Had a conversation with Cliff Denson, Managing Director of BSG Delivery for the Texas region, regarding the Needs of Brown Shoe Corp.  It's in the proposal stage right now.  Brown Shoe is a global company that runs initiatives as projects.  They are in discussions with BSG Concours regarding their need to gain visibility into the activities and progress of 250 business project managers (non-IT).  We don't know how many projects these 250 managers manage. They don't want to use a deep, complex Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tool like MS Project and Portfolio Server.

Given this, it may be a similar pattern to Roadmapping within Strategy on Demand.  There would be a template for a PM to fill out some basic project info (milestones, Expected Dates, Cost, etc.), then baseline the project, and the projects would roll up into a dashboard that executives can drill down into this detail.  It would also serve as the project content manager.  This may be a good candidate SaaS app if it fits into the roadmap pattern.

Not much more details at this point - conversations with customer are ongoing. 

The proposal attached below has been submitted to Brown Shoe on 10/17/2007:

Brown Shoe_Business Project Mgt_Draft_101507-FNL.doc

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My notes to Cliff:

Cliff, I read the proposal and I’m pretty sure what you are looking for.  Depending on Brown Shoe’s needs, a subset of this capability is already under consideration and is tied to Strategy on a Page.  An output of the SoP is a list of initiatives that become projects with activities, such as Business Case development, Scope Definition, etc.  These create a Roadmap of initiatives.  Support for the roadmap process is being fleshed out and prototyped – focused on the collaboration and communication required to create the roadmap. 

There are a number of task, project, and portfolio management tools out there (MS Project and Portfolio Server (very nice system), Mercury Investment Navigator, Primavera, Visual Studio 2005, Sharepoint, Journyx, SAP, QuickArrow, and a ton of others), as well as Project Accounting systems.  I don’t think we’ll ever have Earned Value Management analysis (CV, SV, CPI, SPI, ETC, and all the other PMI ratios), capacity analysis, scheduling, and the other Project Portfolio Management (PPM) features.  This is already handled very well by many other systems and it’s non-trivial to develop.