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OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management unifies roadmap planning across products and teams, offering real-time visibility and standardization.

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About OpenText

OpenText helps companies securely capture, govern, and exchange information on a global scale. From small businesses to the world’s largest enterprises, OpenText solves digital business challenges across industries.
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  • Founded in:
    1991
  • Employees:
    23,000
  • Customers:
    120,000+
  • Footprint:
    180 countries

Summary

Challenges

  • Teams used fragmented tools like JIRA, Excel, and WS PowerPoint.
  • No central source of truth for roadmap planning.
  • Limited visibility for leadership across business units.

Solution

  • Unified tool with OpenText Project and Portfolio Management platform.
  • Standardized product roadmaps across the enterprise.
  • Delivered unified integrations that improved visibility and reduced duplication.

Results

  • performance-gauge Created one source of truth for all product roadmaps
  • performance-cog Improved roadmap insights through smarter analytics
  • business-contact Delivered visibility across 10 business units and 358 products

Challenges

  • Teams used various tools like Jira, Excel, and WS PowerPointl
  • No central source of truth for roadmap planning
  • Limited leadership visibility

The Engineering PMO group operates within the Products and Engineering organization, reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer (CPO). This team is responsible for managing the processes that support collaboration between product management and engineering. It also oversees the internal tools used in their daily operations, ensuring streamlined workflows and continuous improvement across the product development lifecycle.

Before deploying OpenText Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), OpenText teams used various disconnected tools for roadmap planning, leading to inconsistent processes and limited visibility. A unified solution was needed to streamline planning and align leadership insights across business units.

Prior to aligning on a unified solution, many teams—especially those brought in through various acquisitions—were using different tools and approaches for roadmap planning. While the legacy OpenText teams primarily used JIRA, leveraging its built-in roadmap functionality and covering about 60% of the company, teams from acquired organizations had a more fragmented setup.

Although Micro Focus had already partially adopted PPM, other teams relied on a mix of tools, including Excel and PowerPoint, to manage and communicate their plans. This lack of a centralized, accessible repository made it difficult for leadership to gain a clear, cross-business-unit view of strategic planning. The need for a single, upstream source of planning truth became evident, prompting the search for a universal solution to unify and streamline roadmap management.

Person using a laptop and tablet with digital project management and analytics dashboards overlaid

We needed a unified upstream source for roadmap planning across all teams, especially as we integrated groups from various acquisitions with other processes. By standardizing planning in PPM from the very beginning, leaders now have consistent visibility and clarity across the entire organization.

Karol Jurado
Product Manager Engineering PMO group, OpenText

Solution

The Engineering PMO deployed OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management to centralize roadmap planning. It’s integrations with PhT and OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform (SDP) improved cross-company alignment, visibility, and decision-making.

Products deployed

Unified tool with OpenText Project and Portfolio Management platform

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management was chosen as the unified planning solution after teams observed its successful use by colleagues like Product Management and other engineering teams.

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management proved adaptable to OpenText’s needs and offered a scalable solution for the organization. There was a strong need to establish a single, consistent platform that all teams could use for roadmap planning—one that could provide visibility across business units and support executive decision-making. PPM met these requirements and offered a path toward greater alignment and efficiency.

This decision was also aligned with a broader initiative to decommission JIRA across OpenText, associated with the adoption of OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform by IT, engineering, and R&D for end-to-end software lifecycle and release management. The goal of eliminating JIRA was to help reduce tool sprawl and associated costs.

Standardized product roadmaps across the enterprise

To support unified product roadmap management, the Engineering PMO group led the implementation of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. The initiative began with gathering requirements from stakeholders across the organization, aiming to create a single source of truth for planning. With many teams coming from various acquisitions and using different tools—ranging from JIRA to Excel and PowerPoint—there was a strong need to standardize the roadmap planning process.

The team collaborated closely with the OpenText Project and Portfolio Management development group for a tailored solution using the Portfolio Management module. This included enabling both the Portfolio Management and Demand Management modules, allowing users to manage roadmaps, search and report on planning data, and gain greater visibility across teams. The focus was not on governance or compliance, but rather on enabling consistent, upstream planning practices across the company.

After extensive development and a thorough round of user acceptance testing and feedback, the tool was successfully rolled out in December 2024. Since then, the Engineering PMO group has overseen the day-to-day administration of the platform. The implementation has allowed all teams to enter their roadmap data in a consistent way from the beginning of the planning cycle, giving leadership a clear and unified view across business units.

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management implementation supports a broad user base across the organization. While the primary users are product managers and their leadership teams, access is also extended to other key roles such as engineering leaders, technical writers, program managers, and the user experience team—anyone who needs visibility into product roadmaps. In addition to active users, there are also many consumers who access the tool to extract information for their own work, even if they don’t contribute directly.

Currently, the platform supports more than 1,000 registered users, with access aligned to the number of products and corresponding product managers. The platform currently manages a roadmap of 358 products spanning over 10 business units. This ensures that each R&D team, typically composed of 10–15 people and supported by a dedicated PM, maintains a balanced and scalable structure.

Delivered unified integrations that improved visibility across platform

The first major integration is with the Product Hierarchy Tracker (PhT), which served as the foundation for the roadmap tool. This integration ensures that all active products listed in PhT are automatically available within the roadmap system, PPM, providing a consistent and centralized product listing. As a result, product managers can easily select their products and begin entering features without manual setup. This connection not only streamlines the user experience but also explains the scale of the user community, as it enables broad access across teams working on any active product in the organization.

The second key integration is with OpenText Core Software Development Platform (SDP), which was not in place previously. This integration allows product managers to push features from the roadmap tool directly into SDP once they are assigned to a release. A synced copy is created in SDP, and updates to feature titles or descriptions are automatically synchronized between the two systems every 24 hours. This eliminates the need for duplicate data entry and ensures consistency across platforms.

Given that SDP supports ten thousand engineers across multiple tenants and workspaces—each mapped to a product—this integration is critical. It enables the roadmap tool to aggregate and connect data across all SDP tenants and products, offering a level of visibility and alignment that many large organizations, especially those using JIRA lack. This centralized view is essential for leadership to make informed decisions and for teams to work efficiently without redundant administrative overhead.

PPM offers flexible reporting options to support both static and dynamic needs across teams. One key feature is the ability to generate PowerPoint-based roadmap reports. Product managers can input specific parameters to automatically create slide decks that visualize their roadmap data—saving significant time compared to manually building and updating slides. These reports remain fully editable, allowing teams to tailor them for leadership presentations or regular status updates.

In addition to static reporting, PPM also provides interactive dashboards. Users can access pre-configured dashboards that display key performance indicators (KPIs) and roadmap metrics, with the ability to drill down from the company level to individual business units or products. Teams can also create custom dashboards to track metrics specific to their needs, offering real-time visibility into planning data and enabling more informed, data-driven decisions.

One of the key strengths of PPM is its flexibility in adapting to changes within the product hierarchy. As new products are introduced or organizational structures evolve, the system automatically synchronizes with the PhT to reflect these updates in real time. This ensures that the roadmap tool always aligns with the most current product structure. The platform is designed to scale OpenText’s needs, supporting a wide range of business units and product lines. Executives benefit from this structure by gaining clear visibility into how product plans align with strategic priorities and how teams are allocating their efforts.

This hierarchy gives leaders a transparent, drill-down view across the company, enabling faster decisions while reducing redundant data entry.

Person typing on a laptop with digital icons representing data flow and document management

Teams update once and trust the integration to reflect the latest info everywhere—no more double entry or second-guessing. It’s a seamless way to keep everything aligned and up to date.

Karol Jurado
Product Manager Engineering PMO group, OpenText

Results

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management has unified OpenText’s roadmap planning into a single, integrated platform, providing real-time visibility and standardization across hundreds of products and business units.

Created one source of truth for all product roadmaps

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management implementation has delivered significant benefits across OpenText by consolidating the entire company’s roadmap planning into a single, integrated platform. It provides a unique source of truth for product roadmaps, ensuring standardization in how data is defined, presented, and reported. With real-time synchronization to the Product Hierarchy Tracker (PhT), the system adapts to changes in product structure—such as new products or reorganizations—while maintaining consistency.

The integration with OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform further enhances the value by linking roadmap planning directly to release and production workflows, enabling seamless coordination across requirements, testing, and ticket management. Leaders now have clear, aggregated visibility across hundreds of products and business units, something that was previously difficult to achieve with disparate tools like JIRA.

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management platform’s robust reporting capabilities allow teams to generate both static and dynamic views of roadmap data, aligned with strategic initiatives such as AI investments, Titanium, FedRAMP, and Cloud 9. PPM empowers executives to track progress, assess strategic alignment with corporate priorities, and make informed decisions quickly.

Improved roadmap insights through smarter analytics

With a strong foundation established in this first version, the next steps focus on enhancing clarity and expanding the platform’s capabilities. Key priorities include refining visualizations to better highlight trends and dependencies and advancing analytics to transform roadmap data into actionable insights.

These improvements aim to support faster, more informed decision-making and provide leadership with a clearer view of strategic impact. As priorities evolve—particularly around initiatives like AI—the tool will continue to adapt, offering flexible reporting and deeper visibility aligned with executive needs. The team is excited about the progress made and looks forward to building on this momentum.

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