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Project Portfolio Management, Vision and Trends

Better Together: Planview and Cherwell Join Forces

Published By Patrick Tickle

Partnership highlights power of Planview Portfolio Management and Cherwell ITSM to help joint customers better achieve their strategic and operational goals

Like the human brain, an organization can rewire itself in response to disruptive events, creating new models for connecting strategy and delivery. There’s a renewed urgency here, and Planview is committed to helping our customers navigate this strategy to delivery transformation, pivot quickly, and rewire as conditions change. That’s why we are excited about our recently announced partnership with Cherwell Software, which brings together Planview Portfolio Management with Cherwell IT Service Management.

Our purpose is to help joint customers drive strategy enterprise-wide, enhance operations, and accelerate the delivery of breakthrough products, services, and experiences. The mix of our two industry leading solutions is especially important for managing the complex, cross-functional initiatives where IT is increasingly playing a central role. To that end, CIOs are collaborating with strategic planners, PMOs, and other business leaders more closely than ever, and in fact Cherwell is seeing PMOs increasingly become a key stakeholder in their ITSM conversations.

This makes our partnership a natural fit, giving joint customers a unique ability to:

  • Choose the highest value investments and initiatives
  • Measure time and budget spent on strategic initiatives vs. maintenance activities
  • Adjust dynamically to rapidly shifting priorities and market conditions
  • Balance teams, finances, and priorities across all operations
  • Accelerate on-strategy delivery
  • Provide outstanding service delivery and experiences to employees and customers – all in line with strategy

Subpar ITSM and PPM Solutions Causing User Fatigue

Many ITSM vendors and other providers tack on some sort of basic PPM functionality and call it “good enough.” However, enterprises don’t have time or money to waste on point tools or cumbersome platforms that take an army to configure and upgrade. The fatigue these solutions are causing is real and widely voiced by users.

In the Gartner August 2018 report (Refreshed in December 2019) “The Reality of ITSM Tools as Enterprise Service Management Tools,” analyst Daniel Stang writes:

“ITSM tools often do not work well for PPM leaders and PMOs charged with facilitating difficult decision making regarding the use of limited resources for project work. Pure-play PPM providers offer project reporting and the advanced planning needed to support this type of decision making. For example, a glaring weakness in the “PPM” pieces of ITSM and other non-PPM providers is the inability to provide resource capacity planning and modeling that matches the sophistication of pure-play PPM providers identified in Gartner’s research.”

Planview and Cherwell: Elevating PPM and ITSM

What’s so powerful about this combination is that Planview and Cherwell are best-in-class solutions with the experience to help customers lead transformational change. Planview is one of the “pure-play” PPM providers, as evidenced by our being named a “Leader” in the May 2019 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management.” Cherwell IT Service Management is also recognized by industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.

Together, we enable our customers to ensure teams and their work is on strategy while balancing against day-to-day realities, including resource and financial constraints. Cherwell IT Service Management streamlines and automates work processes to improve IT operations efficiency and maturity as well as deliver business results.

Unlike its slower, more complex competitors, the Cherwell Service Management platform is modern and flexible with a concurrent licensing model and a no-code development. Both Cherwell and Planview PPM Pro provide an outstanding user experience and seamless upgrades.

Planview facilitates the dynamic planning and rapid reprioritization necessary to today’s businesses. Using Planview PPM Pro, PMOs, CIOs, and other leaders can create organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and enable teams to do their best work, no matter how they work. What-if scenario planning enables leaders to evaluate trade-offs between investment options while considering the capacity of departments. They can optimize funding and resource allocation to cross-functional initiatives, measure progress, and understand the impacts of decisions.

Joint Customer: Parkview Health

Don’t just take our word for it. One of our many joint customers is Parkview Health, a not-for-profit, community-based health system based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, with 13,000 employees. Michael Havison, Director of Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and a true thought leader in the PPM and ITSM domains, had this to say about using Planview and Cherwell in tandem:

“I am thrilled that two of our most strategic technology partners, Planview and Cherwell, have joined forces to deliver a solution that spans Enterprise Portfolio Management and IT Service Management. As we strive to deliver excellent health care to every person, every day, these two market-leading providers have been instrumental in providing us with the structure and visibility into the full spectrum of work intake through investment, strategy through service request, that has helped us drive efficiencies and align our resources to the goals and initiatives that matter most.”

Read our Parkview Health case study for more details.

Whether you are a customer of Planview, Cherwell, or both – and you might just have both solutions already! – let us know how we can help your organization achieve its strategic and operational goals.

To learn more about the solutions behind this partnership check out the Planview PPM Pro product page “Accelerate PMO Success with Centralized Project Portfolio Management” and the Cherwell IT Service Management product page “ITSM Software That’s Easy to Use, Configure, and Maintain” and check out their respective demos.

Planview and Cherwell Software announce partnership

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Written by Patrick Tickle Chief Products Officer

Patrick Tickle is responsible for the company’s Products organization and leads the Planview team that continues to deliver the most innovative portfolio management solutions to the marketplace. Patrick brings over 20 years of experience in product management, product development, and marketing across a wide range of technology solutions. Prior to joining Planview, Patrick served as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management of ITM Software where he executed category development and product definition. He has also held a variety of product management and marketing positions at Terraspring, Inc. (an enterprise software company acquired by Sun Microsystems), MIPS, and Silicon Graphics. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.