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Tag: Planning

5 Reasons Why You Should Choose Proggio as Your Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Solution

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles.

With plenty of misleading “Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions” out in the market today, it is important to know how to choose the right one for your organization. Despite understanding how the software functions, you will also need to ask yourself which approach to your project portfolio management (PPM) do you want to take? Do you want to aim to complete your projects and mark them done, or do you want to build your portfolio based on your company goals, and focus on strategy-to-execution technique?

In this article, we will give 5 major reasons why Project Management Office (PMO) leaders choose Proggio as their enterprise PPM solution to help them plan, execute, and deliver their project portfolio successfully, and why you should too.

Reason #1: Ultimate project portfolio visibility

Finally view and understand the progress status of your entire project portfolio in a snapshot. Each row is a project, and next to each one is the auto-generated Project Health Indicator displaying the progress of the project, helping you take immediate actions in order to keep everything on track.

Proggio’s revolutionary patent-based solution was built to provide a high-level perspective of the project portfolio in a quick snapshot, no matter if it’s tens or hundreds of projects in their portfolio:

When you have clear visibility of your project portfolio, you can track, monitor, and manage it better by staying focused on what matters, and thereby bring value to the company, running your project portfolio from strategy to execution.

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Reason 2: “Unlimited Users” on all plans

Proggio recently shifted its pricing model to grant unlimited user access for all new plans:

  • Single source of truth (SSOT) — Gaining unlimited users is a unique element that is not offered in any other PPM solution and is meant to support getting everyone in your organization onboard Proggio as your single source of truth, seamlessly.
  • Company-wide user adoption can oftentimes cause friction, but Proggio makes adoption feel second-nature with their customized and personalized tools and views that support the goals of every role.
  • Buy-in with other stakeholders is easy. Within a matter of weeks, you can have the entire organization onboarded and contributing to the project portfolio data set. In other words, all of the data regarding your project portfolio will be accessible and shared within one platform, saving you valuable time and grants you a good night’s sleep.
  • External teams and vendors are included so that their data does not get siloed, as well.

 Reason #3: Automatic alerts and notifications in real-time

With Proggio’s auto-generated Project Health Indicator, Alerts, and Notifications everyone will always be able to make the right choices at the right time.

Proggio auto-generates alerts and notifications when changes and updates take place in your project portfolio that enables you to remain focused on the important matters at the right time. Here are some examples:

  • Auto-generated Project Health Indicator displaying within your project portfolio view gives you the ability to instantly know where your attention is needed. With one click on a project that seems to indicate “poor health,” a split-screen will appear below displaying the detailed activities on the collaborative timeline.
  • Delayed activities indicators will identify issues to be dealt with in order to stay on time.
  • Push notifications to all relevant stakeholders whenever there is an update or urgent matter, keeping you always well informed for decisive decisions.
  • In-app messaging –If there is a bottleneck, finding the issues and dependencies are a click away, and you are able to send an in-app message, which will also send an email, to the relevant stakeholder to learn more. No need to waste time writing an email trying to describe the problem once you figure out who is responsible.

Reason #4: Proggio enables you to align your PPM strategic goals with your operational goals

When you have clarity and transparency of your project portfolio, it is inevitable that you will have better control, focus, and a higher chance of alignment of your PPM strategic goals with your operational goals. In addition, you heighten your ability to align your project portfolio towards your desired ROI. In Proggio, it is easy to duplicate your successful project portfolio and you can scale your successful actions every time:

Reason #5: Enable Project Lifecycle Management in one platform

Build your project’s lifecycle from inception to completion in one platform.

Proggio understands that to get a product complete, it takes more than just execution–the steps that come before and after.

  • Lifecycle built mechanism– define your own lifecycle steps where each step can involve different roles and approval steps in order to get the project from inception to completion in one platform.

Summary:

In conclusion, Proggio is the ultimate enterprise project portfolio management solution that provides project portfolio clarity in an instant. Proggio serves as a cloud single source of truth and makes it easy to stay in control and align your entire organization towards your strategic goals.

Start your free trial with unlimited users at Proggio.com or schedule a quick demo with their solutions manager.

5 Reasons why you should use Portfoleon to manage your project portfolio

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles.

In my next installment of this “5 Reasons Why…” series on project management related software and services, I want to consider 5 reasons why you should consider Portfoleon to manage your projects and portfolio of projects. I personally had not heard of Portfoleon before, but was delightfully overwhelmed with the power and visibility this tool gives to the project leaders when presenting projects for planning and alignment with organizational goals. The key to getting buy-in from senior management is to demonstrate feasibility, efficiency, and relevance of your plans with these projects and how they align to the strategic company goals. Portfoleon does just that. Let’s consider…

Get a bird’s eye view of the project portfolio

In managing your project portfolio Portfoleon puts emphasis on visualization. Make every conversation you have with your stakeholders productive by instantly pulling the right data from a single source of truth and visualizing it in a way that enables your team to make decisions.

With Portfoleon’s powerful visualization capabilities you can make kanban boards, strategic timelines, spreadsheets, pivot tables, and charts to highlight different aspects and interact with your portfolio. Planning resource demand and supply in broad strokes will enable you to quickly find and address resource gaps.

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Collaborate and involve

You will get better results and improve buy-in when your stakeholders are actively involved in the portfolio management process. Gone are the days when a manager would work on the project plans on their own.

With Portfoleon you can involve others into the process, test assumptions, prepare plan changes, and finally roll the updated plans out to the whole organization.

With a draft-publish-rollback system, your team members will be able to confidently perform experiments and make changes knowing that they will not interfere with the work of others.

Customize to your specific needs

Define your own corporate terminology and data structure with custom item types, fields, forms, and automation rules.

All the custom items and fields are available everywhere – in the spreadsheets, kanban and timeline cards, pivot tables, integration API, and more.

Integrate into your IT landscape

Portfoleon is made to integrate into your IT landscape – securely and efficiently. Use the single sign-on integration to authenticate your users, use the native integration with Jira, or integrate with anything using the integration API or a no-code Zapier connector.

Get quick wins even with the most difficult portfolio

There are many great software systems out there that provide complex portfolio management capabilities, but ask you to go through a long preparation process before you can get started. Often the maintenance effort or barriers to entry become too high and the teams choose to proceed with the old ways.

Portfoleon is designed to help you to start small. With as little as a just list of projects names and two key dates Portfoleon can already provide you with a lot of value. Add more data points gradually to improve your portfolio management system. With every small step involve more stakeholders, have more productive conversations, and get a better outcome.

Start now

Make your project portfolio planning simple, visual, and lightweight in Portfoleon. Get started now with their free plan.

5 Reasons Why Xebrio Can Uniquely Take Your Project from Requirements to Deployment

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles.

My next instalment in my “5 Reasons Why…” series will look at Xebrio’s project management too. This offering is a software tool that will help you fulfil your story from Requirements to Deployment. Xebrio is an ecosystem for tracking projects starting from requirements to releases, all under one roof. Xebrio helps teams achieve maximum productivity by enabling precise and comprehensive requirement analysis and tracking, milestone tracking, hassle-free collaboration and task assignment, issue tracking, and much more, ensuring that your team never misses a deadline and works efficiently. It offers you the flexibility that your team needs without making following up on tasks harder than the tasks themselves. Here are my 5 Reasons Why you should check out Xebrio…

Manage Requirements with Stakeholder involvement

Xebrio’s requirements management suite differentiates it from other project management tools. Xebrio’s makers have understood that it is vital to start a project correctly with careful and efficient requirements management to be able to end it successfully. Xebrio helps teams leverage stakeholder collaboration and input for productive and efficient requirements management. So, it allows external stakeholder collaboration & review and connects requirements to all the ever-important primary functions of project management.

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Link Test Cases to Requirements 

The second-best thing (after the requirements management suite) in Xebrio has to be its test case management tool. This is one of the rare tools that offer support for requirements management as well as test case management. Xebrio is jam-packed with features that make test engineering a breeze. It has a lucid QA dashboard that enables a holistic view of all test engineering activities, which allows teams to gain in-depth data-driven insights into the project’s testing efforts.

Customizable Task Management

Xebrio’s task management suite is a virtual, improved to-do list and makes completing tasks a pleasure. Xebrio helps teams to record tasks and sub-tasks extensively. You can easily delegate tasks to individuals and teams and invite teammates to collaborate or review & share feedback on tasks in real-time. You can make tasks visible to external stakeholders or work on certain tasks together with just the flick of a button. Xebrio also allows the sharing of files and resources. No more attachments getting bungled or lost in emails!

Efficient Milestone Tracking

Xebrio allows milestone-oriented delivery — the delivery of the project in chunks of tasks. Milestones can act as check posts for project’s progress, such as the project kickoff dates, the submission of an important deliverable, or the completion of a bunch of similar small tasks grouped together that make up a bigger phase of a project. You can schedule and track milestones and keep an eye on project progress. You can analyze your project’s progress with Xebrio’s milestone tracking suite in one glance since milestone stats and data-driven insights are represented visually. Reporting against milestones is very straightforward and helps to check how much of a project is completed, and what is outstanding. You can then relay this progress to your stakeholders and clients more effectively.

Effortless Team Communication and Collaboration

Understanding the significance of proper communication and seamless collaboration between geographically dispersed teams, Xebrio offers a variety of features for excellent real-time communication. With their ‘Discussions’ feature, you can access a virtual idea board where brainstorming sessions can take place as organically as they would in person, but with the added benefit of structure, a detailed record of every conversation, and the ability to work on ideas derived from the discussions immediately and within the same tool.

Summary – call to action

In addition to being meticulously designed to streamline and ease project functions, Xebrio makes the users’ experience more comfortable with good user-care practices and reasonable pricing points. Are you ready to try it? Either contact Xebrio for a personal tour or signup now to try it. You won’t be sorry.

When and How to Implement Managed Services in Your Organisation

Written by Francis Miers on . Posted in Articles.

What are Managed Services?

Managed services are the process of outsourcing some or all of your day-to-day IT operations to an outside provider. Most organisations do it already. If you have Office 365 or G-Suite, you have software as a service, which is a form of managed service. The days of the organisation that runs all of its IT from its own data centres, managed by a team of in-house staff, are all but over. The question of when and how to implement managed services applies better to separate services than to the whole organisation.

Do I Need to Outsource?

So, when should you outsource a service, which is an IT system used by your organisation’s staff or its customers, such as email, CRM or online services for customers? A key factor is often whether the service is specific to your organisation or not. If it is, it may well be rare or unique, perhaps the website that provides a differentiated service to your customers. Such a service may require to be managed by in-house staff trained in its particularities. If the service is more off-the-shelf, however, such as email or CRM, even if it is strategic, managing it with your in-house staff could distract them from more value-added work that only they can do. This is where it makes sense to consider managed services. Your organisation and its staff should focus on its core competencies, not on standard activities which can be done just as well by others.

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In fact, standard activities can often be done more cheaply by others.

 What are the Benefits of Using Managed Services?

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) will be able to spread the cost of the staff required to do these activities over many customers, and so can deliver the service less expensively than in-house teams at all but the largest organisations. The economies of scale can also deliver benefits in other areas. The MSP may well be better equipped to keep your organisation compliant with regulations such as GDPR, and they may provide stronger security against malware and accidental data loss. When you engage an MSP, you can negotiate contractually binding service level agreements (SLAs) with them. The SLAs provide clarity about the level of service expected, which may be better than the best efforts of an in-house team.

Other reasons to adopt Managed Services include increased efficiency – MSPs can implement best practices and industry standards, as well as help you with planning, procurement, and governance. Of course, you may be able to do this in house, but to do so as cost-effectively as an MSP requires a large scale.

An increasingly strong reason to use an MSP is that it can enhance security. You can write it into your SLAs that the MSP must keep your software updated, something which can drop down the priority list when IT is kept in house. This can affect even the largest organisations. One of our customers, a large logistics firm, suffered a major financial loss caused by malware which exploited a vulnerability in its operating systems, a loss which could have been avoided if those systems had been kept up to date.

It is important to keep the services you delegate to MSPs and those you keep in-house under review. The technology is changing rapidly, and more and more services are reaching the point at which it is better to outsource them than keep them in-house.

How to Implement Managed Services

Once you have identified a service which could probably be outsourced to an MSP, how should you go about it? Even if you have a trusted supplier in mind, it is normally worth evaluating proposals from several others, if only to keep up with current pricing, and what new services might have emerged in the market. Write up a set of requirements and send them to each prospective supplier. This, of course, is normal procurement best practice, but, aside from competitive pricing, what should one look for in an MSP?

Key Factors to Consider

A good MSP will always have strong technical skills. Ask to see whether they are accredited as a company with important software and other IT vendors. For example, if you are implementing a managed service for your Windows desktops, is the MSP accredited with Microsoft? What qualifications are held by their staff? Do they follow ITIL principles? Ask them for reviews by their customers. Unless you are looking for help with a specific technology, it is good for MSP to have broad-based technical skills, rather than skills focused on a single vendor. That way, they can better advise on procurement decisions and will be able to recommend solutions that are best for you, rather than those which fit their skill set. For example, if you host or are looking to host systems in the cloud, an MSP with experience of multicloud may be a better partner than one with experience of only one cloud provider.

Incident Management with Managed Services

Closely related to technical competence is organisational competence. A good MSP will minimise emergencies; well-maintained systems should only go wrong rarely, but if something does go wrong, how good is their incident management? What system do they use to track incidents? It should be based on a helpdesk system such as ServiceNow or Jira Service Management, but for mission-critical systems, it should include incident management such as xMatters or PagerDuty. How good is their monitoring and alerting? Important systems should be monitored, and any anomalies should be flagged as alerts. The best monitoring and alerting systems now have built-in machine learning to help interpret monitoring data from individual devices and determine whether particular readings give cause for concern and if so, provide diagnostic information.

Good technical and organisational skills in an MSP are reflected in the provider’s certification in industry standards such as ISO 27001 (information security) and ISO 27018 (cloud services security), as well as quality standards such as ISO 9001. Check which accreditations are held by your prospective MSP. ISO 27001 is particularly important if you are considering entrusting the MSP with your data. It ensures that the MSP’s own systems and processes adhere to minimum standards of security.

Organisational and technical competence must be complemented by the provider’s ability to meet your desired SLAs. If you need 24/7 support, they must be able to provide it and meet all your other requirements concerning response times, resolution times and dedicated support channels. For example, can you call them for a high-priority incident as opposed to logging a ticket?

Of course, IT moves fast, and competence with current technologies should be backed up by an ability to be aware of and adopt emerging standards and technologies. A good MSP will have a wide range of customers and partnerships and will be able to draw on its network and relationships to offer you the best of what is up and coming. At its best, this can give you a competitive edge in your business by allowing it to benefit from the latest technologies before your competitors do.

Finally, it is important that your MSP is sound financially and reputationally. Find out how long it has been in business and ask to see its recent financial information. Research any news appearance to check there is nothing untoward.

Improve your Business Strategy now

In summary, implementing managed services should be done primarily to allow your organisation to focus on what it does best. Managed services can also reduce your costs, improve security, and introduce the latest techniques to your organisation. Implement managed services on the parts of your IT which are not unique to your organisation and keep the scope of managed services under review. In choosing an MSP, evaluate several, and check their technical skills, organisation skills, standards compliance, ability to innovate and financial stability. If implemented well, managed services can improve your competitive edge and contribute to the overall success of your business. Looking for more information on Atlassian Managed Services? Read this essential guide here at Automation Consultants.

5 reasons why Runn is the best resource management tool for IT teams

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles.

In this installment of “5 reasons Why…” I’m presenting one of the newest tools in the resource management space – Runn. Since 2018, Runn has made a name for itself, now being used by software teams around the globe. Here’s my 5 reasons why you should try out Runn for your professional services team…

1. High-level resource and capacity planning

Runn takes a high-level approach to planning – don’t spend more time planning than executing! Runn is a beautifully dynamic tool that showcases the workload for your projects and people at a glance.

Get a bird’s eye view of your project and resourcing plans and easily spot who is over and underutilized. See the impact of changes at a business level, and drill into specific roles, teams, and groups of people–right from the planning interface. You can also see how workload is looking in the short and long term, and whether you have the capacity to deliver potential, tentative projects.

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2. Quick and easy resource scheduling and project planning

Planning in Runn is simple and intuitive. Simply drag-and-drop time allocations and phases to create them, and right-click to edit. Choose from a monthly, quarterly and half-yearly view to create and view your plans in advance. You can even keep your project budget in mind when planning with the live budget tracker. This lets you see how much an allocation of time is going to cost to your project as you draw them in the planner.

Runn has a unique workflow for placeholder allocations – the work that isn’t yet assigned to someone. Fully plan your projects even if you don’t yet have someone with the right skills at the right time. You can transfer the work to an actual person later down the line.

3. Compare your plans with reality

Runn’s built-in timesheets are some of the simplest ones out there. Only manually enter time if what you worked differs from what was scheduled. Or go one step further and autofill your timesheets with Runn’s Time Tracker Chrome extension as your team fills them in.

Pull valuable insights including the variance of scheduled versus actual time worked and staff productivity, so that you can build better plans for future projects.

If you prefer to use your own timesheet or time tracker tool, Runn has native integrations with Clockify, WorkflowMax and Harvest. You can also build your own integration with your preferred tool using Runn’s API.

4. Track, measure, and adjust your plans

Runn is built with project managers in mind. With a variety of project tracking and forecasting insights, know how your projects are progressing against the budget and plan. Each project has a dashboard with key performance metrics depending on the project type (time and materials, fixed price or internal project are all supported).

See cost, revenue, and profitability forecasts for an in-depth look at the health of your projects and to be aware of potential challenges before they come issues.

5. Powerful business intelligence and reporting

Runn provides visibility over the financial health of the business. Filter the reports and charts by a number of fields including role, team, tag and client to view important data and KPIs for each group. Adjust the date range of your reports and view the data by week, month or quarter. See how tentative projects will impact your numbers, and determine whether you should pursue them.

You can also export all reports to CSV files to use in your own reporting.

Ready to try it?

Get more information about Runn and its features, and then try it out with a 14-day free trial.