Collaborate to Innovate

IntelligentEnterprise: "15 Things You Can Do With Development Chain Management
Select the right projects to invest in; allocate the appropriate resources in the right sequence among multiple projects; and leverage lessons learned from running multiple concurrent projects.
Integrate project, resource, and portfolio management in the context of your unique development process.
Reconcile top-down strategy from senior management with the bottom-up details of project plans and resource assignments.
Enter, analyze, and view product schedules, resource capacity, and assignments from standard Web browsers (Internet Explorer or Netscape) in real time.
Set up the phase (or stage) process for each product portfolio; manage cross-functional project teams and decision boards; create the activity structure (steps, tasks, and milestones) associated with different types of projects; and forecast suggested resource needs for each type of project.
Provide a flexible means of reinforcing structured development by facilitating the creation of a repeatable and sustainable development process while still allowing innovation by customizing plans.
Configure multiple partner centers and exchange designated information within the context of your unique product development process with partners, customers, suppliers, or consultants.
Give designated partners access to the information they need while protecting your interests and core competencies.
Use a common baseline to evaluate and prioritize projects for funding, sequencing, and resource allocation.
Analyze and consolidate information across multiple product portfolios.
Create user-definable templates that contain standard project information such as structure (phases, steps, and tasks), cycle times, resource and skills required, deliverables, and so on.
Integrate the resource needs, requests, and assignments with the project schedule and resource capacity.
Anticipate resource bottlenecks ahead of time because all active and planned projects are managed with the same data source.
Use a resource management dashboard to get a quick overview of new resource requests, projects using resources from their group, and planned projects that require using resources from their group.
Get project highlights such as slipped items, key schedule items, calendar items, notices, action items, and team members from a project management portal. "

Figure 1 Examples of semantics rules that are deeply embedded within applications.