Previously I touched on EPM Live as a whole and their leadership in development and deployment of enterprise Sharepoint Project and Work Management solutions.  Their key product offerings are:  ProjectEngine, WorkEngine, and PortfolioEngine. 

In this installment, I would like to address the ProjectEngine offering with our readers. First, ProjectEngine is all about collaboration.  The ProjectEngine product is a simple, online project management tool that makes working together on projects, easy. What do you normally look for in a project collaboration tool?  A central repository that is easily accessible to your project team?  A place where your team can track their projects, revise task assignments and progress, and share documents?  A place where project communication flows seamlessly with other tasks on the project and is efficient and effective, and not a cumbersome tool forced on the project masses because the company ‘invested’ in it? 

Well, ProjectEngine is all of those things and more.  As I took a turn using ProjectEngine, I found it to be a great balance of scheduling options, project management best practices, collaboration tools and reporting options.  It is powerful, yet simple to use.  Of course, it is Microsoft Sharepoint-based as previously mentioned, and it seamlessly with other business productivity tools such as Microsoft Project, Outlook and Excel.

For more information on EPM Live and ProjectEngine, check out the EPM Live site or signup for a 30-day trial on one or more of their enterprise solutions.

By: John Kendrick

Somebody once told me that American cars are great – they do everything but run! Maybe things aren’t quite that bad anymore, but there is a lot of truth in that statement. The domestic auto industry failed for a number of reasons but the main one was that American automobiles didn’t reliably get people from point A to point B. At the end of the day it didn’t matter how cleverly designed the world-class advertising programs were, or how innovative the financing became, if the car couldn’t reliability transport a passenger from point  A to point B then want good was it? Clearly the American auto industry missed the most critical opportunity and then they paid for it dearly.

In contrast, Japanese auto manufacturers recognized that reliable transportation was the most critical customer opportunity. Japanese auto manufacturers relentlessly studied their designs, simplified systems, and made sure that their cars were able to provide the greatest value for each customer dollar. The Japanese companies didn’t perfect their designs overnight, but they found a way to manage product defects in the field many times without the customer ever knowing that something was being repaired. This is an example of how the Japanese manufacturers anticipated their customers’ potential needs to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Programs are designed to attract new customers, increase customer loyalty, and reclaim lost customers. A well designed CRM program focuses on providing the customer exactly what the customer wants, when the customer wants it, at the location of the customer’s choice, and for a price that the customer wants to pay. This goal is accomplished by aligning an organization’s internal and external business processes with the needs of the customer. But many firms don’t accurately identify what is most important to a customer. Frequently, management defines what is most important to their customer. . Unfortunately, the management’s list and the customer’s actual desires are quite different. Therefore, an effective CRM program must have a solid understanding of what is most important to the customer.

How is this accomplished? A simple approach to creating a well designed CRM program is implemented in a phased approach in order to insure the most complete and accurate measurements of customer perception. The three critical states of implementation are: 

• (Stage I) Determining Critical Issues - Begin by determining critical issues of customers and competitors' customers. A topical guide is used at each interview to assure consistency in the topics covered. The information obtained during this phase provides the necessary data to develop the survey used in Stage II. 
  
• (Stage II) Prioritizing Issues/Attributes - This phase enables an organization to prioritize issues and attributes found during the initial phase. All customers are surveyed. The results highlight strengthens and weaknesses, identify factors that contribute to the customer's perceptions of quality, measure customer priorities, determine perceived performance levels including competitors and provide a baseline measurement (benchmark) for future comparisons.
  
• (Stage III) Ongoing Measurement - This process continually provides an organization with ongoing measurement in two areas - quantitative surveys, and qualitative interviews. The customer feedback is used to identify opportunities in the product design, product performance, and the effectiveness of the business strategy. 

A traditional approach to establish the Key Drivers of Customer Satisfaction, those attributes that effect the overall satisfaction the most, occurs by combining the market performance and the importance, as determined by the customers of the organization. When these composite scores are multiplied and sorted in descending order, they provide a ranking of the attributes in terms of their association with overall customer satisfaction. The ranked list gives the organization the necessary information where to prioritize improvement efforts.

Consider the example of a telecommunications equipment supplier. In the first stage, the customers determined that the following list represented the critical issues: 

1. Price
   
2. Reliability
   
3. Ease of Use
   
4. Customer Service Expertise 
   
5. Availability
   
6. Maintainability
   
7. Operating Cost
   

In the second stage, these five critical issues were identified as the key drivers of customer satisfaction. The  prioritized listing of the key drivers and the relative weight of each is shown below :

1. Availability (35%)
   
2. Price (25%)
   
3. Customer Service Expertise (20%)
   
4. Ease of Use (20%)
   

In the third stage the overall customer satisfaction is periodically measured as a function of these four key drivers and the business processes are managed and optimized based on customer feedback. This is where the classic closed loop process performs – the customer feedback is examined, assessed against what is most important to the customer, and then this becomes the basis for corrective action plans. The corrective action plans focus on process optimization and are frequently identified as lean, six sigma, or Kaizen initiatives. After corrective actions are implemented, the results are assessed, the efforts tweaked and tuned, and the customer satisfaction measured. The process is sustainable.

Effective CRM programs don’t have to be rocket science. They do have to have a simple and practical approach that will identify what the customer needs, and then they need to have a plan on how the When they successfully identify the correct attributes of customer satisfaction and the relative importance of each attribute then they will understand their customers better than the customer’s understand themselves – and those firms that have done this well will tell you that this is something that you can take to the bank! 

I’ve already talked to you about Comindware’s ElasticData and the flexibility it brings to the workflow management process.  ConnectStep is another unique Comindware feature that connects the steps in a collaborative workflow process and automatically generates next-step tasks so you can work more efficiently.

With ConnectStep, next-step workflow tasks can actually be automatically generated for you and assigned as work items.  This can be done as these work items are created and as they progress from one step to the next according to user-defined workflow processes. By automating these workflow processes and task generation, team members can focus on their specific tasks while Comindware efficiently moves things along.  Yes, it’s that easy.

You may ask – just as I did – how is this accomplished?  ConnectStep makes it possible to connect Comindware Tracker and Comindware Task Management thus providing the user with a complete system issue tracking + task management.  Most workflow automation and issue tracking systems lack integrated task management capabilities. Without the ability to generate next-step tasks, users have to push things along manually to the next person via email or issues just get passed from person separate from all their other work tasks.  In these cases, often productivity suffers and some tasks almost always fall through the cracks.

By contrast, Comindware makes it easy to define and automate workflow processes and connect these with next-step tasks to better orchestrate collaborative work efforts. By organizing and automating work efforts into tasks, each person’s tasks and due dates are clear and they can manage these auto-generated tasks along with their other tasks.

ConnectStep is just one key feature of the Comindware suite of products. Contact Comindware for more info or you can elect to try it for 30 days.

There is no question that issue management is a critical process for project management and for any organization, for that matter.  And, of course, doing it right is just as important.  After all, if it doesn’t serve your needs, doesn’t provide meaningful reporting, and doesn’t all for the proper identification, oversight and ongoing management of issues then it isn’t going to provide much value to your organization and it won’t get used.

You could plan forever

So should we take months designing the right issue management platform to make sure it’s right the first time and usable forever?  No….absolutely not.  It’s like couples who decide to wait till they have enough money to start a family, or a big enough house or just the right jobs.  Their youth passes them by and they end up with no children at all, no family and no grandchildren and so on.  And they get bored looking at each other 20 years later. 

Don’t wait for perfection

They key is, you have to start somewhere.  No one gets it right the first time.  Projects ‘fail’ more than 50% of the time, but that doesn’t mean a usable solution hasn’t been implemented.  It means they went over budget, or over the timeframe for implementation, or something was out of whack at deployment that was probably fixed later.  A majority of projects aren’t a complete success at deployment…but most get the job done and with some post deployment tweaking they are successful or at least basically delivered the anticipated outcome.

The same is true for an issue management platform.  Issues need tracked…period.  It’s imperative that you don’t miss critical windows of issue management and issue tracking on key projects just because you’re trying to build or select the perfect tracking system.  The key is to hold some planning meetings to identify what the major issue elements are that need to be tracked and reported on for your organization and develop or buy something that will meet those requirements – at least as much as possible.  You can tweak it later because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get it completely right the first time.  Despite what my first manager told me about his first software application, no code was ever written error-free the first time, no project was implemented issue-free from beginning to end, and no tracking platform has ever been developed that will do everything you need it to do right out of the gate.  Design it to capture what you think you need today and in the near future, and plan to revisit those needs along the way.  Assume that it will need to grow and flex with your organization’s needs.  Don’t wait to start with perfection – or you will never get started and you’ll miss tracking critical issues on your early projects.

For issue management and project tracking on your ongoing engagements, check out Gemini.  Gemini uses understandable and consistent industry-specific terminology to facilitate the most collaborative situation possible for everyone involved on the project.  Gemini can meet all of your task management needs for your organization.

When you’re thinking project management practices, what comes to mind?  Are these things you do when the CEO is watching?  Things you do if you’re part of a project management office (PMO)?  Things you only do if you’re running a $1+ million engagement? 

I hope not…but sadly it is an easy trap to fit in to.  When you’re running a two-month, $10,000 project, you have to admit that it’s hard to get into the details of applying best practices to your project...especially if you have four or five other projects happening at the same time.  Let’s say, you’re running a large JD Edwards ERP solution implementation with significant executive management buy-in and oversight at the same time you’re leading an effort to upgrade the website of an internal business unit in your organization.  Which one gets the most attention?  Which one might fall through the cracks?  Yes, the popular thought would be to apply best practices to the large project and do as little as possible for the internal customer, right? 

Well, in a true best practices organization it really can’t work that way…and it shouldn’t.  Not if you’re really trying to build a consistent PM methodology and have repeatable practices and processes that lead to ongoing success.  You can make those processes scalable – certainly.  You don’t have to create a 30-page communication plan for a $10,000 project…2-3 pages will probably do it.  But still do it.  So, even for the small stuff, be sure to:

Kick the project off right.  No matter how big or small the project, conduct a formal kickoff session, even if it’s a short one for those extremely small projects.  Don’t blow this off – it’s a bad way to start any project off.  Start off doing it right and be thorough about it – it sets a nice example for the project team because I’m sure you want them operating at the top of their game for every size project, right?

Conduct weekly status meetings.  Always product a weekly status report and revised project schedule and always…always conduct a weekly status call or meeting with the customer.  It doesn’t matter if it’s just a five-minute phone call some weeks, but be sure to do it. The minute you start letting yourself and others skip it or cancel it, is the minute the project may start to slip away.  And I don’t care how small the project may be, the customer can still get frustrated.

Keep the customer engaged.  Keep tasks assigned to the customer throughout the engagement even if it’s a small project and they seem like meaningless or ‘filler’ tasks.  Keeping things assigned to them forces them to report on them and forces their attendance on a weekly status call.  Trust me, this one is important.

Forecast and reforecast dollars and resources.  Finally, don’t forget to review the resource usage and upcoming needs weekly as well as the budget actuals and forecast.  And don't forget that performance appraisal best practices from Halogen may be part of the project process - be sure to also plan for those sometimes necessary and required performance appraisal efforts as well.  And, of course, it’s easy to fix and get back on track if you stray a little as long as you’re watching it weekly.  Don’t think that just because the budget is very small that it’s ok to just let it go.  It’s not.  If you can keep a project within budget by watching resource usage and dollars expended, then do so…it means the difference between project success and project failure.

Privilege management is often at the very core of IT security for most companies and also a major stress point for most IT directors and CIOs.  It doesn’t come easy, and if it’s not carried out right…or carefully…major security breaches or unintentional security incidences can result.

Indeed, careful control of administrator rights as well is at the very foundation of IT security and when users have widespread administrator rights, this opens the network to a variety of security risks.  This can be easily mitigated because users do not need to have full administrator rights to accomplish daily tasks, and privileged users should have restricted access to tasks related to their role/responsibilities only.  What an IT group needs is an product that can control end user and privileged user rights for applications and systems which require elevated permissions.  Viewfinity can do just that.  Let’s examine further…

The Viewfinity Privilege Management Suite

Viewfinity Privilege Management offers granular-level control for managing least privilege environments by providing elevation of privileges for applications and to reduce and control permissions for privileged users. Privilege control for data extends privilege management policies to control permissions by elevating or reducing privileges and permissions on folders, files and shares.

The Viewfinity Privilege Management Suite provides regulation of administrator rights via these critical features:   

• Application Blocking/Whitelisting
• Privilege elevation, including self-elevation or workflow approval
• Automated policy creation, management and intelligent policy aggregation
• Automated analysis to determine user needs and prepare the environment
• Readiness indicator determines optimal point to remove administrator rights
• Compliance, Audit trail, policy validation reporting and privileged account activity auditing
• Windows UAC Management and UAC Auditing Reports
• Control permissions for data by elevating or reducing privileges on folders, files & shares
• Mobile Workforce Support

Interested in trying it out?  Signup here for an evaluation trial, go here for a demo, or contact Viewfinity for more information.

Comindware is a leader in workflow and task management software.  The real breakthrough – the real difference maker for Comindware – is in the unprecedented flexibility and usability that it brings to an organization. Many products like Comindware are based on relational databases.  Comindware, however, bases theirs on something different – something they call ElasticData.  ElasticData is ultra-flexible and gives your organization and workgroups unmatched flexibility for automating and managing workflow processes for just about any workgroup activity.  This can include tasks, help desk tickets, software bugs, requests, claims, documents, issues and, well…just about anything else you can think of.

With ElasticData, you can start with minimal formalization of workflow processes and then modify them later on-the-fly. Usually you end up being forced to modify your needs to fit the software.  With ElasticData, that is no longer the case – this workflow process management software adapts so easily to your evolving needs and flexes to how you need it to work in your organization.

ElasticData is just one key feature of the Comindware product experience.  I’ve been amazed with the Comindware product and the functionality it brings to the workflow and task management marketplace.  Contact Comindware for more info or you can elect to try it for 30 days.

EPM Live is a global leader in the development and deployment of enterprise Sharepoint Project and Work Management solutions.  I personally had no knowledge of their offerings until I connected with them through social media and decided to investigate their different products.  What I learned through discussions with a few key EPM Live resources and the information they provided is that they have, in fact, worked with thousands of organizations deploying customized project management and work management solutions in the enterprise. 

Built seamlessly within one of the fastest growing enterprise tools on the market – Microsoft Sharepoint – EPM Live leverages tools you likely already know or are familiar with in order to enhance your team’s collaboration experience.  Because project teams in different organizations – or even in different parts of the same organization – work differently, EPM Live offers the flexibility to incorporate different workflows and match up well with the chosen processes and methodologies within the specific work units of an organization.

EPM Live is, in fact, a full-featured product offering three editions: ProjectEngine, WorkEngine, and PortfolioEngine.  The target audience, or user-base, for each is probably evident just by their names and we’ll be examining each of these as well as more details on the EPM Live solutions and capabilities as a whole in upcoming overviews. 

For more information on EPM Live, check out their site or signup for a 30-day trial on one or more of their enterprise solutions.

Think workflow management?  What comes to mind?  Wikipedia defines a workflow management system as this…

“A workflow management system is a computer system that manages and defines a series of tasks within an organization to produce a final outcome or outcomes. Workflow management systems allow the user to define different workflows for different types of jobs or processes.”

Blah, blah, blah.  Sounds mundane and it is.  Let’s consider what we should be able to expect now, in 2012, from workflow management software.  It should be web-based. It should be easy to use.  It should be full-featured, with detailed reporting capabilities.  It should be able to track and manage issues on your projects.  It should allow for team collaboration.  It should have integrated task management to keep tabs on the efforts going on within your project and organization.  In my opinion, it should be something like Comindware Tracker. 

Consider this…

Comindware Tracker is a cutting edge workflow management and issue tracking system that integrates task management and provides the collaboration features that managers and project managers need on detailed work engagements.  Does it work?  Yes.  I downloaded the free trial and tested it out on a recent consulting engagement for a remote client of mine.  I was able to track issues efficiently and smoothy, I was able to assign and monitor tasks and progress and my team was able to easily collaborate with me and with each other even though we were geographically dispersed across the US.  Through the collaborations features – which we found especially useful - we were able to easily share files and conduct discussions thus speeding decision-making efforts, deliverable reviews and approval efforts, and the review and proactive efforts on the ongoing issues on the project.

I highly recommend Comindware, but if you’re not convinced, try it for 30 days.

Social media is out there and it isn’t going away.  It’s not just Facebook either.  I’m not going to even mention Myspace….sorry Justin Timberlake…it’s not relevant anymore and never will be again.  What about Twitter?  What about LinkedIn? 

Facebook

Facebook is for friends and family.  It can be about business – but not so much in corporate environments…except possibly for closed groups allowing collaboration among team members.  And yes, it’s for Red Lobster reaching out to you with couplons for your next meal.  But is really a business tool?  As a collaboration/discussion tool, it can bel.  In those instances I see it as highly useful and I’ve used it successfully on a few projects and consulting engagements with team members.

Twitter

Is Twitter a proper social media tool for businesses?  Definitely.  It’s quick, efficient, and can definitely be far reaching.  Great promotional capability.  It works like people think these days…quick snippets of information – or misinformation – but quick.  Becasuse we want it real-time and we don’t want to much of it.  Say…140 characters…and then our attention span is gone…we’ve moved on to something else.  It has a more uninhibitated,anonymous, and sassy aspect to it than Facebook can ever have.  Meaning it’s more of a cross-over.  Think country meets rock.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn for business.  Absolutely.  Though more for networking, sharing ideas, looking for work or gigs or whatever.  And promoting your own skills.  “Has anyone else managed to get ‘x’ to work with ‘y’?”  Post something like that in the right group on LinkedIn and you’ll get lots of responses and generate some great discussions.

Now, does your small to medium sized business need a social media presence?  Should you be promoting yourself through social media?  Do you need any of these tools?  Yes, you actually do - and all of them.  If you’re not in the game now, you’re already behind.  And if you’re lingering around with 40 Twitter followers and posting tidbits here and there you are wasting your time.

The numbers

A recent survey reported in InformationWeek had some eye-opening results.  While two-thirds of the organizations surveyed had a Facebook presence, only 17% had a formal process for responding to customer complaints through Facebook.  Only 19% have had an external presence on Facebook for more than two years.  24% of consumers surveyed stated that they were more likely to do business with a company they can interact with through a social media tool.  25% stated that social media comments influenced their opinions about companies and brands.

The real bottom line here is this….many organizations don’t know what to do with social media or how much to spend on it.  And they’re probably a long way away from understanding the ROI of dollars spent on social media.  But you have to spend it.  Period. If you aren’t doing it now or very, very soon….you are definitely losing ground to your competitors and with your current and potential customers.  It’s 2012….and social media is the new frontier.  It’s real-time.  It’s what every consumer, business professional and company executive uses in some way, shape, or form to gather information, form opinions, and yes – make some buying decisions.

I’ve realized this…partly on my own, partly from reading articles like the one in InformationWeek and partly because I have clients who realized it and came to me for help.  I’m not saying I can solve all of your problems.  I certainly can’t sell your product for you.  But I can use content mixed with social media promotion to increase your traffic – increase the number of potential buyers to your software, training and professional services so that you can start seeing some ROI.

I have many clients who ‘get it.’  They understand that they must reach potential customers and increase traffic in order to obtain and sustain long-term growth in their challenging marketplace.  And then I sometimes run into those potential clients who simply don’t get it – like two I’ve had just this week.  They are afraid to spend money without proof that their sales will increase.  Newsflash: I can’t sell your product for you!  If someone downloads your free trial and doesn’t like your product, that’s not my fault…that’s yours because your product doesn’t match up well with the customer’s needs or against your competition apparently.  I can’t fix that – unless you bring me in to consult on your product’s capabilities…and that’s a different type of consulting relationship altogether.  But I can get the traffic to you.  I can lead the horse to the water…and I can get that horse to your webinar, or to your website, or get them to download your free trial of your software.  The final sale is up to you.

If you’re interested in discussing how I can use my industry expertise, marketing creativity, and entrepreneurial flair to help your organization the way I’m currently helping dozens of others, contact me at brad@bradegeland.com or visit my website at www.bradegeland.com and fill out the contact form.  Or call me directly.  Leave a message – I’m here to help you.  I require no long-term commitment.  If you’re not happy after a month of working together, we simply quit.  But I promise I’ll do everything I can to retain your business first and tweak services so you do get the results you need.

Let’s talk.