Mariner Benefits
When Project Plans are Everywhere, Insight is Nowhere
How successful is your organization at selecting and managing projects to deliver maximum value to your business? Can you accurately answer three fundamental business questions:
- What work is going on in my organization?
- Who is working on what projects?
- How much is it costing me?
If you can't answer yes to these questions, you're not alone. A project portfolio management solution can help you address these challenges.
Serena Mariner is the most functional on-demand project portfolio management (PPM) solution. Unlike ad-hoc approaches that only show part of the picture, Mariner delivers a straightforward, flexible implementation with quick time to value by matching your PPM maturity with our functionality through solution accelerators, free assessment and training, and Quick Start service offerings.
Continue reading on about the benefits of Serena Mariner. You can also learn more about Mariner from our datasheet and feature guide.
Increase Visibility Across Your Organization
Powerful dashboard reporting gives executives and project management leaders quick insight into what projects are taking place across the organization and their status. Mariner also provides top-of-the-line portfolio management with pre-built workflows and financial analytics to guide your selection of new project ideas to ensure alignment with your business strategies and governance policies.
With Widget Space, project leaders and managers can get visibility into project-related information from outside of Mariner. For example, with an application development project, a Serena Business Mashup report on current defect levels can be displayed within the project workspace, providing additional insight on project status to project managers, while developers continue to work in their familiar environment.
Get the Right People on the Right Projects at the Right Time
People are typically the most critical resource on projects. Mariner delivers robust resource management to bring balance between requests for projects and the supply of talented people. It gives you one place to manage your resource pool including a skills inventory. And, it recommends the best resources for the job based on availability and can quickly uncover potential bottlenecks.
Easily Manage, Evaluate and Execute on Your Demand
Imagine one system of record where you can capture, classify and prioritize demand at a glance; where you can quickly identify available resources; and where you can conduct "what if" analysis to determine the appropriate mix in your project portfolio. With Mariner, you can easily manage, evaluate, and execute on all sources of demand in one spot. This helps ensure that projects are selected to drive business strategies and executed successfully to deliver on ROI commitments. Learn more about Demand Management from the white paper by Harvey Levine, "Aligning IT and Business with Demand Management," and the accompanying on demand webinar.
For more advanced demand management, you can integrate and interact across a variety of systems in your organization including service/help desk, case management, and requirements management. Using the Demand Management Mashup, Mariner integrates out-of-the-box with Serena Business Mashups Issue Defect Tracking and can be configured to integrate with 3rd party systems such as Remedy and Salesforce.com. Get started with advanced Demand Management by watching the Demand Management 2.0 webcast, then download the Pre-Built Mashup.
Deliver On Time and Under Budget
Mariner allows you to establish financial and work goals at the onset of a project. Drag-n-drop project plan views make it easy and quick to create schedules with key tasks, milestones, and owners. For more advanced task scheduling, Mariner integrates with Microsoft Project. It also collects labor and capital cost as well as project benefits to build a financial scorecard.
Accelerate Time to Value with a Maturity-Based Approach
If your organization is like many, you don’t necessarily have well defined processes around project portfolio management. You want to get there, but you need to do it in steps. Serena can help you identify where you are today and create a recommended roadmap for maturing your PPM processes.
Another way accelerate time to value is with the Mariner Xcelerator(TM), an Excel template, that lets you quickly and easily import your resource teams and project investments into Mariner. This is a great way to get lots of information into Mariner using a familiar and easy tool.
Boost Cross-Team Collaboration
Enabling organizations to move beyond ad-hoc approaches like spreadsheets, presentations and desktop project management tools, Mariner lets you share project plans, issue and risk lists, and documents in one central location. With distributed work teams and expanding organization boundaries, you’ll want “anytime – anywhere” access to a 24X7, web-based workplace.