Project Workbench From Innotas On-Demand IT Governance Enables IT Managers to More Easily Create and Manage IT Projects and Project Plans

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - August 17, 2009) - Innotas, the leader in on-demand IT Governance, recently added a Project Workbench that enables IT managers to more efficiently create, assign and maintain project plans for every type of IT work. The Project Workbench is a new view that provides a highly interactive screen for managing tasks, assignments, and other related information.

Many Project Portfolio Management (PPM) applications require users to navigate multiple screens and pop-ups in order to manage their projects, often taking hours just to set up a simple project plan. With Project Workbench, managers can set up and maintain project plans in seconds, allowing them to schedule or add resources on the fly, or quickly build and update Gantt charts using drag and drop capabilities.

With Project Workbench, maintenance and strategic project work are catalogued in a central repository that automatically monitors against pre-defined criteria. The process not only saves enormous amounts of time, but provides a pathway for more frequent and detailed data analysis.

Additionally, Project Workbench includes new IT-specific rules that make it much easier to plan and manage time spent on maintenance work.

"Leveraging our experience in how IT organizations manage maintenance work, we've built rules into our IT Governance solution to manage just that -- without forcing the traditional rigorous planning and overhead costs associated with managing maintenance work. Managers should not have to force staff to create project plans when it's not the project, but the actual maintenance work, that needs to get done," said Chad Haftorson, vice president of products, Innotas.

Innotas Project Workbench also introduced several new built-in capabilities to simplify IT planning and management. For example:

--  Projects and maintenance activities can now be planned in top-down or
    bottom-up mode. Top-down is ideal for controlling the flow of resources
    onto a project, such as when centralized resource pools are in use. Bottom-
    up provides project or application managers with a simple mechanism for
    allocating resources directly to the work they intend to work on
    
--  New project settings allow users to quickly and easily select
    activities to log time against, even in cases where they have not been
    "officially" assigned to that activity.  This is important when managing
    "keeping the lights on" activities that cannot realistically be planned out
    in advance (as other PPM applications force you to do)
    
--  Dependencies manage relationships between tasks; easily estimate roles
    needed for tasks; expand and collapse info panel to get to all task data;
    schedule resources to perform various roles or simply add them to tasks
    
--  Estimates and schedules are automatically rolled up to project level
    to provide project team summary
    

Moreover, because of the ease with which managers can create, schedule, assign and maintain their project plans, Innotas Project Workbench helps speed adoption of PPM practices and time-to-value.

Innotas on-demand IT Governance is built upon a strong foundation in IT PPM, which is used to manage strategic initiatives, and also includes Application Portfolio Management capabilities that provide visibility into sustaining IT operations and maintenance activities. Innotas, with its on-demand delivery model, enables customers to be up and running immediately, and with data loaded, the system configured and people trained in just a few weeks.

To learn more about how customer are using Innotas on-demand IT Governance, download the Innotas eBook, "The 7 Undeniable Truths of IT Governance: Success stories from companies that didn't wait until it was too late."

About Innotas

The Innotas on-demand IT Governance solution is an easy-to-use, rapid-to-deploy, and cost-effective way to manage resources and budgets across an IT department's entire inventory of projects, portfolios, applications, assets, and service requests. With its strong foundation in Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management, Innotas provides CIOs and IT management with visibility across both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations for improved decision making across the entire IT portfolio. Our customers, including the City of Memphis, Crayola, Forbes, Hamilton Beach, Jo-Ann Stores, The Northwest Company Inc., World Vision and many others, span a wide range of industries including financial services, government, healthcare, retail, technology, telecommunications and energy. For more information please visit www.innotas.com or contact us at +1 415.814.7700.

Contact Information: Contact: Seth Geisler Martin Levy Public Relations 858.610.9860