HP unveiled new project and portfolio management software that gives customers real-time visibility and control over the entire IT portfolio to help reduce the business risk of IT project failure.

Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Centre 7.0 provides chief information officers and other IT executives with sophisticated project, demand and portfolio management as well as an integrated approach to managing projects across their lifecycles.

The software addresses some of the biggest challenges of delivering clear and measurable business results from IT by helping to avoid the stalled or failed projects, and the waste of time, budget and resources, that can come with the use of rudimentary project management tools and manual processes.

New and enhanced functionality in Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 helps IT organisations:

•Govern IT by managing strategic projects and operational activities and aggregating operational demand and proposal requests through a single user interface;

•Improve efficiency by automatically optimising the selection of projects and operational activities through the new portfolio optimisation engine, based on user-defined criteria such as budget allocation to certain corporate initiatives;

•Achieve and maintain regulatory compliance across field-level audit trails to track all changes to projects and critical applications;

•Aggregate legacy desktop data, such as Microsoft® Project and other project data sources, to create a unified view across both strategic projects and operational activities; and

•Adopt either top-down or bottom-up project planning and execution with a flexible approach to portfolio management.

“This new software from HP helps our customers address their most challenging IT governance problems and maximise the returns from their IT portfolio,” said Deborah Traub, vice president, Product Strategy, Management Products, Software, HP. “Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center is a key part of our strategy to help our customers optimise the business outcomes of IT.”