OREANDA-NEWS. June 08, 2016. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced new capabilities in its Agile Management portfolio that allow organizations to deliver value faster, from upfront planning to execution to customer support.

“In today’s application economy, the most successful companies differentiate themselves by sensing market opportunities and responding more quickly and confidently than the competition. Organizational agility of this order requires architecting the whole business system for speed, steering and opportunity - a 21st century operating system for getting things done,” said Angela Tucci, general manager, Agile Management at CA Technologies.

“We’re seeing a strong shift in the cultural and organizational behaviors of companies as they strive to become more nimble and responsive to competitive market demands,” said Melinda Ballou, program director, Application Life-Cycle Management and Executive Strategies, IDC. “Adaptive, agile solutions – from business portfolio planning to application creation, deployment and service management – can deliver dynamic technology differentiators and the opportunity for customers to speed and optimize delivery for development and business operations.”

Expanded capabilities include integrations between CA Project & Portfolio Management (CA PPM) and CA Agile Central (formerly Rally), a new persona-based approaches to PPM and IT Service Management (ITSM) with CA PPM and CA Service Management, and new features in CA Agile Central. The benefits of this expanded Agile Management portfolio include:

Unique Combination of Agile Development and Enterprise Portfolio Management Capabilities Drives Business Agility

The integrated solution of CA PPM and CA Agile Central helps companies to effectively balance agility and governance by connecting the work of agile teams to the enterprise portfolio. New integrations between CA Agile Central and CA PPM allow the work development teams are undertaking in CA Agile Central to be visible to project managers in CA PPM, so resource allocations, funding, and progress of business deliverables are more transparent.  Supporting an evolutionary approach to adopting agile, the integrated solution allows companies to continue using traditional methods, while growing agile adoption to deliver on portfolio investments faster—with higher quality and predictable business results.

CA’s Persona-based Approach to PPM Delivers Improved Project Performance

The new CA PPM solution gives modern project managers a better way to connect with their teams through an intuitive user experience, designed to simplify work and accelerate velocity. Intuitive time entry and real-time support provide insights into how teams are executing against strategy, and enable project managers to keep team members motivated and drive better project performance. A recognized PPM solutions provider, CA PPM was named a leader for the fourth consecutive year in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Software Applications, Worldwide.

“Keeping pace with business change in a highly dynamic environment while maintaining a level of governance for financial compliance has been a challenge and priority for our PPM team,” said Becky Wilson, Senior Manager, Tech Portfolio, Corporate Finance at Expedia, Inc.  “We’re excited about CA PPM’s new capabilities, which will help simplify the way we manage portfolio data and increase user engagement.”

New CA Agile Central Capabilities Align Development Teams with Business Value

Many agile teams face the same challenges -- they have too much work in process, and not enough visibility into which work is the most important work. Allowing teams to better connect strategy to execution, CA Agile Central now offers enhanced capacity planning, team planning and release tracking. Key features include:

?       Enhanced capacity planning enables businesses and engineering leaders to match business priorities to available team capacity so they can balance work allocation during planning.

?       Team planning gives visibility into the prioritized set of features that teams will build. By providing context and empowering teams to plan their work, users create reliable release plans together to deliver optimum value to stakeholders.

?       Release tracking provides visuals in real time for executing the work and release tracking progress.

New CA Service Management User Experience Drives Faster Response Times

CA Service Management empowers service desk analysts to react and respond to high-priority work more quickly by providing them a way to prioritize work, and the context to make decisions -- allowing analysts to substantially increase their first-call resolution rates. Updates to CA Service Management help address productivity demands, giving analysts a contextual understanding of the work that needs to get done and why, including:

?       Weather helps put an analyst’s day in context via an at-a-glance view of the upcoming shift and the IT environment.

?     Heat prioritizes the analyst’s work by scoring and presenting the importance of each incident

?     Service genius provides Analysts’ a single text box where keywords drive actions and provide intelligence to quickly resolve incidents.

?     Story timeline helps analysts easily pick up where they or others left off with a sequential view of all activities associated with an incident.

?     Suggested experts & solutions present analysts the IT experts best rated to assist on an issue and suggested solutions based on knowledge, similar incidents and information from external sources.

Agile Management solutions capabilities are being demonstrated at the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 2016, June 6-8 in Orlando, Florida.  For more information on CA Agile Management solutions, visit: http://www.ca.com/us/why-ca/agile-management.html or visit CA at Booth #200.

*Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Software Applications, Worldwide,” Daniel B. Stang, Robert A. Handler, Teresa Jones, May 24, 2016.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.