The QSM team thoroughly enjoyed our time at the Gartner Symposium/ITXPO in Orlando a couple of weeks ago. We spent most of our time at the QSM exhibit, networking sessions, and at various presentation sessions.
We met many C-Level executives with process improvement on their mind. Our main focus was to learn about their specific needs in the IT budgeting and vendor management areas. We conducted question and answer sessions and provided real world examples on how to use business and software analytics to manage the complexities of IT budgeting, taking into account in-house projects as well as the project durations and costs proposed by their vendors.
Many of the senior executives we spoke with also had a need to integrate cost, duration and resource information with their project portfolio management solutions. The big focus was leveraging demand management to improve capacity planning. We provided demonstrations showing the SLIM-PPM Integration Framework which provides the release level cost, effort, resources and schedules that PPM solutions need validated to reduce risk in the enterprise portfolio.
Another big focus of the conference seemed to be cloud and cybersecurity initiatives, so we received a lot of questions about our cloud solution, SLIM-Collaborate. This tool provides software estimation, project planning, and historical data analytics. We provided many demos and explained the benefits of having a secure process for providing this type of information across the enterprise.
One final big area of interest and one where we received a lot of questions was on the availability of industry benchmark statistics which could be used to measure improvement. We were able to highlight our research on over 10,000 completed software and IT projects. We also showed how they could use the QSM industry data and their own client history to sanity check the validity of project plans at the release and portfolio levels.
Overall, a great experience meeting new people and seeing clients that we have been working with for many years!