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IT Portfolio Management: Page 5 of 20

What's all good for the CIO, however, can strike IT staff as too restrictive and without direct benefits. The issue of time accounting--how much time an employee spends on each project--has forever been a problem within IT.

IT staffers often chafe against the yoke of strict time accounting. Often, the data is invalid or based on guesswork, severely limiting an ITPM product's ability to aid strategic budget and planning decisions. IT managers who were promoted out of the technical, rather than business, ranks during the '90s will have to learn to use cost accounting and financial data. Without such business acumen, it will be difficult to adjust to ITPM solutions and supply the data necessary to perform cost and benefit analysis of projects.

Take All the Help You Can Get

These are not products you'll be implementing on your own. You'll need training and professional services help. Our grading of price includes at least two weeks of such assistance to emphasize this requirement. Artemis, Changepoint and Pacific Edge did not let us install their solutions on our own. Although each installation in itself was straightforward, configuring and customizing each product requires the vendor's assistance.

Before the products were useful in our lab, we also needed to understand the business relationships among projects, finance and accounting rules, and our own company's business jargon. All the products we tested use a hierarchical structure to organize projects; it was our job to build that hierarchy and determine how to account for assets, labor and projects. Should assets be tied to a project or accounted for separately? Should projects be grouped by client or by strategic objective?