Lifecycle management is more than a buzzword, it is the central organizing principle of all IT efforts. Understanding how to differentiate or coordinate Lifecycle processes is perhaps the key challenge in IT today. Program lifecycle management (PLM) represents a deliberate attempt to reconcile and combine multiple lifecycle management tasks within a single, unified approach.
The Problem
Why is PLM important and necessary? The motivation behind PLM has been present for decades, and despite many attempts, the problem remains largely unresolved. IT projects are getting more complicated, not less; and this trend is accelerating, not decelerating. PLM directly addresses the root causes of “IT complexity syndrome” in a comprehensive fashion. Those root causes for this complexity include:
- System/service/solution sophistication continues to increase as the pace of technological change accelerates, thereby driving new and more demanding expectations from end users and stakeholders.
- Interoperability expectations have increased exponentially both within the enterprise and externally between enterprises and stakeholders.
- Bandwidth and resource exploitation expectations have become much more complicated, including storage management, virtualization, security and wireless connectivity.
- The pent-up expectations for data exploitation are only now beginning to be realized. After 10 years of evolution, business intelligence tools and data warehouse capabilities are finally cost-effective and integration with unstructured sources through enterprise content management (ECM), collaboration or Web 2.0 has begun.
Most IT projects begin with the office or group charged with making projects happen and funded to manage them. Efforts to tackle lifecycle issues within most enterprises are likely to be frustrating if the management office is not addressed first. Despite improvements in technology, program efficiency still eludes our industry
How Many PLMs are There?
Some might be familiar with the acronym “PLM” as representing product lifecycle management. So how do variations on PLM relate to one another? There are five PLMs that are closely related:
- Program lifecycle management,
- Portfolio lifecycle management,
- Project lifecycle management,
- Product lifecycle management and
- Process lifecycle management.
These PLM variations can be viewed as a hierarchy within a single, unified enterprise context. More importantly, this unified context allows the application of a common semantic foundation which in turn allows the coordination of all related data within a single PLM data repository. This is not a master data management (MDM) solution although it does help in establishing enterprise-wide MDM governance. Program lifecycle management supports active working processes and capabilities already familiar to those practitioners of the five PLMs. (Throughout the remainder of this article, PLM will refer to program lifecycle management.)
A few organizations refer to a similar concept called enterprise lifecycle management. However, the PLM described here is meant to serve a more specific purpose, namely the unification of program management office (PMO) efforts. The PMO is ultimately responsible for all IT program successes and failures, but there are some enterprise details or processes that fall outside their normal management scope. PLM as a unified practice has been designed to optimize the consolidation of a significant number of essentially related processes and capabilities. PLM does not integrate all IT activities though.
