Adding agility to Compuware's Changepoint

Compuware made a number of announcements re: Changepoint yesterday. Changepoint is the company’s project portfolio management solution. Changepoint is primarily targeted to mid-to-large IT organizations. Briefly, the company outlined a number of product directions for the near-term as well as showcased its Accelerator for agile development projects.

The agile development announcement was interesting as the company now has new functionality to support IT projects that are using the fast, repetitive agile development methodology. The software includes needed templates, best practices, reports, etc. to support agile development efforts.

This accelerator is also interesting because it works in concert (not standalone) with the core Changepoint product. In this manner, top IT and business executives can evaluate all projects regardless of the development approach used (i.e., agile or conventional).

Compuware also outlined a product roadmap that is focused on newer technologies and the effect these could have on project/IT management. The new solutions will support technologies such as Silverlight 2.0, W3C (non-IE) browsers and more. The company is

I was pleased to see these announcements as much of the focus from PPM/PSA (project portfolio management/professional services automation) vendors have been on delivery model (e.g., SaaS) or down-market versions of existing products.