IBM Rational Focal Point: Features and benefits

Rational® Focal Point™ provides a comprehensive decision support system for market-driven product and portfolio management. Through visualization, prioritization, analysis, and planning capabilities, Focal Point enables product planners and teams to make the right decisions about developing the right products with the right content for the right market at the right time.

Focal Point helps product development organizations to increase the success of their product lines by:

• Capture business inputs in the form of business and market requirements from customers, analysts, market research, and internal stakeholders

• Utilize visualization, prioritization, and unique road mapping and planning capabilities to create plans that are valuable and achievable

• Bridge the gap between the business and engineering by centralizing information key to decision-making, status reporting and portfolio reviews

• Prioritize and visualize customer needs to reduce the risk of minimization or elimination during project delivery of the most valuable capabilities

• Centralize information to escape the chaos of managing data in emails, documents, and spreadsheets, speeding the ability to respond to changing market and business conditions

• Overcome the influence of the loudest voice in the room and use objective information to support decision making

• Make enterprise architecture plans actionable and value-driven by assessing requests against business priorities, and road mapping alongside other initiatives