Mike Taylor, President of Innovative-e, and Scott Chapman, President of Project Hosts, presented a 1-hour webinar on Project Management On Your Terms (PMOYT) for the Public Sector, a complete public sector solution created specifically for agencies that are struggling with managing projects effectively. Our approach will illustrate how to accelerate agility, adoption and control with a three-step approach that will help customers:
Increase business agility
Shorten deployment times
Lower security and downtime risks
Lower operational and support costs
15. U.S. Government Client Examples
“Project Hosts is the first Cloud Service Provider to have demonstrated compliance
with the rev4 FedRAMP baseline.” Matt Goodrich, FedRAMP Director at GSA (1/22/15)
Scott Chapman is the CEO and co-founder of Project Hosts, the industry leader in hosting dedicated clouds for Microsoft project server and SharePoint solutions. Scott has been involved with hosting Microsoft applications and cloud solutions since 1999, and more recently led the company’s effort to obtain FedRAMP SaaS compliance for Project Server and SharePoint.
Mike Taylor is the CEO and president of Innovative-e, a leader in providing Project and Project Management business solutions. Mike has helped organizations deliver solutions built on Microsoft technologies since the mid 1990s, and is heading up the company’s refinement of industry solutions for Project Server and SharePoint. we are a Microsoft Gold solutions provider that helps businesses and organizations better manage their everyday projects and information.
Mike is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with more than 20 years of IT experience.
Studies show that have most knowledge work is project related. It’s not just your classic PMS who are managing projects. The value of implementing robust project management systems are well documented. Not going to spout a lot of analyst statistics…
This is REAL – Examples: A major government organization found a management overhead spend of $1M 30% into the project whereas it should be $1M for the whole project. Identifying this early helped mitigate hundreds of thousands in additional spend.
A Healthcare provider found that some large portfolios were running over budget and schedule by hundreds of percentage points. Better portfolio management and reporting will help identify risks and conflicts up front before overcommitting resources.
Better decisions – being proactive vs reactive
Value realization
PMIS technologies have existed for 20 plus years, but what is the state of PM today?
Typically only the highest maturity organizations (engineering, product development, etc.) have good process and project management systems. HOWEVER, more and more departments and workgroups are being asked to provide detailed reporting and analytics. These folks are often left on their own to find and implement solutions…
The results are that even today, the most common tools for project management are email and collaboration tools (onedrive, dropbox, sharepoint, etc. for collaboration and excel, word, powerpoint, and project desktop for reporting and analytics.
Leave data fragmented and stale. Creates tremendous amount of manual work.
What you want vs what your boss wants
Top Down
Visibility (Dashboards & Reporting)
Accountability & Control
Speed and agility
ROI
Bottom up
Adoption (least impact on users)
Project Control
Actionable information
How many have heard all that before? Are you thinking, yeah, but it’s too complicated!
Over the years, we’ve found that the complexity of the software and processes will lead organizations to avoid using them.
Do nothing or use Ad Hoc processes and tools is an acceptable strategy for many. However, when it too much manual time is spent on information management that yields inconsistent or incorrect results. If this is the case AND there the resources involved (people, money, materials) are significant, the something must be done…
Stop gap or incomplete tools only make it worse. We have been drawn into helping clients try to use SharePoint, 3rd Party PM tools, Cloud PM tools, etc. only to find that customers keep driving more and more development to fill gaps in these. This leads to higher costs for development and support including upgrades over time.
Is the system ready to deliver value immediately on go live? In other words, does it have pre-configured governance, templates, artifacts, technology, reports, processes? Can it be changed quickly?
Can it be deployed quickly – as it days or a few weeks instead of months?
Does it support employ security best practices and frameworks? Does it provide for more uptime and fewer maintenance outages?
Is the overall cost structure more flexible and lower to maintain?
Quick intro of this approach…
In the past, these solutions were months or years to get infrastructure up and running….
Can be available in one day for simplistic Microsoft Project Online solutions. More robust solutions can be deployed in days or weeks.
Lower cost to deploy – we’ve seen costs for the environment AND effort to develop (internal or external resources) go down
Vastly better reliability than on premise. We’ve been delivering cloud/hosted solutions through partners for 9 years. Could solutions downtime is probably 90% less than on prem.
Hand off to Mike
Environment users are familiar. This solution was modeled from the CIO dashboard – ITDashboard.gov except this version provides actual project data rather than spreadsheet or xml loads.
Also perserves some of the key processes already in place such as Project Managers doing updates rather than forcing users into that level of data management on day one.
Allows for KPIs to be calculated or self attested.
Provides some artifacts and collaboration methods familiar to the users.
Transition back to Mike
In this solution, we focused on a few key dimensions of project management – Schedule, Cost, and Risk
Moved their self assessed maturity from 1.3 to 2.8 representing estimated annual savings of $1.9M
This ‘tilted egg’ shows how often times the People, Processes, and Tools/Technology are not in sync – this is a core problem for PM solutions
PMOYT attacks this head on by implementing solutions built around common PM/business patterns and then rapidly bringing people and processes in alignment thus ‘righting’ the egg.
People: Competencies, Specializations
Processes: Business Process Modeling/Automation
(Demand Mgmt, Agile, Six Sigma)
Tools:
Implementation
Support
Enhancements
Upgrades
Can be deployed quickly - days or a few weeks instead of months
Ready deliver value immediately with pre-configured governance, templates, artifacts, technology, reports, processes. Easily changed…
Builds on processes already in place – i.e. if PMs manage task updates, perhaps that stays the same initially.
Solves immediate needs to get Wins - (key reports, dashboards) without adding too much overhead to Project Managers and Team Members.
The PMIS is an Application. Application management processes and practices are in place to keep it going and growing over time.
Adoption resources and processes are in place (job aids, how to artifacts (videos, FAQs, etc.), consultative support framework established (power users, and SMEs)