In part 1 of this series, I went through some of the issues with end user SAM practices in the datacentre, from my experience.  I also looked at a sample PMO process, something which is fairly standard in most organisations, and what each of the key stages are.  In this post, I’m going to explore how you can plug SAM into such a process to achieve some simple governance and cost efficiency.  I’m not going to look at activities that might come before or after the PMO process.

Consider the below PMO process, which includes all of the key stages of the project lifecycle.  As a refresher, I’ve included a brief reminder underneath of what each of those key stages represents.

1. Scoping and Analysis – requirements gathering by a business analyst, ensuring the proposed project fits in with business and IT strategy
2. Design – architecture involvement, high level design of the application and detailed designs, if applicable, of each element
3.  Build and Test – initial build of development and test environments, systems integration testing, user acceptance testing
4. Deploy – full build of the production application and go live
5. Handover – project closedown and handover into BAU support

So where would you add software asset management touchpoints into that process, to ensure your organisation gets the full benefit of governance, optimisation and risk prevention?  Consider the diagram below with checkpoints 1 through 5.  These do not necessarily align to standardised PMO gates (although in most cases they will); they are simply my view of the necessary checkpoints for the SAM team to maintain proper governance with relation to the end user’s software assets.