Innotas debuts new Agile project management solution

The new solution will allow companies to better manage both resources and projects

Though I've never had to run a giant company before (shocking, I know!) I imagine that its easy to get overwhelmed, and bogged down, with the number of projects that are going on at a single time. 

Project portfolio management company Innotas seeks to make that process smoother by giving executives and product managers the ability to gain visibility over their entire portfolio of projects, people and apps.

Now it has announced a new solution, one that it believes will simplify the process even further.

Innotas has introduced a Cloud-based Agile Portfolio Management solution, it was announced on Thursday. The solution delivers portfolio management across agile projects, giving its customers improved visibility, cost tracking and resource management. 

Agile is a new methodology for project planning, though it is one that is becoming more mainstream, Tushar Patel, the VP of marketing at Innotas, told me. The old way of planning is known as "waterfall."

So what's the difference? Basically, one takes the long view and the other the short view.

The Waterfall method is linear, and employs a sequential process, with a roadmap and a set end point. The Agile method, on the other hand, is incremental, and is planned in two week increments, in order to adjust to a changing market.

"It works if you don’t want to put out roadmap for a year," said Patel. "There is a risk that team will go developing for the next year, and they could miss the mark because of a changing market conditions," he said.

"If you're building a website, you'd be making updates every two weeks because you can't say what it will look like a year from now."

Ultimately, they are simply different project management techniques.

"As an executive, you have to say, 'How do I manage all that? Seeing what are my projects, what are resources looking like and how am I spending time,'" said Patel. 

Innotas says that the new solution will provide configurable reports and dashboards, in order to analyze development team and project work. It will also enables management to measure the true cost of agile projects by translating agile terminology to business terms used to run the business.  

It will also provide capacity and demand planning capabilities, and will track performance against initiatives and goals. 

The example that Patel gave to me was an online realestate company, which is an existing Innotas customer, had a backlog that was "hundreds of items long," of requests made of the support team, sales team and product team.

"They had no way to score, or prioritize, which requests were important and how they align to the business strategy," said Patel.

By using Innotas, the company was able to use project scoring and prioritization software to gain a clearer picture of which requests were the most important, and which were the most urgent.

Founded in 2006, the San Francisco-based Innotas has raised over $20 million, including a Series A round of $5 million from Arrowpath, Cedar Circle, Comventures and Angels, as well as a Series B round of $15 million from Arrowpath, Cedar Circle, Comventures and Angels.

(Image source: innotas.com)