Agile Investment Management 2.74 Release: New Resource Capacity Management & Reporting Enhancements

Apptio’s Agile Investment Management 2.74 release (released July 2) featured key functionality around reporting actual cost and activity from application lifecycle management (ALM) and work management systems in concert with the planned activity already represented in the tool. Users need a way to intelligently bring in granular data around technical execution from common tools or bespoke homegrown solutions. When trying to analyze current progress and health of a portfolio, it is pivotal to understand how to connect the work details to overall organizational strategy and be able to report on it. With the 2.74 release, Apptio starts to tie this granular work to investments across your portfolio. 

In addition to these new capabilities, Apptio released functionality around resource utilization. During these unprecedented times, organizations need to understand how they can do more with less. Whether it is budget/funding cuts or resource furloughs, companies are faced with hard decisions around what work they can achieve and what they need to put on hold. A key component of that decision is understanding resource capacity management. Now in 2.74, users can see how their team is deployed across release trains and take action for resources that are not fully utilized.   

When working with internal stakeholders around health, risks, and progress across an organization, portfolio and product owners need an efficient mechanism to report essential metrics. The Analyze – Summary screen provides the high-level fidelity that can support these conversations and serve as a springboard for further, more detailed analysis. Users can now find ‘Actual Cost’ across the multiple levels of hierarchy in portfolios married with the planned cost ultimately resulting in a quick actual-to-plan variance analysis.  

While seeing analytics at a portfolio level can help substantiate decision making, users need a more detailed view of certain investments or initiatives. The new addition of Investment Modal highlights one of the ways users can start to understand progress and health of a specific investment in Agile Investment Management. Users are able to see visualizations that show actual costs alongside planned cost with forecasted values into the future. The table below lists out all the features that are contained in the investment with their actual cost and completed tickets. 

Organizations typically do not have a single system that they track all their work in. In fact, they may have multiple enterprise solutions mixed in with some homegrown tools, making the aggregation of data a burden and manual task. Agile Investment Management provides a single table to aggregate actuals data in – agnostic of source system – providing a means to combine disparate data and report on it. AIM leverages Apptio’s leading data platform for advanced transformations that help fuel Agile Investment Management’s key attributes. 

Resource managers and users alike can now start to understand the utilization of their team across release train throughout time. As new people are ramped up or added to teams, users can come into the Resource Allocation View to see how this impacts their team and the overall utilization of labor resources. When priorities change, bulk allocation of resources can also be achieved through this view to accelerate the re-planning of capacity across time.  

To learn more, read about Agile Investment Management or request a demo.