A Work-Focused Approach

VP of Marketing Tim Low joined Daptiv in September 2006. He is responsible for product strategy and go-to-market activities for Daptiv products and services, as well as for the company’s marketing operations.

BM. PPM software is undoubtedly proving a must-have resource, and revenues are predicted to grow by a further 10 percent over the next three years. What are your predictions for the market, and in your opinion what are the key drivers of this?
TL. The disciplines and benefits of project portfolio management are moving beyond early adopter organizations like IT into other business functions. The ability to apply management rigor and gain insights into business performance on a wide variety of strategic initiatives is extremely compelling, and PPM capabilities are part of serving this need. PPM software has been used extensively to optimize IT portfolios and drive down costs; imagine how compelling this is to other large functions that have significant portfolios of work and also have to make informed trade-off and optimization decisions.

PPM software offers two primary benefits. First, it provides insight and visibility to make better decisions upfront about what work to do – how do certain projects support your business goals? This is the ‘portfolio’ piece of the puzzle. Second, it offers tools for executing this work in an optimal way. This includes better performance to budget, better performance to schedule, better optimization of resource allocation, etc. Both of these are even more critical in times of economic uncertainty.

BM. The concept behind your main product Daptiv PPM is that it is work-focused, rather than simply project-focused. What are the advantages of this approach from a company’s perspective?
TL. Increasingly, organizations are looking to gain a holistic view of where they are investing their financial and human resources, and to only look at project work is shortsighted. We at Daptiv talk about what we see as the ‘mid-office’. Organizations have invested heavily in ERP software that helps manage the back office, and more recently in CRM technology to facilitate customer interactions – the front office.  Where organizations have not had robust enterprise-class software is in the mid-office where the lion’s share of work gets done. The tools they have had to make do with are personal productivity software like Microsoft Office. We see savvy organizations looking at tools that will allow them to really add rigor to the way they manage business processes in the mid-office – processes like IT portfolio optimization and execution, but also processes that cross organizational boundaries such as the new product development and go-to-market process, or even the process of integrating an acquired company and all of its systems and people into the new company. This is real work that is strategically important. It deserves enterprise-class software and tools.

Daptiv’s offering combines core project and portfolio management capabilities with a rich collaboration environment and tools, as well as the leading environment for visualizing and analyzing performance called Daptiv Work Intelligence. It offers a way for organizations to start tackling business challenges that have huge payback potential.

BM. What are your thoughts on the future of PPM solutions?
TL. On-demand software or software as a service is exploding, not just in the project portfolio management market, but in all segments of business software.  Fundamentally this is about speed – time-to-benefit. Organizations cannot afford to wait. With Daptiv PPM, even communities of several thousand users can go live in days or weeks. It does not take months of hardware procurement, software installation and customization to implement. We think this will continue.

Users of PPM software are like users of other business software. They are also consumers. The consumer internet is having a significant impact on the expectations people have for their experience with business software, and Daptiv intends to provide them with elements of experience and functionality that offer the best of both worlds – reliable and secure enterprise features that are also rich and may remind them of their experience with the consumer web.

Our focus in 2008-2009 will continue to be what it has been: to help our customers be successful. This means that we will continue to provide them with enhancements to PPM features they’ve come to depend on, while also surprising them with new services that will help them manage their work even better than before. In early 2008, Daptiv introduced the Daptiv Greenhouse. Part of our Daptiv Community site, it’s a forum and tools for ideation and idea management around the future of our products. All of our customers (about 100,000 users at 700+ organizations) are members of the Daptiv Community and can use the Greenhouse to plant ideas, cultivate them and have a dialog with their peers and Daptivians and partners too about what would make our PPM solution even better.