Program Analytics

Program Analytics is the application of a standard methodology to the design, implementation, and management of portfolios, programs, and projects. Seahorse Analytics leads complex endeavors to successful conclusion by comprehending the whole of stakeholder perspectives, communicating effectively with management, business and technical personnel, and coordinating diverse resources toward a common goal.

Portfolio Management

A portfolio is a collection of programs and their constituent projects. Portfolio management is concerned with orchestrating these interrelated programs and projects to maximize overall value to the enterprise. Key questions include the following:

What are the critical objectives of the enterprise that further its goals?
When must these objectives be achieved in order for the enterprise to be successful?
How are the enterprise's resources best allocated to achieve these objectives?

Seahorse Analytics can help your enterprise align its programs with business objectives, architect the mechanisms that facilitate the inception, initiation, planning, execution, and closure of complex initiatives, and put into place the processes and tools that will enable the effective monitoring and management of these activities. Key contributions that we have made in Portfolio Management for our clients include:

Preparing a detailed portfolio inventory comprising multiple programs and their constituent projects
Assessing the anticipated resource requirements of each endeavor and estimating associated costs
Leading management through prioritization by identifying the relative importance and urgency of each separate initiative
Implementing metrics to measure portfolio performance, including overall status, progress, issues and risks
Instituting on-going, periodic reviews with management to ensure that the portfolio continues to meet business needs

Program Management

A program is an on-going organizational entity intended to consistently achieve certain results by choreographing related projects for the benefit of the enterprise. There is no need to reinvent the wheel with each project when many share common focus. Instead, related endeavors may be grouped to achieve benefits of scale in terms of people, processes and tools. The success of a program may be measured in terms of the benefits it provides. These benefits contribute to the bottom line through increasing profits, for example, by improving market share or reducing speed to market, and through decreasing costs, for example, by shrinking overhead or eliminating redundancy.

Seahorse Analytics can help your enterprise define and manage programs that make sense and leverage the benefits of aggregating similar, related projects under a common oversight. Doing this enables an organization to provide executive management with a combined view of costs, risks and issues to keep projects on track and within budget. Key mechanisms that we have instituted for Program Management include:

Defining program oversight committees and program organizational charts
Coordinating periodic program review meetings with key stakeholders
Developing consolidated program financial budgeting and tracking tools in Microsoft Excel
Creating program dashboards displaying individual and aggregated status, progress, risk and issues
Designing integrated "master" program plans and project templates in Microsoft Project Server
Architecting Microsoft SharePoint site collections as a repository and collaboration tool for documentation
Documenting and instituting a comprehensive document peer review process for ensuring consistent project artifacts

Project Management

As defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI), a project is "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result." This effort is constrained in terms of its scope, schedule, and resources:

Scope - The objective(s) a project is intended to accomplish
Schedule - The timeline in which the objective(s) must be completed
Resources - The people, processes, and tools that enable its completion, often measured in terms of budget

(See the PMI article "What Is Project Management?")

Seahorse Analytics can help your enterprise define the scope of a specific project, develop a detailed Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) comprising individually separate and distinct work packages, identify interrelationships between activities, create a viable project schedule that identifies tasks, durations and resources, establish dependent relationships between activities, monitor and control the project to provide regular status and progress reports, and successfully close the project upon its completion. Projects successfully delivered for a "Fortune 500" company include:

Integrated encryption with automated tape backup libraries at multiple core data centers
Migrated technology infrastructure, including migration of mail, desktop, and network services, to enterprise solutions for atypical acquisitions
Conducted RFP phase of Network Intrusion Detection System project, including project planning, vendor evaluation and selection, and project team staffing
Delivered “Proof of Concept” for a $10 million enterprise role-based Access Management System comprising Windows, Unix, MVS/TSO, DB2, Oracle and email resources
Expanded architecture and upgraded software of 2000+ Unix servers for PowerBroker and Enterprise Security Manager, enabled shared cryptography principals, and developed HTML/Java/Oracle application for analysis of security alerts with total budget of $1.2 million