CIOs today share a common mandate: maximize the business value of IT investments. Without the right processes and systems in place, however, organizations find it tough to assess the value, cost, risk and performance of the services IT provides.

Effective governance requires real-time access to accurate, business-critical data. Compuware Changepoint automates and integrates key business processes to give IT departments access to unprecedented views into the distribution of effort and cost of service delivery. CIOs and IT management gain greater control to drive accountability at all levels of the IT organization to ensure IT investments support business priorities and increase the quality and efficiency of service delivery.

Client Relationship and Demand Management

Changepoint helps organizations manage all client data in one place using a client portal. The portal provides a single outlet for IT teams to initiate work requests, track activity and status updates, participate in online collaboration and discussion forums, view all activities related to an internal client group and communicate with management directly. These capabilities allow you to manage client satisfaction and improve service quality more effectively.

The integrated portal also provides a consolidated view into existing and future requirements to help you manage the demand for IT departmental resources appropriately. IT teams can receive change, support, maintenance and new work requests, align requests with corporate goals and investment criteria, and distribute work seamlessly to the appropriate parties with automated workflow.

Project, Application and Infrastructure Portfolio Management

Whether managing project, application or infrastructure portfolios, Changepoint helps organizations select and prioritize the investments that best support business goals, even as business conditions and market requirements change.

• Evaluate the impact of proposed investments. Changepoint provides critical prioritization and selection information related to business rationale, risk, value, cost and resource capacity to help you balance your portfolio and align it with corporate objectives.
• Reduce the risk associated with projects. Project portfolios provide real-time views of project schedules, resource assignments, budgeted vs. actual costs, change and support requests, risk and satisfaction ratings so you can continuously monitor the status of a particular project. With project portfolios, you can easily define, assign and track weighted metrics and thresholds to support your governance processes.
• Maximize the business value of applications and infrastructure. Application and infrastructure portfolios integrate management across the entire life cycle. You can monitor, manage, support and conduct ongoing assessment of all applications to drive decision-making. These portfolios allow you to categorize application and infrastructure assets while accurately assessing risk, performance, total cost, user satisfaction and value. You can make more informed decisions to ensure IT systems are aligned with business goals.
• Alert management of key operational events requiring immediate attention. The Business Intelligence Framework delivers unparalleled performance analysis and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) through its flexible reporting tool, configurable portal and customizable e-mail notifications. With these capabilities, IT teams can keep you posted on hot-button performance issues.

Resource Management

Compuware’s solution for IT governance eases the complicated process of recruiting staff, optimizing allocation and gauging staff utilization. Compuware’s comprehensive resource management provides:

• flexible, powerful resource searching
• resource request workflow that supports both centralized and decentralized models
• performance vs. assigned metrics, including satisfaction ratings
• automated workload and utilization monitoring
• integrated contractor management
• automated recruitment processes for permanent or contract employees
• support ongoing portfolio analysis and planning with resource demand analysis.

Project and Request-driven Management

IT organizations gain the best of both worlds in managing IT projects: highly detailed project and budget management with client request tracking. The Changepoint solution easily adapts to your organization’s requirements to ensure project requests are addressed quickly and client changes, issues and support requests are tracked from start to finish. Flexible project management capabilities give IT teams:

• project template management and best practice sharing
• project scheduling and graphical status reporting
• complete budget management
• bi-directional integration to both Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server
• integrated and automated survey capabilities to track client satisfaction
• issue and change management and ongoing risk assessment
• request management and routing
• call tracking and escalation
• integrated time tracking
• support for multiple time zones
• the ability to generate new initiatives, projects or tasks directly from approved requests for streamlined, seamless workflow for efficient handling of requests.

Time and Cost Management

Compuware offers a sure-fire solution to keep costs under control and ensure submissions and charge-backs are made and approved on time, every time. You can streamline time and materials and trace workflow easily with:

• time tracking against both project and non-project work
• compliance measurement and reporting with automated reminders
• multi-level configurable approval workflow
• offline time and expense reporting from a laptop or PDA.

Finance and Budget Management

Complete budget management helps organizations oversee those items that affect IT budgets most: project costs, effort and change history. You can generate meaningful charge-backs and financial analysis, and allocate costs to the right projects and clients, with:

• central tracking of all time, for effective cross-charging and cost allocation
• budgeting for capital vs. operating expenditures
• comprehensive analysis of past and future financial performance
• integration to back office financials
• SOP 98 compliance.

Knowledge Management

Organizations can improve corporate learning and communication by sharing knowledge among their IT teams. Changepoint offers support for rich data types and full text searches, topic subscription and notifications, and team functionality, such as threaded discussions. With these capabilities, IT teams capture and extract valuable data from a central repository to easily share IT expertise and proven best practices.

Employee Performance Management

Individual and team-based performance determines how well a software solution or new business process is adopted, the level of customer satisfaction and the quality of work completed. Employees can proactively manage their own contributions to overall corporate success with Changepoint.

Employees are given specific objectives that directly relate to corporate objectives. Standard metrics help employees and their managers consistently monitor daily activities, including time submission and approval, task status and request approval. Employees receive feedback on their personal performance based on given objectives. Individual and team-based scorecards show performance ratings based on configurable metrics. Surveys allow you to continually track and monitor client satisfaction based on team, system or individual performance. Since employees receive feedback direct from the client, they can proactively manage client satisfaction with key systems and services.

The workforce performance management functionality provides you with objective individual and team-based employee performance results. With this data, you can support reviews and a mentoring process, track the progress against performance improvement plans, and recognize and reward top performers. You can also develop custom metrics that measure peer satisfaction with team performance and mentoring relationships.