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What is the only application that all professionals in the world use?

Exactly. It is the email. For years professionals around the world complained about how uncomfortable it can be if it is used as a documentation repository and even claimed that emails are "dead". Even so, it is very clear that mail is still unrivaled in the day to day of any office.

Of course, at ITM Platform we do not want to help your inboxes become messy garbage dumps.

No more unwanted notifications

The problem with email in B2B environments is not so much the channel, but the frequency. Usually, most applications send notifications automatically and, unless they are very well designed, their volume increases rapidly and end up being ignored.

With Teambot the opposite occurs: it is an ally of our users because it only sends a notification when it is requested.

The functioning is very simple:

I write an email to Teambot
I include my request for information on the message subject
Teambot reads mu subject and my email address
Teambot sends me an email with the requested information

This whole process can last less than 6 seconds. And you do not even need to log into ITM Platform. This is the reason why all our customers are adding Teambot to their list of regular contacts.

Semantic searches from the subject

The truly elegant thing about Teambot is that it offers precise and complex information from an absolutely minimalist user interface. We have decided to follow one of the best design maxims: less is more.

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In order to provide users with the highest advantages, we have transformed the email into a search engine... applied to all ITM Platform projects and tasks.

The search engine uses only the metadata fields. Specifically, two fields:

The addressee, who is always teambot@itmplatform.io
The subject, where the user indicated the information they are looking for.

Benefits of Teambot

As a Team Member, you can organize your day without logging into ITM Platform

By simply sending an email to Teambot with the subject “today”, you will receive all the tasks to which you are assigned and all the projects in which you participate.

From there, you can request more details with a simple click.

As a project manager, you can swiftly check the status of critical tasks

Do you have doubts about the status of a task? Ask Teambot and you will find out immediately.

As a PMO administrator, you can quickly check the status of any project

With the access privileges of a Full Access license, PMO managers can use Teambot to gather the most important information about the status of a project. In order to do this, they just have to send an email to Teambot with the name of the project (or a part of it) in the mail subject. If there is more than one option, Teambot will send a clarification email.

With Teambot you can work offline

From now on, users who are in geographical environments with connectivity problems can continue working while they are offline, obtaining the detailed information they need. With Teambot, the email server will send and receive emails even in locations with very low connectivity; and once the information is received, it will be available anywhere in offline mode.

With Teambot you can respond to your boss with precision

Another useful feature is the simplicity of reporting information to anyone, just forward the information offered by Teambot.

How to give Teambot instructions for email

Teambot reads the email subject to find out what you need. The first command you can try with Teambot could be “help”; Teambot will send you instructions on the type of commands available and the answer you will get:

Task lists for a given day: list tasks
Complete lists of tasks: list all tasks
Complete lists of projects: list all projects
Task details: name of the task
Project details: name of the project

Beyond the basic instructions, we wanted Teambot to be able to listen to our users and understand what they want to know. So, for example, if you send Teambot an email with the subject “corporate plan”, it will return a list of tasks and projects whose name resembles the subject.

In the next phases, we hope that Teambot will continue learning new rules of behavior and will become even more useful and helpful, offering proactive reminders when, for example, the delivery date of a critical task approaches; or allowing to report hours and progress by email.

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Although working by objectives is the best way for managing staff, organizations’ management requires an organizational level which is only provided by projects.

Management by objectives has set us free from a working culture in which it was more important to be present at our workstation rather than doing a valuable and quality job. But, nowadays, we can say that it is about going to a better place.

OK: I admit that saying that management by objectives is a cadaver could be an exaggeration, but also is saying that we all have been set free of perfect attendance

In fact, just as we all have friends in whose jobs it is more important to be than to work, objectives are a key element to motivate employees and escape from the routine. Let’s not dismiss them yet.

Nevertheless, let’s analyze why they are no longer enough for those who run an organization.

Discover how to manage your organization by projects with ITM’s White Paper

Management by objectives, for what?

Let’s put the example of Alice Smith, the web designer of an e-commerce company

When Alice improves a 25% the views of the star product section on the web, she is meeting one of the goals defined along with her boss. This means beneficial and foreseeable consequences.

When meeting objectives, Alice gets her coordinator and firm's recognition: she has accomplished a beneficial objective for star product sales and thus, benefited the whole business. She has become a recognized professional who has been rewarded for her job.

Consequently, Alice has the well-done job satisfaction and the incentive to keep working by objectives meaning that, when managing her time in the future, she will take decisions oriented to maximize results that will maintain or improve her status and will keep on contributing to general good results.

For their part, the Company’s managers are satisfied as they can delegate hard work and focus on managing which are the goals the company must achieve.

Why management by objectives is not enough

After some years, it is easy to see that management by objectives, despite its advantages of motivation and personal time management, it does not always help taking the right decisions at the right moment. Sometimes, it is not even enough to deliver the expected work.

When each worker works by their own objectives, which is the risk of no one taking care of the efforts coordination between the different initiatives that are being carried out?

Too high

On the following year, Alice did not manage to get her objectives because the TI department was too busy creating a new purchasing management system to support her on the web changes.

What is missing? Employees’ efforts must be coordinated between each other so that no one see himself blocked due to the need of cooperating with colleague who is too busy with another issue.

How can that coordinated cooperation be achieved? Managing internal work by projects, especially the most fragile one.

What is project-based management?

At project-based management, each project is connected to the objectives and business benefits willing to be achieved. Employees work on a coordinated way to obtain the project’s output: cooperation is programmed.

At the same time, the project’s output is an objective of the company or a necessary factor to achieve it. Without that project, the same factor wouldn’t be carried out and would block the work.

When there is a complex objective and it needs many different factors to happen, many projects grouped on the same program can be created. Program’s director will have to coordinate the projects to support each other, favouring synergies and avoiding a project pending work to block another project.

Let’s give an example

Let’s imagine that the company Alice is working for wants to create a new line of domestic products thought for single women between ages 35 and 50.

The goal is to put on the market 10 products of this new range and obtaining 1 million revenues in two years

The new range requires the work of all departments: product design, web, TI, marketing and commercial. Furthermore, all managers are very interested because their final year bonus are linked to initiatives. Particularly, the finance, sales and operational directors know it is about something important.

Instead of assigning objectives by department and by every employee, different projects grouped on the same program are created. The operational director is placed on the top of these projects as they have experience on projects management.

Many of these projects have transverse teams: people from marketing and systems and product design departments are working together. On the other hand, there is a single sales, web and systems project in order to have everything ready to start selling as soon as the products are ready.

With this kind of structure, program director:

Counts on the information about the ongoing process of the project
Can cancel projects that are not essential for the development of the new line
Allocates more human and financial resources to urgent or central projects
Is able to report the advancements on the project to the company’s senior management, anticipating possible problems and foreseeing results.

Why project-based management and management by objectives are compatible

No company in which a management by objectives style has been adopted has to leave the management structure to start running projects.

Management by objectives and project-based management are compatible and interdependent.

Let’s have a look to what ITM Platform’s white paper recommends

“The combination is straightforward: it is enough to link both project and tam to the objectives. This mechanism informs team members about the importance of the project, which is not only in the delivery, but in the external goal.

Keep on reading here:

The Project Success Definition is Broken

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Agile is a flexible way of working in which an enterprise facilitates its people to work where, how, and when they want – with high resilience and fewer constraints – to boost up their performance and provide “best in class” value with customer compliance. It uses information technology and communications to allow people to fit their needs without traditional ideas of when and where tasks must be completed. It depends on the idea that work is an activity we do, rather than a place we go.

Advanced tools sustain this new model and allow to cater customer demands, minimize costs, improve sustainability, and increase productivity.

What are the goals of agile work?

The key selling point of an agile work model is that agile is a win-win situation. It offers various benefits to both employers and employees, which are covered in the next section. This is much more than just making people’s lives more comfortable and flexible: ultimately, a scalable work model can achieve results that are hard to achieve in traditional work environments.

But what are the goals and results of implementing agile methodologies in your workplace?

Wider adaptivity: The entire organization is empowered to be much more flexible and responsive to changing needs and situations when team members are not bound to location or fixed office hours. For instance, if employees are based at multiple time zones, it becomes easier to give extended support hours to clients or work around the clock to complete a deadline.

Employee productivity: When businesses measure performance by activity and output, rather than on the time physically spent at a desk, workers become motivated to spend their time on critical tasks that meet organizational goals, improving their schedules at times when their energy and personal productivity are high.

As per recent studies, location-independent employees are more productive and elated compared to their on-site counterparts. And when employees are relaxed and engaged at work, this develops a feedback loop that leads back high organizational performance and responsiveness: when employees get more done, they tend to be actively empowered by management –the entire company benefits. Agile Training helps you learn to implement Agile in a better way across your organization.

The Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (ENEI) describes in its guide to agile working: “The place where employees have the autonomy and empowerment to choose when and where they work, a culture is fostered that eliminates artificial measures of success, for instance, time and attendance, while the focus is on performance and results.”

Further, according to ENEI not every position can be adapted into agile flexibility. In fact, most jobs can’t incorporate flexibility on all four categories: time, source, role, or location/production mode.

Benefits of Agile Project Management

The use of agile methodology with a web or app project is generally about collaborating with new customers, but it also accelerates productivity and improves quality. Additionally, the agile methodology has many advantages to offer to project management.

Here are the most important benefits:

Collaboration: Customer compliance is one of the most important parts of an agile project management team. By updating the clients on the progress, working on their feedback and prioritising workflow according to their requests will ensure that the client ends up being satisfied. Team management software can also help throughout the process.

Time Saving: In an agile project, the team divides the project into small “sprints”, which usually need to be done within two weeks. This helps the team prioritize small important tasks and deliver them in less time. The time saved can be spent on secondary items that improve product quality.

Faster Results: After each sprint and before going into the next sprint, the team will take breaks to test their work and then go back to fix any bugs, take customer feedback and perform changes,. Agile is not only focused on faster development; it also aims at maximizing quality.

Highly Flexible: With agile, it’s never too late for change. When a client demands an important modification in the product design or data architecture, the team will work on small iterations of a minimum viable version with the new features. In contrast, change requests at the last stage in production can shatter a waterfall project.

Hybrid: Combination of Waterfall and Agile

Agile and Waterfall are well-known visions of software development management.

The former follows the iterative development and is flexible, while the latter is a step-by-step development and needs careful planning.

About twenty-three percent of all companies experienced that using principles of both approaches is more advantageous than choosing one of the two. The traditional Waterfall project management approach and Agile combination are called Hybrid.

Agile adopters are most abundant in software development, but for budgeting, planning, and hardware set up, waterfall can work better. Further, by integrating Agile practices into a traditional Waterfall work processes, enterprises can deliver successful projects early. For instance, project planning is done in sprints, testing can be integrated into the development, and feedback can be taken regularly. You can even modify the Waterfall model, organizing retrospectives with the use of Kanban boards towards a hybrid model.

It is important to note that the choice of hybrid framework’s features may vary from project to project. Hybrid frameworks not only include using both approaches according to the project phase, but also involve options to embed Agile practices into a Waterfall process.

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This article was written by guest author Mats Malmstrom, who who will be presenting the upcoming webinar on value management.

Mats is a multi-talented management consultant with more than 25 years of experience as executive sponsor, program and project manager, as well as the owner of LYM innovation Consulting, a firm coaching and training organizations in the art and science of Project Management in North and Latin America.

Introduction to traditional value management

Traditionally value in projects has been expressed with the following formula: Value(outcome)=Scope/Cost

Thus, theoretically we have two options to increase project value: we increase the scope more than we increase the cost,or decrease the cost more than the scope. Mathematically, there is no possible objection to these two possibilities, which are enabled by the initial formula.

Here’s where the problem starts. As we all know, project management is the art and science of producing results never achieved before (which is quite amazing, if you think of it). Unfortunately, the beautiful simplicity of the value formula doesn’t quite capture the complexity and dynamics of the project. It’s a bit like trying to predict the weather using the laws of thermodynamics.

In other words: exploring opportunities to increase the scope alone will not guarantee an increased value; nor will a decrease in cost, without looking very carefully at the impact on the scope that is delivered.

The success of a project is measured in the terms of how well it manages to deliver the wanted result/outcome at a predicted delivery time and cost. These terms are expressed in the form of project goals. All projects have different priorities set between these constraints, and project requirements are ranked accordingly to focus the project on “doing the right things”.

While the traditional approach provides a good baseline for value management in terms of setting the broad parameters of value creation, following the “mathematical tactics” blindly could result in critical value being forgotten or lost.

Project value straddles beyond usual project management parameters

Historically we have been defining and monitoring project success and performance in terms of Scope (requirements implemented), Time (Project outcome delivered on time), Cost (Project cost vs initial budget) and Quality (Quality KPI’s fulfilled). Projects meeting those goals have been considered successful and thus have generated the expected value for the organization and its business.

Though these parameters give a good indication of project performance they often fail to show the complete picture of the value expected or created by a project.

That’s why it’s increasingly important to talk about value in its own terms, as opposed to treating it as a by-product of the parameters listed above.

The PMI has recognized this reality for many editions. Take, for example, the definition of business value in the glossary of the PMBOK 5th edition, where it is noted that the concept is unique for each organization, and includes both tangible and non-tangible elements.

When we start consider value as the reason for doing what we do, value management becomes a central process driving business success., In the latest Pulse of Profession report from PMI(r) indicates that organizations applying Benefit realization management (Value management) are reaching better project results.

Also, defining project goals around those terms does have an impact on how the project is organized, managed and how the project governance is implemented in the organization.

Some examples of poor value management

Problem statement:

The project manager could not report on the new financial KPI’s required for a more thorough financial follow up of the project because of the way the line organization had structured the cost collection in the ERP system. This generated an additional cost for the project, as cost information had to be manually collected and synthesized from the project organization.

Diagnostic:

There was a misalignment in the matrix organization, making it very difficult to measure the value of the project accurately.

Problem statement:

The project manager prioritized delivery performance (Time) without understanding what the customer’s most urgent needs were. The project was showing excellent progress while the customer complaints escalated.

Diagnostic:

In this case the value tracking did not include some of the values expected to be delivered by the project.

Problem statement:

The standard project reporting did not meet the organization’s/stakeholders’ needs for business information, adding extra work for the project team.

Diagnostic:

This is a typical situation that occurs when there is no standard procedure for monitoring value for the project across the organization.

Problem statement:

Another project started up a number of project activities in order to meet the deadline without considering how the large negative cashflow impacted the financial performance of the company.

Diagnostic:

This could have been an approved project execution strategy from the start, but what if it wasn’t? Sound businesses strives to make the financial operations as effective i.e. increase liquidity to reduce the cost of capital, and so have cash available to cover expenses and invest in new ventures.

Structuring Value Management

You may ask what these situations have in common, and what they have to do with value management. In all these cases, a structured value management process across the operation End-to-End would have helped the projects avoid the situation, or at least minimized the project impact.

While there isn’t a catch-all mistake in all the examples, a more holistic approach to understanding project value at the outset of the project, and more consistency in managing the generation of value during the project’s life cycle can help identify misalignments with stakeholders, and between the productivity interests of the project manager and those of the organization.

What do we mean with business value?

Find out more in the webinar: How do you optimize project value?

Let’s go back to this important notion. We have already seen that in order for us to understand the business value of a project we have to put it into the context of the organization: its mission, vision, strategy and goals. We must understand the environment it operates in: customers, competitors, regulatory and legal considerations. How does the organization get things done, i.e. what are the processes and tools used? What resources and competences does the organization have? How is the organization structured and governed?

The expected business value is expressed exclusively for each project in both tangible and intangible goals in various dimensions related to company strategy, business goals, the customers, resource availability, operational improvements, competence development, to name a few.

Of course, financial aspects are crucial -although not sufficient per se. The financial performance of the project must be in for measuring success, and rigorous financial metrics must be used to measure the value of the project (and its feasibility!) over the project life cycle. Hence it is vital for the project manager to have a good understanding of how the project performance is impacting both the general company financials and the project financials in order to lead the project and take corrective actions when necessary.

Successful business value creation starts with a comprehensive, purposeful strategic planning on company level and is then broken down into a portfolio of business critical initiatives that are realized by executing programs or projects.

Capturing the business value for the project is a quite complex work of collecting and understanding its complete context. Unfortunately, very often project managers are not self-sufficient in this type of activity, since they may not access to have relevant information, either because it has not been communicated properly, because it is sitting in an organizational silo, or, in the worst case scenario, because it may be classified or beyond his level of authority.

For the project manager to lead the project effectively often means to realize what he doesn’t know about the project and untap many unknown unknowns. Of course, this is a daunting task without proper information sharing policies that enforce a culture of collaboration and interaction with stakeholders that help lead resources in the right direction.

In conclusion: You might not have an organizational structure and processes in place to follow up or ensure value creation in the project. However, there are some relatively easy things that you could do within the limit of your level of authority.

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Project value has changed a lot over the past decades. In our parents’ generation, the idea of a project was linked to two professional profiles: architects and engineers. Where the architect combined artistic creativity and practicality, and the engineer due to his capacity of imposing his vision to nature, connecting long distances through bridges, roads, oil pipelines and great achievements such as the airplane and the television.

Projects in a world of transformation

Currently, digital transformation is a companies’ first challenge.

As a consequence of those advancements, today, the project by antonomasia is technological. The projects expert is normally related, some way or another, with digital world.

Discover how to make the most of your projects for your business

That change has broken the classical definition of a project’s success. In other words, the project has been transformed into a business management tool. It is not a matter of technicians and project managers anymore: there are great managers with the title of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) or Strategy Director whose favourite projects are transformation projects.

In the classic model, a project was successful if it was delivered on time, within the expected budget and quality. Construction projects keep in accordance with this model.

However, nowadays it is very common that projects that meet those criteria to end up failing. For example, a business application which does not take off among users.

But, how is it possible that an effective and efficient project with enough quality does not fulfil the expectations?

The answer is in the current situation. Fifty years ago, the world was relatively stable. The project didn’t need to amaze to be successful: it was enough for it to get home to port. But, when reality is constantly changing, that port cannot be reached with a linear trajectory.

New definition of success

At this moment, things have changed and the new definition of success includes a new vertex: innovation

In the end, 21^st century projects only ensure success if they allow to change things and start to work in another way. Innovation doesn’t need to be something of long reach: it is enough with the addition little value increases in order to qualify the organization in its change strategy.

Big Data analysis for the discovery of business opportunities is a field in which many incremental steps of this kind can me made towards an organizational model that doesn’t exist yet. It is not easy to quickly find the truth behind data: Big Data strategy will include very different transformation projects among which there are preliminary analysis, algorithm design, the design of new products based on identifiable market niches and the integration of those data with the existing CRM. All those projects are oriented to the generation of new opportunities.

For a graphic design agency, another good example would be the creation of a project for a client with a technology that had never been used before. This is also a transforming project as it creates a completely new capacity and competence.

This idea is equivalent to recognizing that change management should be absorbed as a corporate mission by any company that wants to maintain competitiveness in the market.

With the new definition of success, it is also possible to redefine with precision what we understand as a project in the era of digital transformation:

“The project is a set of factors which produce added value, whose delivery to the organization is scheduled in time for its realization”

There is also another consequence of this definition. The project has an end in time, but when the output is delivered, that innovative work has only just begun: you need to exploit the advantages.