In my next installment of this focused series on reasons why our PM community should know or try certain very useful and powerful project management tools they may or may not have ever heard of, I am going to cover ONEPOINT Projects.
In my next 5 Reasons Why installment, let’s take a look at Saviom software.
Saviom Software is an Australia-based software company and a market leader offering robust and configurable resource management and workforce planning solutions. With over 20 years of experience, Saviom has established its global presence across 50+ countries and helped more than 100 customers achieve their business goals. Some of their esteemed clients include PwC, Fujitsu, Siemens, Honeywell, DHL, Continental, and many others.
Saviom can help leverage the skillsets of cost-effective global resources across matrix organization boundaries. Its forecasting capabilities reduce unnecessary hiring/firing costs. Saviom also helps minimize deployment of under/over skilled resources on projects.
Saviom’s powerful forecasting analytics helps you to improve the billable and effective utilization of your workforce. Applying advanced filters, managers can proactively mobilize resources from non-billable or low priority to billable projects. It also enables you to track the estimated vs. actuals and improve the overall forecasting process by aligning it to reality.
Saviom helps plan for pipeline projects in advance by identifying resource shortfalls/excesses using demand capacity planning. It also allows you to bridge the gap proactively by exploring various resourcing channels. Planning and forecasting future/pipeline opportunities help align the sales and delivery team.
Saviom provides 360-degree visibility of resources across the verticals of geography, functions, domains, and business units of matrix structure organization. Slice and dice allocations and multidimensional scheduling capability ensure appropriate resources are available for suitable projects at the right time and cost.
What-if analysis, Saviom’s unique feature, helps you get the best possible ROI within existing resource constraints. One can either extend timelines or mobilize resources to a high-priority project before arriving at the best outcome. Accordingly, analyze the impact on resource capacity and utilization and make an informed decision.
Ready to try Saviom? Signup for a free trial or book a demo today.
The next segment in my somewhat weekly series on 5 reasons to try many of these project management software and service offerings that you may not be using or even aware of their powerful capabilities, I am featuring Parabol and 5 reasons why you should know about it and give it a try.
Parabol is an agile meeting tool that helps remote teams run guided retrospective, check-in and Sprint Poker meetings. Every meeting includes optional icebreakers, anonymous voting/reflections and space for async discussions.
When your meeting is over, Parabol follows-up with an automatic summary, which means no more note-taking. Now everyone can be fully present at your meetings.
Parabol takes the burden off facilitators by making it easy for anyone to run a great agile meeting – no matter if you’re a pro facilitator or just starting out.
You Need A Safe Space For Open Discussion
Facilitators need not fear organizing teams around a blank whiteboard. Parabol meetings have a built-in structure that guides you through all the steps of a productive and efficient agile meeting. With more structure comes more dependable meeting outcomes.
But before you jump into the juicy topics of your meeting, you can create a safe space with an optional icebreaker. Built-in questions help get everyone talking and build psychological safety – because if you speak once at the start of a meeting you’re much more likely to speak up again.
Connecting as humans makes teams feel safe around each other and sets the stage for a more open conversation. After an icebreaker, your team can feel confident discussing anything together.
You Want To Have The Right Conversations
Cognitive biases can get an upper-hand over anyone, but Parabol keeps them in check with features that counter bias towards authority and anchoring bias.
Anonymous reflections in retrospectives and anonymous voting in Sprint Poker make meetings more democratic. Nobody can see another person’s input or be influenced by it. People aren’t able to line up behind the opinions of authority figures. And anonymity gives everyone’s voice equal weight – from the team lead to the new hire.
With anonymity, team members can feel safe raising difficult topics. If you’ve got a spicy situation brewing, a participant can choose to own their reflection: “I wrote that one”. Or not. It’s up to them. Parabol helps teams have important conversations without employees fearing reprisals.
In Parabol retrospectives, the team decides what they want to discuss with a democratic voting process. Every user is assigned a number of votes they can cast on issues they want to discuss most. The issues with the most votes are discussed first. This helps teams focus on having the right conversations.
You Want To Focus On Getting Things Done
We’ve all been in meetings that end without any next steps. They can feel like a complete waste of time. Parabol pushes teams towards action by prompting participants to add follow-up tasks during the meeting and sending automatic meeting summaries.
Integrations with Jira and GitHub help agile teams fit Parabol into existing workflows. So you can create a follow-up task in your Parabol retrospective and send it straight over to Jira! Just like magic! If you’re doing sprint poker estimation, your final estimate will also sync right back to Jira. Parabol’s Slack integration lets your team know when a new meeting has started.
Parabol’s check-in meeting improves team transparency and accountability. Everyone on the team can see the work you’ve been doing so you can chart your progress together. The meeting’s dynamic agenda function lets any team member raise a talking point. This gives team leads and facilitators a quick and transparent way to fix any roadblocks.
You Need A Tool That’s Built For Agile Teams
Parabol is built by agile teams, for agile teams. So it’s optimized to suit the way agile teams work and cover the main meetings in a sprint cycle.
Try Parabol for yourself by holding a 2-minute retrospective meeting with their simulated colleagues. Click here.
Let’s face it, an online whiteboard tool isn’t enough for structured agile meetings that you need to hold regularly. It can be messy and confusing. And as a facilitator, whiteboards take a lot of time to prepare. With Parabol, you can start a retrospective, Sprint Poker or check-in meeting in seconds. No preparation needed.
Unlike other tools, Parabol covers the lifecycle of agile ceremonies. You can start your sprint estimating stories with Sprint Poker. Then report on progress and unblock each other with check-in meetings. And at the end of your sprint, you can run retrospectives meetings. All in one tool.
You Want To Make Meetings Worth The Time Invested
Too often, meetings don’t feel worth the time invested. And that’s a real shame.
Because meetings are a chance to come together. To share opinions. Chart a path forward together. Bond as a team. And process tensions.
Parabol’s icebreakers add joy and connection to meetings. Anonymity creates a safe and democratic space for contributions. Integrations help you get things done according to your workflow. And automatic meeting summaries help you keep the whole team up to date.
Life’s too short for bad meetings. Try Parabol to make meetings worth the time invested.
My next installment in this exclusive Project Times series on project management related tools and services looks at Leankor’s offering that promises to make projects more profitable while also making them easier to manage during these remote PM and virtual project teams real world times.
Remote teams. Tighter budget controls. Efficiency mandates. For enterprise organizations already navigating the complexities of large-scale initiatives, 2020 brought further complication with the disruptive effects of a global crisis. And while some degree of the former normal may eventually return, the heightened pandemic-era pressure to accelerate delivery while driving profitability is here to stay—regardless of where teams work.
Fortunately, as the world changed, enterprise organizations have been able to rely on Leankor’s sophisticated enterprise work and project management solution to seamlessly transform operations and combat the challenges that have resulted from this evolution. With super-charged collaboration features, Leankor’s next-generation solution transforms complex, interconnected workflows and business processes into easy-to-manage plans for faster delivery and profitability. Here are five ways Leankor helps teams do their best work.
Closer Collaboration When Teams Are Farther Apart
While the future of the remote workplace is still evolving, collaboration among distributed teams will always be critical to enterprise work and project management success. According to a December 2020 PwC survey, 87% of employees say the office is important for collaborating with team members. Salesforce research finds 96% of workers believe lack of collaboration is the source of workplace failures.
To bridge the collaboration gap, Leankor’s sophisticated, cloud-based work and project management solution links distributed internal and external teams with full transparency into planning, execution and strategy. For the most complex, large-scale projects, stakeholders must align from kickoff to delivery, and often even as early as the opportunity development stage. That includes not only remote office employees but also contractors, field services teams and even customers. Leankor empowers teams with tools to conduct virtual discussions, brainstorm and quickly solve problems from anywhere.
360-Degree Visibility for Clear Context in Uncertain Times
Remote collaboration requires all team members to have access to the same, updated information for context and effective decision making. When distributed teams can sync and share files in one central location in the cloud, it eliminates disconnected spreadsheets and disparate servers, mitigating the risk of decisions based on the wrong data. Because we live in times marked by uncertainty, the data-driven context and clarity provided by Leankor’s next-level solution help guide individuals, teams and organizations to more certain and better outcomes.
Remote collaboration requires all team members to have access to the same, updated information for context and effective decision making. When distributed teams can sync and share files in one central location in the cloud, it eliminates disconnected spreadsheets and disparate servers, mitigating the risk of decisions based on the wrong data. Because we live in times marked by uncertainty, the data-driven context and clarity provided by Leankor’s next-level solution help guide individuals, teams and organizations to more certain and better outcomes.
Flexible Work Management Aligned to How People Work Best Now
McKinsey research suggests 70 percent of companies use the Agile methodology in some form to run their organizations. But that doesn’t mean Agile-only support is sufficient for effective work and project management. For optimal efficiency, most organizations operate with a variety of methodologies and use hybrid approaches across projects and departments. However, some organizations are still using time intensive, manual approaches to manage their complex projects.
To support the way an organization works best, Leankor allows multiple methodologies to co-exist, including Kanban, Lean, Agile, Gantt, Waterfall, hybrid, pull-planning and others, adapting and translating for streamlined project and risk management. All methods can be interconnected and unified in a virtual platform to communicate with ease, making progress seamless. This can happen even when people are socially distanced in home offices or in clusters of teams in regional satellite locations.
When Agile work methods exist with traditional Gantt project planning processes, Leankor allows organizations to create projects using traditional methods and for work and tasks to be executed at the team level using Agile approaches. This means teams work the way they want from a single system while increasing organization-wide efficiency, control and velocity.
Interconnected Resources to Drive Profitability—from Opportunity to Delivery
When teams, data and customers come together, efficiency translates to profitability. Amid global economic uncertainty, on-time, on-budget has never been more critical, and neither has customer satisfaction and loyalty. For large-scale, long-lasting projects across multiple sites, Leankor can have a direct, positive order-to-cash revenue impact. It’s a user-friendly uber orchestrator, managing interconnected resources, timelines and workflows.
When powerfully integrated with Salesforce applications like Service Cloud, Einstein AI, Community Cloud, CPQ, MuleSoft, Field Service Management, Vlocity, Chatter and QUIP, Leankor goes far beyond traditional project management to become a comprehensive enterprise work management solution, transforming large-scale project complexity into efficiency. And ultimately, that translates into profitability.
Analytics for the Agility to Manage Now and What Comes Next
Leankor’s powerful analytics are designed for users of all technical levels. They empower people to make informed decisions throughout the project lifecycle and improve the outcomes of work. From streamlining request-for-proposal (RFP) processes for multi-service-point quotes to enabling customer-centric master dashboards for better customer service and P&L insight, Leankor drives revenue from opportunity to delivery. Individuals meet timelines and budget expectations with robust analytical and reporting features. Executives get visibility into resource allocation and financials to better manage profitability. Teams identify risk with AI, advanced reporting and predictive, next-best actions to eliminate or mitigate costly issues before they occur. Informed decision making throughout project lifecycles provides the agility to manage for project success and long-term organizational success.
A Next-Gen Solution for the New Age of Work and Project Management
The pandemic and resulting global economic crisis have made work and project management especially challenging for organizations across industries and around the globe. But with the right solution to manage people, processes and technology, any organization can drive efficiency that empowers teams to do their best work, keeps stakeholders informed and accelerates delivery. The result is greater profitability across projects and elevated work enterprise-wide. It’s an approach that will help organizations thrive in this crisis and through whatever lies ahead.
Summary / more about Leankor
Leankor is a highly visual work and project management solution built on the Salesforce Cloud. Designed for the enterprise customer, Leankor helps companies execute complex projects at scale. A transformative solution, it links different styles of methodologies and processes, empowering people to work more effectively. Leankor enables teams to organize, manage, collaborate and deliver better projects, helps decision-makers measure effectiveness, and allows companies to deliver quicker revenue cycles. Leveraging the power of Salesforce, it brings together customer, project, and resource data, extending the Customer 360 vision. Leankor is used by many of the world’s leading brands with focused solutions for industrial enterprises in Manufacturing, Construction, Solar, Energy and B2B Telecom, with additional emphasis on R&D, quality management, product launches and manufacturing for Biotech, Medtech and Pharma.
The next installment of my exclusive series of articles on new, emerging and some established project management tools and services will focus here on OnePlan.
OnePlan is an in-depth solution for your project portfolio needs that touts itself as the best project management software for the Microsoft platform.
The way the world works is changing, and so is the technology for managing projects, products and portfolios. Microsoft is aligning its project tools strategy with its vision for today’s enterprise. In the modern workplace, the constraints of one monolithic system and one way of working are gone. Microsoft products Project Online and Project Server are on their way out and Project for the Web and Project Operations are on their way in. Today, Microsoft.com states that “there is no date to limit the functionality of Project Online at this time, but we encourage customers to plan their transition as soon as possible.” The Microsoft vision is bigger than just the new project products. It is important to understand the broader strategy for business solutions, where flexibility, speed and innovation in the enterprise are not limited to just one way of working.
Microsoft’s new vision for enterprise project management includes core components of their productivity platform: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Teams, and Dataverse. The addition of Project for the web provides a more modern, user-friendly scheduling tool. The vision is expansive and provides customers the flexibility to create tailored solutions that also integrate all forms of work management across the organization. Now, if you are an existing user of Project Server or Project Online, the natural question to ask is ‘which Microsoft product should I look at as my replacement?’ But in the new world of work, where a ‘one-size-fits-all’ system just won’t cut it, we need to change the question.
A better question is: ‘how can we improve our portfolio management performance and what are the key capabilities that our various teams will benefit from?’ An optimal solution will likely include integrating with one or more major enterprise planning systems, as well as a connection to the work management tools that teams find most productive. And then there are some standard components that are going to be valuable, including Microsoft Teams for collaboration, plus Microsoft PowerApps and Power Automate for workflows, requests and approvals. In summary, the new landscape means having to put in a little more thought and ‘solutioning’ up front, but the end result is a more valuable solution, with better adoption.
To help you get started, Microsoft has announced the launch of a new version of its Project for the web Accelerator for PPM, which delivers a more configurable basic solution using Power Platform and Project for the Web. Coupled with some licensing changes that make the technology very competitively priced, this is a welcome step towards fulfilling Microsoft’s vision for its Project Online installation base. OnePlan has been working with Microsoft to help create this vision. OnePlan provided an early version of the new Accelerator and has continued to innovate and extend the platform to fully support current Project Online users. The combination of Microsoft’s Project Accelerator and OnePlan provides a superior PPM platform. Here are 5 reasons why:
OnePlan includes capabilities to capture and define your corporate strategy in the form of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This supports Strategic Portfolio Management. The solution enables the linking of your objectives and key results to your projects and programs to fully understand how the strategy is being realized and the key projects and resources needed to make it happen. It includes a wide variety of methods for prioritizing or sequencing portfolios, based on metrics of business value and constraint. For more information on our Strategic Portfolio Management features visit: Strategy Execution Management | OnePlan
Most portfolio management scenarios require powerful financial and resource management capabilities. These capabilities are OOB with OnePlan and, in contrast with Project Online, OnePlan has almost unlimited options for configuring them to meet specific enterprise needs. This includes resource capacity planning at the levels of team, role, function or individual. It also includes easy to use, time-phased financial budgeting, forecasting, and tracking of actuals, plus optional timesheets if needed. Financial and resource capabilities can also be integrated with enterprise systems.
Full Support for Agile Methodology
OnePlan includes the ability to use boards at the feature, project, large solution and portfolio levels; to create sprints, program increments, epics and the relationships between them. It also enables resourcing based on sprints, stable teams and cross-functional teams. The OnePlan solution is Scaled Agile Framework certified. It can be deployed within Azure DevOps to provide powerful Portfolio and Resource Planning capabilities.
Furthermore, the solution does not require an organization to adopt a single methodology. The trend is towards a variety of methodologies and delivery models in the enterprise. OnePlan supports this dynamic environment, providing consolidation, portfolio planning and reporting on top of the various PMOs and their chosen delivery models. For more information visit: Scaled Agile – Lean Portfolio Management | OnePlan
OnePlan supports using both Project for the Web and Project Professional as end-user scheduling tools. It also supports using Microsoft 365 Planner, SharePoint lists, Azure DevOps, JIRA and more. OnePlan provides seamless access to the tool of choice. Gone are the days of insisting that all projects must use a complex professional tool. The goal: provide Project Managers with the option to work with the tools they need to do the job right.
Another strength of OnePlan is the ease of systems integration. For example, portfolio management sometimes requires a connection with a CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce – to enable visibility into the pipeline of upcoming projects or products. Or a connection with a financial system such as SAP, in order to bring in actual costs from capital and expense items. To make systems integration a repeatable, robust and continuously supported scenario, OnePlan provides connector products – known collectively as OneConnect – for a wide range of enterprise applications. For more information on our OneConnect solution visit: Integrations | OnePlan
To learn more about OnePlan or to get a free trial, visit www.oneplan.ai today.
