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Where is Rational Project Conductor?

Some of you may have noticed the absence or removal of Rational Project Conductor from Jazz.net. This is a part of our strategy to strengthen our Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution by making project management a core CLM capability, by better integrating Project Portfolio Management with CLM, and by simplifying our product portfolio.

Strengthening project management within CLM
With the 3.0 release of Rational Team Concert there were significant enhancements to planning. Hopefully you were able to explore the enhancements via the Beta program, by downloading a trial, or by reading the blog post by Jean-Michel Lemieux.

The recent Rational Team Concert planning enhancements have brought project management closer to Collaborative Lifecycle Management. The need for this tighter integration is something that we have heard repeatedly from our customers even from the first day that Rational Project Conductor was released and throughout our various client feedback programs.

Strengthening the integration between portfolio management and CLM
In December 2010 we also released IBM Focal Point 6.5. This release included a workspace for Project Portfolio and integration with IBM Rational Team Concert. You can now manage a pipeline of projects in Focal Point, determine which one should be funded, jump start your Rational Team Concert project from Focal Point, and then use Focal Point to continuously assess performance of a collection of project by feeding information back from Rational Team Concert to Focal Point.

Simplifying the product portfolio
Many of you have provided comments and feedback related to how we required organizations to buy, install, and configure a separate product simply because they needed some small incremental capability to manage a project. The new planning capabilities in Rational Team Concert 3.0, combined with the integration with Focal Point, simplify our product portfolio in this space, while better integrating key project management capability into the CLM.

We will keep you posted as our roadmap continues to evolve. We are committed to further strengthen the integration between Project Portfolio Management, Project Management, and the broader CLM solution.

While we work on our roadmap, I encourage you to download Rational Team Concert 3.0 and explore the new planning enhancements delivered via the Formal Project Management template.

Go to the online help to learn about merging some of the traditional project management capabilities into your own process template.

And visit ibm.com to learn more about Focal Point.

Neil Leblanc
Product Manager – Rational PPM