6 - SCOPE reduces Resource Costs for producing Reports

Background

Organisations' software programs are no longer ‘stand-alone’ applications, but have multiple interfaces with multiple applications.  The ramifications of this inter-connectivity is that a single business operation will be reflected in a chain of events that ripples through multiple applications.  The same ripple-effect occurs when a business operation needs to be modified, typically every application that uses the data needs to be consequently modified.  So within any Release of an Application there can be as many as 15 different business initiatives (projects) that impact the application with one or many change requests.  This results in a multi-dimensional many-to-many relationship between business projects, applications and the change requests that need to be counted.

Management typically need to aggregate ‘size’ in a variety of ways, i.e.:

• How big is this Release of the Application? - for input into productivity analysis and Release estimates (need to aggregate the size of all Change Requests, for all different Projects that impact the application)
• How big is this project? - for input into the business case or productivity figures (need to aggregate the size of all Change Requests for the project across all Applications)
• How much impact does this Project have on this Application? - for input into the decision as to whether or not to proceed (need to aggregate the size of just the CRs for this project for this application)

Microsoft Excel Counting

Spreadsheets that record all the processes impacted by a project for the different Applications in a single spreadsheet are not able to accommodate these different reporting needs, whilst the information can be extracted manually from dozens of workbooks it can be very time consuming for every report.  Whilst Excel has a linking capability between workbooks to aggregate data, this becomes unsustainable and easily corrupted particularly once there are more than 100 workbooks (counts) linked.   The only alternative is for the count results to be manually extracted at the completion of a count.  However this is also error prone if the count is subsequently audited and corrected the reported productivity figures are rarely revisited.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE was designed to model these multi-dimensional relationships between Projects, Applications and Change Requests so that the results of the count sizes can be aggregated and reported via each type of combination.  All the FP Analyst needs to do is assign a Project to a Change Request and the Change Request to an Application and SCOPE does the rest.  SCOPE has over 40 different inbuilt management reports at all levels of granularity from Application Portfolio reporting to Application, Release, Project and Change Request Level reporting.  SCOPE can export the Reports to HTML, Microsoft WORD or Microsoft Excel formats for inclusion in other Master Reports.