Founded in Russia in 1997, Kaspersky Lab is one of the world’s leading security software vendors. It is a multi-national holding with headquarters in Moscow and local offices in 29 countries. Global revenue grew 38 per cent in 2010, topping $500 million.

Kaspersky Lab has more than 2,300 employees and its products protect over 300 million users around the world. Its antivirus engines safeguard the main attack targets, including workstations, notebooks, file and Web servers, email gateways, handheld computers and smartphones. The company has more than 200,000 corporate clients, including large corporations and government institutions.

Objective Improve the agility and execution of new product and customisation projects

ApproachResearched various project management solutions against 100+ criteria

IT improvements• Creates a standard set of tests, minimising

customisation tasks and saving time

• Generates statistics on time spent and scope of work for particular projects

• Enables data on coding and bug fixing to correctly estimate implementation time for similar projects

Business benefits • Analyses the business value of planned

projects, allowing senior management to take effective decisions

• Produces accurate reporting, enabling resources to be planned and a roadmap to be generated 18 months in advance

• Performs dynamic weekly checkups on how well a project is progressing against the plan

• Achieves 100 per cent transparency of human resources for improved workforce management

HP customer case study HP PPM helps leading security firm assess business value of projects

Industry Software development

Kaspersky Lab streamlines project and portfolio management

“Thanks to HP Project and Portfolio Management we can now estimate the business value of a particular project, based on objective data. The processes have become totally transparent and predictable.” —Nikolay Grebennikov, technical director and head of R&D department, Kaspersky Lab

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The Kaspersky Lab Research & Development (R&D) department is the largest business unit. It is here that all the Kaspersky Lab products are created, by over 800 R&D personnel. In addition, the department is responsible for continuous 24x7 updating of the antivirus signatures and other information stores used by the company products. The department’s engineers work in Moscow, St Petersburg and Novosibirsk, as well as in the company’s offices in China, Germany, UK, and USA. It has two units, one responsible for R&D itself and the other for production work.

The first unit includes three laboratories. These research malicious programmes and other threats, develop counter measures, analyse Web content and create data protection techniques, as well as implementing a strategy for ensuring information security based on trusted files. In addition, the R&D department includes about 30 experts all over the world, tasked with promoting Kaspersky Lab’s technologies through conference keynotes, media articles and various industry events.

The production unit includes specialists responsible for all stages of software product lifecycle. Operations are managed centrally from the project office, bringing together managers of the four lines of the company’s business: consumer products, corporate products, technology development and infrastructure security systems.

The Department maintains a close relationship with the Products and Services department, responsible for analysing market trends and collecting feedback from users around the world. “Using that data in conjunction with the recommendations and requirements of the research laboratories, the two departments jointly define the company’s product strategy,” says Nikolay Grebennikov, technical director and head of R&D, Kaspersky Lab.

Need to competeTo be able to compete successfully, the company continuously expands its technology portfolio through R&D investments. As a result, the staff count has grown almost threefold in recent years, from 300 in 2007 to over 800 in 2010. This has lead to a significant increase in the complexity of human resource management and project management in general.

It became harder to allocate the human resources from various department units and the department lacked a centralised project management system. Managers were free to use the tools of their choice and, though most of them ended up using Microsoft® Project, they could not always align their individual resource planning and project schedule control activities.

Things worsened as the number of department projects grew. Kaspersky Lab expanded its product portfolio and faced an increasing number of requests for customisation of the solutions – each requiring a separate full-scale project. Project managers of the technology unit also receive a flood of requests for updates and improvements to the modules.

“We had to choose what projects to implement and what to reject,” says Grebennikov. “These problems had to be solved as part of the project portfolio management, which is impossible to implement without an efficient automation toolset.”

To solve the problem, Kaspersky Lab deployed HP Project and Portfolio Management Center (PPM) software in its R&D department as a means of increasing the efficiency of resource, time, project and portfolio management.

In choosing this solution, the selection process compared candidates against over 100 criteria. Among the most important was support for the matrix organisation structure, including the ability to combine workers of the various units into a common pool that could be distributed among different projects. HP PPM was the only solution that offered the required capabilities out of the box. Aside from its superior functionality, the system was chosen because of HP’s solid record and the flexible approach of its consulting team.

HP PPM was deployed primarily by the Kaspersky Lab’s R&D department staff with the help of HP consultants, who customised the system to meet specific requirements.

Customer solution at a glance

Software

HP IT Performance Suite – IT Operations Management

• HP Project and Portfolio Management Center software

Automated project workflow“Before automating the project management workflow, it had to be standardised, centralised, and made transparent for the company executives,” says Grebennikov.

Once this was done, the HP PPM modules were configured to support the business processes of the project office. Grebennikov says customisation tasks were minimised thanks to the flexibility of HP PPM.

All 100 employees at the project office’s infrastructure division have started using the new system. In addition, at least one project team from each of the three remaining divisions has joined the pilot testing. HP PPM has now become the mandatory project management tool for all 800-plus employees of the Kaspersky Lab R&D department.

“Thanks to the HP system, we achieved a 100 per cent transparency of the human resource management, and we rely on it to manage our department personnel,” says Grebennikov.

Prior to HP PPM deployment, the department adhered to a bottom-up approach, with resource allocation decisions made directly by project team members. However, as the R&D projects became more vital for Kaspersky Lab’s competitive ability, the company’s board of directors started to take a more stringent stance towards analysis of development projects. As a result, the department’s managers have had to switch to a top-down resource planning process using the HP PPM resource allocation table.

“Thanks to this, we can not only plan and schedule resources ahead of time, we can also perform dynamic weekly checkups on how well a project progresses against the plan,” says Grebennikov.

The integration of HP PPM with the company’s human resources management systems makes it possible to leverage not only existing employees when allocating resources, but also those in the process of being hired, which increases planning accuracy. In addition, the department’s workers always get an accurate estimate of how much time they are going to spend taking part in a particular project and of the scope of work they are about to perform, which helps in preparation for further projects.

Using the system, every team member records the time he or she spends for a particular task, this then produces statistics on different project activities, such as the amount of time used for coding and bug fixing. The data makes it easier to correctly estimate implementation time for similar projects.

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Analysis of business valueHP PPM is now used as the underlying system for portfolio management in the R&D department. It provides an efficient toolset for analysing the business value of the whole range of projects related to developing new products and customising the existing ones. HP PPM helps select the highest priority projects based on their resource requirements and allows building a roadmap of projects for 18 months ahead.

HP PPM plays a crucial rule in decision making at all levels up to the department executives and the company’s board of directors.

In future, the R&D department plans to widen its portfolio management capabilities to rely not only on the resource constraints data, but on the analysis of a project’s viability from a costs and investments perspective. This will require the integration of the HP solution with Kaspersky Lab’s financial systems. In addition, the portfolio management processes will be supplemented with another key element - risk management.

The R&D department also plans to strengthen and expand the cooperation with the Products and Services department. Managers of the latter will be able to use the PPM system to inform R&D about the projects found to be promising from the product strategy point of view.

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4AA3-9440EEW, Created February 2012; Updated September 2012, Rev. 1