The Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 is HP's first software rollout to result from its acquisition of Mercury Interactive Corp., a deal that was finalized earlier this month.
"For years, HP software did not have products that touched on the closest thing to the CIO's heart -- managing and optimizing the business outcomes of IT," said Zohar Gilad, HP's senior vice president of strategy. HP's new software, however, straddles IT and business interests to help IT officials make decisions that are more aligned with corporate goals, he said.
The software includes an optimization engine that will automatically rank certain IT projects based on predefined criteria such as budget issues or overarching corporate goals, HP said. In addition, the software can define enterprisewide standards and policies used to measure the health of IT projects, said Chad Haftorson, HP's director of product management.
"If all the project managers use different thresholds, you really don't know what red, yellow or green [alerts] mean," he said. "You are comparing apples to oranges."
Anna North, senior analyst in the project management office at Salisbury, N.C.-based grocery store chain Food Lion LLC, said that her organization is planning to implement the new software early next year. About 300 employees now use Version 6.0 of the tool to manage both IT and non-IT-related projects, she said.
The company is eager to begin using the software to help create and enforce standard processes for how projects operate. "It is going to help us create a project methodology across the organization," North said. "We can enforce those standards across the organization at the project level."
In addition, the software will help Food Lion better set criteria for measuring the health of IT projects, she said. "We were having a lot of problems deciding what is yellow, what is green," North said.
Finally, the project and portfolio management software includes a resource management feature that North said could help Food Lion better manage the IT shop's time. That's because business users now continually approach the IT department with "one-off" requests. And because there is no comprehensive visibility into what resources are already being used, there is no good way to allocate IT development time, she said.
"Often, not having that visibility across the organization means that you're filling those requests not always on the right projects," she said. "As the requests come in, our IT organization is bogged down. By the time we get to the middle of the year, they can't work on anything new because they already have their schedule full."
While Food Lion now is using a hosted version of the Mercury software, the company is evaluating a switch to running the project and portfolio tool in-house so it can customize it, she said.
Version 7.0 is available now from HP or through partner companies.