Enterprise Release Management Plutora helps organizations manage complex IT Feature Pipeline, IT Releases and IT Test Environments in a simple and transparent manner.
Enterprise Releases Transparency and Control Plutora is a cloud based on demand Enterprise Release application that provides transparency and control of your releases. Plutora makes it easy to plan, manage and control your release windows, assign systems and scope items, track environments and engage stakeholders. Plutora enables you to easily track the various release phases leading up to implementation. Plutora also helps you produce implementations plans and run sheets easily. Plutora works with all release types from the most complex enterprise releases to small business as usual patches. Plutora improves your productivity, reduces cost, reduces delays and prevents failed releases. It ultimately helps you delivers more to your stakeholders on time and within budget. Plutora offers a strategic approach to delivering best of breed release management to enterprises. Receive more functionality per dollar spent. Experience a more reliable technology service with less outages and incidents. Robust and repeatable release processes for weekly, monthly and quarterly releases. Powerful insights and greater visibility of your organizations IT Releases. Clear understanding with your suppliers as to what is being delivered, when and how frequently. Eliminate delayed implementation due to unforeseen environment contention. Ability to accurately forecast your resource requirements for each release. Plutora Enterprise Release Graph 2
Problem Space Eliminate the wall of confusion between Business and IT In most organizations a wall of confusion exists between business stakeholders and IT teams. The wall of confusion arises from the multiple fragmented processes and tools that exist between various teams within organizations. These fragmented processes and tools, often in the form of proprietary spreadsheets, uncontrolled documents and disjointed emails result in a situation where there is no consistent view of the priority of enhancements, no published product roadmap, multiple dated release schedules and IT environment contention. The wall of confusion is heightened by geographically dispersed teams, outsourced teams, multi-sourced teams and the increasing expectations businesses are placing on IT teams to deliver changes faster to their customers. The more complex the operating environment becomes the greater the likelihood of fragmented processes, disjointed tools and information buried deep within organizational silos. Decisionmaking under these situations leads to costly errors. The typical response to the wall of confusion is to increase the number of people in the Program Management Office and hire more Release Managers, Environment Managers and Implementation Managers. The wall of confusion results in increased cost of IT changes and IT enhancements within the organization. The risk of release failure also increases because the participants in the release are not executing according to a common plan and consistent information. Productivity is severely impacted and the number of growth initiatives that can be executed with fixed budget is reduced. The overall cost of regulatory compliance programs is also increased. Plutora breaks down the wall of confusion and addresses these issues through a common understanding of all elements of the release process. Plutora increases productivity and enables more changes to be deployed at lower cost. 3
Key Benefits Everything required to operate a robust and scalable Release Management function Business Owners Reduce the cost of change through greater productivity in the IT pipeline and IT release management functions. This ultimately translates to real costs savings or increased throughput on existing costs. Reduce time to market by clearly understanding all changes in the pipeline and prioritizing essential items to direct necessary focus on those activities. Articulate and establish a shared vision of the product roadmap to ensure alignment with IT teams, IT suppliers and IT partners. IT Executives Reduces delivery risk through increased transparency and control over the release, which highlights areas of concern in any delivery stage early and allows sufficient time for corrective action to be taken. Improves IT customer service through real time understanding of the IT portfolio rather than delayed second hand accounts of release statuses. Reduces cost of releases through eliminating the continuous spreadsheet reconciliation between business stakeholders, and IT suppliers. IT Suppliers Reduce release risk through a unified understanding of all release elements to be delivered to clients. Consistently deliver clearly articulated scope in accordance with the transparent release schedule throughout all phases of the program. Improve productivity through eliminating the need for continuous manual reconciliation between client systems and internal delivery teams. Improve productivity by articulating product roadmaps in a unified way to multiple clients. 4
Plutora Enterprise Platform Plutora is a cloud based Enterprise IT Release Management application that helps organizations manage complex IT Feature Pipelines, IT Releases and IT Test Environments in a simple and transparent manner. IT Pipeline Management Plutora eliminates the black hole of requests, by providing a unified point of interaction between business users and IT staff. Everyone in the enterprise can share and view current information about the entire feature pipeline including status details, the most recent requests and release timeframes. Plutora helps organizations intelligently refine and categorize feature requests, evaluate features based on standard criteria, and vote on new business requests based on stringent criteria. IT Asset and Environment Management Plutora provides comprehensive pre-production environment management capability by clearly identifying the environments used during all release phases within the enterprise. Plutora clearly identifies how environments are used, their relationship to dependent environments and potential resource contention between environment usage. Plutora also highlights all releases impacted in the event of environment failure. Stakeholder Engagement The Plutora dashboard provides clear feature insights and release metrics to all stakeholders within the enterprise. Plutora presents stakeholders with a customized view relevant to their portfolio of interest and associated releases. The dashboard is available IT Release Management Plutora manages the process of creating and communicating enterprise release schedules within the organization. This streamlined release process helps enterprises manage all aspects of the release including phase activities, capture of release notes, documentation and implementation plans. Plutora considers planning for release blackout periods, phase dates, stage gates and key milestones. Plutora also manages the dependencies between application release and enterprise release to ensure consistent phase exits and successful release. Plutora also enables release managers, implementation managers and business analysts to allocate feature requests to defined releases. The contents of all releases are always clearly transparent to all stakeholders within the enterprise. Plutora not only captures key planning dates associated with releases but also enables monitoring and control of release progress throughout the release lifecycle. Plutora tracks the status of releases, phase, activities, milestones and stage gates. All stakeholders have complete real-time transparency of their feature requests. 5
Easy to Use Plutora provides an intuitive application that delivers on usability and customer service. Plutora replaces a myriad of disparate spreadsheets, out of date power-point decks and uncontrolled macros with a simple to use application that is accessible anywhere and anytime. We spend most of our time with our customers, innovating and making everyone s lives a little better, one small release at a time. Cloud Based Plutora s SaaS solution removes many of the hurdles that existed traditionally with implementing new tool suites across organizations. Plutora s on-demand delivery model is designed to help you reduce complexity, go live faster and reduce ongoing operational costs so you can ultimately succeed delivering Releases into production. Plutora s Intuitive Wizard lets you easily setup your organization to attain a real time view of your releases in your IT portfolio. Subscription Plutora is available under a simple monthly subscription model of $68 per user per month. 6
Our Your Story Methodology Supports your Existing Methodology Plutora is methodology agnostic and is customizable to support the existing methodology used within your organization. Plutora provides value to organizations delivering under Waterfall, Unified, Agile or DevOps approaches. In large organizations it is quite common to observe teams delivering and supporting different IT assets using the methodology most suited to the team s capability, the nature of the system and market. Plutora supports the use of multiple methodologies for different systems in your organization. Plutora s objective is to provide transparency and control to stakeholders regardless of the underlying methodology. Supports your Supplier s Methodology Not only does Plutora provide transparency and control based on your internal methodologies, Plutora works equally well with the methodology used by your suppliers and partners. Well Integrated IT Service Management Tools Plutora fills the gap that exists in managing the preproduction flow of scope through numerous program phases and environments. Existing IT Service Management Tools rarely contain non-production systems or impose a process that is too restrictive and inefficient for managing non-production systems. Plutora integrates well with your organization s existing IT Service Management Tools through two key touch points. 1. Plutora integrates with existing IT Service Management tools to retrieve scope items in the form of Service Requests and Change Requests to drive the release composition. 2. Plutora integrates with existing IT Service Management tools to supply necessary information to support the Production Change Approval Board (CAB) and deployment to production. JIRA Plutora integrates with JIRA to provide a consolidated and consistent view of scope items allocated to scheduled releases. Business Case Productivity Gains provide Payback within 2 months Plutora significantly reduces the risk of delays and failed releases by providing transparency and control across the IT portfolio. The business case is a simple one. How much does each day of delay resulting from poor control, missed scope or environment contention cost a major program? Plutora also provides productivity benefits and frees up freeing resources to focus on more valuable activities. Consider the time and cost spent on: Crafting steering group packs? Producing manual status reports? Maintaining Release Schedules? Controlling Non Production Environments? Manually reconciling scope and status spreadsheets? At US$68 per user per month a conservative 1% increase in productivity justifies the expense. 7
Case Study: Wealth Management Institution The Wealth Management industry, more specifically Financial Advisory is going through enormous structural change as a result of legislative changes aimed at improving the quality of adviser consumers receive and increased access to more affordable kinds of advice. This is achieved through best interest duty, ban on conflicted remuneration, opt-in fee disclosure, and scaled advice. In addition to this, legislative reforms are also being introduced to strengthen the governance, integrity and regulatory settings of the pension system. The combination of these legislative changes results in fairly significant compliance changes to be made to a large number of systems within Wealth Management Institutions. A large Wealth Management Institution in Australia sought the help of Plutora to provide transparency and control over how these changes would be planned, managed through existing test and validation environments and finally deployed into production. Due to the large volume of change, high number of interdependent systems impacted and fixed timeframe, attempts to manage the release process using uncontrolled spreadsheets, slide packs and proprietary intranet sites were inefficient and all failed. Within three weeks, Plutora was setup and able to provide a comprehensive view of the regulatory release schedule for the next 12 months, the nature of Institution wide quarterly release including dependencies, the composition of scope items in each release, and the necessary IT environments required to support the release approach. Stakeholders always had a current view of what IT teams were working on and when those changes would be released to production. Releases continue to be delivered in a transparent and controlled manner without costly surprises. 8
Our Story Plutora originated from a problem space we encountered as executives delivering complex systems within large institutions over the last 5 years. As executives we needed a simple and transparent way to manage the flow of features from business stakeholders, through various IT Test Environments ultimately culminating in a release to customers. The IT landscape was also becoming more complex through multi-sourcing arrangements, multiple vendor involvement, globally distributed teams and a move to cloud based services. We started out doing this via various spreadsheets, intranets and extranets, which were updated manually. Maintaining these disparate sources just wasn t working and these always seemed to go stale and were eventually abandoned. This often resulted in costly delays and failed releases. As we sought other options we found that every other tool we explored didn t do what we needed or was bloated with features we didn t need. We were so passionate about building a better solution to the problem that others were also experiencing that we left our corporate roles to build Plutora. Evaluate Today Try Plutora for free for 30 Days. Setup Plutora for your organization and portfolio of systems in a simple and intuitive way. Use Plutora to increase enterprise release and implementation productivity. Use Plutora to regain transparency and control of your systems. Our hosting and service delivery infrastructure meets the highest level of security demanded by large enterprise clients www.plutora.com GPO Box 467 contact@plutora.com Australia: +61 2 8607 8552 Sydney, NSW, 2001 www.plutora.com United Kingdom: +44 20 3322 9959 Australia United States: +1 (650) 646-9709 9