Changepoint: Same Script, Different Theater

Aptly named Changepoint has certainly adapted—to stock-market hiccups and software-market shifts. The firm shelved its 2000 public offering, but had roughly $40 million in venture capital as a cushion. Since then, the firm says it’s had two profitable years in a row, growing revenues while shrinking headcount by a third.

The company first catered to the professional-services industry, where requirements rarely exceeded time-tracking and resource-billing. The recent expansion of its technical skills into portfolio management may not seem intuitive, but given the slowdown in consulting, rivals such as Lawson Software have made similar moves.

Integris Health’s Avery Cloud says that model is actually appropriate for technology units. An outsourcer, he says, “would use professional-services applications to deploy its experts to its customers to meet their business goals; I.T. must do the same.” Changepoint, he says, “is not just a project-management tool, and not just a portfolio tool. It’s an I.T.-management tool. We use it like a portal,” albeit one that also handles balanced scorecards, business cases, knowledge capture, and “all kinds of opportunities to manage information about the portfolios.”

For some of Changepoint’s other early adopters, though, implementation has been incremental. “We’re not doing portfolio management right now,” says Gerhard Kraus of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. “We’re still defining a prioritization procedure,” which will help “decide which projects should come first.” Boehringer doesn’t “expect to have [portfolio-management features] up and running until the start of next year,” Kraus says. The company wants to compile baseline data first.

Boehringer had been using other project-management software, but in Changepoint, Kraus says, the company saw “one single, integrated solution for managing I.T. operations and the I.T. portfolio.” By introducing Changepoint, Boehringer hopes to reduce complexity and streamline business processes.

At Precision Response Corp. (PRC), “We had six different systems that we could at least partially replace using Changepoint,” says PRC’s Rae Towsley, “That was part of the ROI.” The ability “to have a [top-level] snapshot and at the same time drill down will change the way we measure projects,” Towsley says, and improve levels of customer satisfaction. That’s the kind of adaptation Changepoint’s counting on.