When evaluating different tools, soft virtues such as the ability to adapt to different situations are often overlooked.
The concept of resilience has been popularized from its origin in psychology and environmental sciences to have multiple uses.
It is said that someone is resilient when he manages to overcome adverse situations. A resilient material regains its shape when the external pressure ceases; A plant, when it survives a period of drought. A resilient organization is one that manages to reorient its business model to the pressures from the market.
However, resilience is seldom mentioned as an advantageous feature for software products that can tolerate stressful situations. Given that B2B software is reaching new degrees of specialization, it may seem strange.
Let's begin to consider resilience as a priority factor when evaluating different business software alternatives, in particular SaaS solutions.
SaaS B2B software suffers from a widespread problem: adoption rates by end users. Friction is, in this sense, the biggest barrier to return on investment.
What characterizes resilient software? What does it mean to be able to tolerate and survive adverse circumstances? Somehow, the stress test moves from the user to the tool itself. In the most difficult situations for a company, such as the adoption of a new management software, the tool has features that allow it to adapt and respond positively to a variety of uses by users.
More specifically, we look at an example from the project management industry. A project management software, for example, will be resilient if:
it covers different styles, methodologies and organizational processes, without forcing specific behaviors on the part of the users that require previous training
assumes in its system the dichotomy of agile versus predictive
allows for managing operations in addition to the projects themselves
is able to coexist with the intensive use of other products in linked areas of the core business
manages to increase its value from the appearance in other software environments (e.g. apps and integrations)
In the case of ITM Platform, for example, its resilient features include, but not limited to, the following factors:
ITM Platform is a very useful tool for expert project managers, because it welcomes, in its core, most of the aspects that should be considered in the integration of projects. However, it does not require specialized knowledge, to the point that it has an excellent reception in organizations that are taking the first steps in their orientation to projects.
Instead of covering a very specific niche, ITM Platform offers a competitive combination of complete but easy-to-use features. It is not necessary to take advantage of everything the machine can do to get going.
As far as the user experience is concerned, the navigation menus opt for maximum visibility of the benefits, instead of requiring a very precise knowledge of the platform
There are multiple access routes for the most essential functions
These points are just some examples of why I consider resilience to be a very valuable principle in assessing the ease of maintaining software use when circumstances change, motivations to use software, and coexistence with other business information systems.
Jaime Capitel
Senior Content Strategist
ITM Platform
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You don’t even need to be able to measure the value.
But imagine if you could.
Imagine that you could quantify the value that collaboration contributes to your projects. If you could add a few cents (or a few dollars) to your "collaborative balance" every time someone makes a constructive comment, warns of a problem in time, makes an innovative proposal outside the scope of their responsibilities, share experiences of other Projects that can save hours of misguided execution.
You could show the results to top executives, including shareholders and customers, and defend the profitability of investing in strong internal communication policies.
In reality, you don’t need to measure the value at every instant. It is enough to make sure that in your organization there are solid channels for communication to flow. You may need more than one technological solution to support the entire flow. Oh, and remember that email stopped counting as collaborative technology back in 2006.
Collaborative tools
It is convenient to distinguish between channels for internal communication (within the team of each project) and external communication, or between projects.
Communication between projects
The business chat or intranet services are excellent for removing watertight drawers, but they live far from the technical planning of the projects, so they are difficult to integrate with the daily management of them. They are excellent for cross-cutting issues affecting all departments.
Internal communication
By contrast, internal communication to a project team will be better supported through management software such as ITM Platform, which integrates social networking features within each project.
Creating the Right Portfolio
No tool can communicate between projects and connect to the equipment of each project without generating noise. Therefore, it is essential to be able to find a good internal technology portfolio that maintains governance criteria.
The combination of ITM Platform with Slack is a great example of a portfolio of communication tools. Within each project, the owner is ITM Platform, while Slack is unbeatable as a business chat between teams. Thanks to the ITM Platform Teambot app, you can also connect both tools so that the members of your teams can work with the ITM Platform from Slack.
This way you can get all the benefits of a communication policy as well as improving the quality of your projects and learning between teams.
Do you still want to measure your ROI of collaboration? Subscribe to this blog and you will get the answer.
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Sometimes we can't start all the projects we would like to. This often happens with internal projects: how many CIOs will undertake all projects that are demanded by the heads of each department? And how many find solid reasons to explain which projects are initiated, in what order and why?
Whenever you have a hard time deciding which projects you should run, you can base your decision on the evaluation of different scenarios. Here's an example.
Imagine that there are three internal projects that are difficult to compare: the implementation of a new document management system (DMS), the development of a new product and the internal training of the entire sales force. And also, as we said, we do not have enough capacity to finance them all.
Estimation of cost and importance
The first step in setting the scenarios is to assess their cost and importance:
Number
Project
Importance
Cost estimate
1
DMS
17,73%
$15,777.00
2
New product
47,05%
$90,091.00
3
Training
35,22%
$64,144.00
Suppose that the maximum budget that can be allocated to these projects is $150,000, less than the total of 170,000.
How to value a project
With ITM Platform, the value of a project depends on how much it helps to achieve a business objective. This criterion allows you to group very different projects by programs and to develop scenarios more complex than the one of this example.
Test yourself on how to generate scenarios linked to your goals with ITM Platform.
1. Count Scenarios
The next thing is to know what all the alternatives are. In this case, there are 8 scenarios or possible situations considering that we can choose (blue) or discard (red) each of the projects.
123
123
123
123
123
123
123
123
2. Quantify the scenarios
What is the investment required for each of the scenarios?
0.00
$64,144.00 $
$90,091.00 $
$154,235.00
$15,777.00
$79,921.00 $
$105,868.00 $
$170,012.00
As we know that the investment limit is $150,000, we can rule out the two combinations that exceed it.
0.00
$64,144.00
$90,091.00
$154,235.00
$15,777.00
$79,921.00
$105,868.00
$170,012.00
3. Assess the scenarios
What is the value obtained from each of them?
0%
35%
47%
82%
18%
53%
65%
100%
If we did not have limitations, of course, we would choose to launch all the projects. But in applying the financial constraints, we choose the scenario that brings the most value without exceeding budget.
Since two scenarios have been ruled out, it is necessary to choose the combination with the highest value among the remaining ones: 65% of projects 1 and 2.
Is it simple? When you try it on IT Platform you will no longer have doubts when selecting projects.
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One of the most frequent needs facing organizations that are looking to launch a PMO is the centralization of information and knowledge. When your e-mail begins to be used as a repository of documentation, or when there is no homogeneity between the sources of information of different projects, it is possible that the time has come to consider the existence of a structure that supports the operations of the organization.
This type of PMO has been compared to a weather station, since the unification of processes and flows of information allows the increase of data and objective criteria to evaluate in which direction the projects and the equipment are moving.
By serving as a center for unification of knowledge, the PMO begins by assisting the management of the company by providing data and information that assist the company in decision making.
This is achieved in the confidence of the management of the company, the acquisition of new skills and the possibility of direct decision-making. The end result is to convert one support project management into another with a control or manager profile. This other type of PMO will be developed in another article.
Functions developed by the PMO as a support tool
Teaching and training, promotion of attitudes based on adequate project management, under direct supervision.
Transmission of information to the management of the company, so that it is the one that makes the executive decisions.
Search for techniques to reduce costs.
Centralization of management services in the department of project management or PMO, emphasizing the management savings that this entails.
Empowerment of those who have been designated as Project Managers, who must be trained in project management but also allow sufficient freedom to properly develop their skills.
Application and evolution of the support PMO
Supporting PMOs are sometimes geared towards an internal permanent improvement service. This is based on empowerment and the acquisition of responsibilities on the part of heads departments within the company under the instruction and monitoring of the PMO. The objective is that, after a period of training, the managers of the different departments of the company acquire new skills in project management or update the ones they already have, doing their work practically without the help of the PMO. This will allow the PMO to focus on other functional areas and to reorient itself from the mere work support, towards a more strategic integration.
Juan Delgado
Blogger
ITM Platform
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We talk to Sander about our JIRA connector, the last product update on ITM Platform that produces a complete vision of development processes from the project management perspective.
Question: Can you tell us a little bit about how the project was born?
Sander: We already knew JIRA as a big actor in the industry of project management, but in this case we had a particular customer in Spain who was using JIRA regularly, and for them an integration with ITM Platform became a very important element. The starter of the project was that a customer asked for this piece, but besides that we immediately recognized that it would be an interesting enhancement for other customers as well, so the decision to include the integration was quickly taken.
Q: What sector is the company in?
S: They’re in logistics, but we talked to their IT Department. In a way, that corresponds very accurately to the general scenario that we are targeting with the enhancement: a business core that relies very heavily on the integration of information processes into the daily delivery of services will very likely benefit from the combined strengths of JIRA, on the IT side, and ITM Platform on the project management side.
"With the new connector, PPMs can combine the day-to-day view in JIRA with the general overview provided by ITM Platform"
Q: What does the connector do?
S: The connector establishes a link between Atlassian JIRA and ITM Platform and it helps you to synchronize any projects and issues on JIRA to ITM Platform. You can select which projects and issues you want to synchronize so you can decide to keep certain projects only in JIRA and to have all project information available on ITM Platform. Apart from projects, it also synchronizes human resources, issues and people on those issues.
"The connector allows to sync JIRA projects as the three types of projects on ITM Platform: classic, Kanban and services"
Q: Did you find any major obstacles in development?
S: I wouldn’t say that we had any major obstacles, because JIRA is a very well established product, they encourage integrations and they have solid documentation to do this.
That said, of course we had some minor issues that are more related to design decisions and terminology than to actual problems in writing the code. The type of information on both systems is different and we had to design a way to match it. For example, we decided that an issue on JIRA would be a task on ITM Platform, which was reasonable because both entities are quite limited and are subordinated to projects. However, we then realized that customers can have issues on JIRA with no end date, while this is a mandatory field on ITM Platform. We had to think of functional ways to work around this and fix it.
One of the other things that we realized during development is that companies may have many different types of projects, even from entirely different business areas, and in many cases it wouldn’t make sense to synchronize all of this to ITM Platform. That’s the reason we decided to include filters so customers can decide which projects and issues to sync, and which not.
Q: When taking these decisions, did you have in mind the customer that asked for the integration, or a long term strategy of how people are going to use this?
S: I guess you could say we were thinking from both perspectives. We considered how would this project actually make sense for any customer in the market, but in the meantime we shared intermediate designs with the customer to make sure they would be satisfied with it, which was the case.
That said, we made sure to move beyond the scope of this specific customer, who works a lot with gantt chart, waterfall and classic project management, to make sure other customers could decide to sync their JIRA projects and issues onto the three types of project entities supported by ITM Platform: besides classic projects, there’s also Kanban projects and services. In that sense, we foresaw future usage beyond the initial scope.
For instance, you can perfectly imagine to manage a service on ITM Platform, but that the issues identified are managed on JIRA. The synchronization can then be configured to obtain a complete overview of the service that includes the resolution of the issues.
Q: Why is the connector important and who do you think will benefit the most?
S: If we look at users within organizations, people responsible for planning projects at the program or portfolio level will benefit the most, because they will have the day-to-day management for issues on JIRA and the full overview that ITM Platform allows without having to work on two systems or manually copying information. This can be very important in understanding how resources are being utilized, as some of them might be assigned to small JIRA issues and at the same time to larger projects.
Q: What can you build on top of the information pushed from JIRA?
S: Any additional information that does not come from JIRA can be managed on ITM Platform. A good example is the budget, which is not driven by JIRA.
Q: How does this connection fit into ITM Platform’s strategic vision?
S: It fits within our vision that we should be an open system. We want to be able to serve many different companies and we are aware that companies already use other systems and many different tools. These are the things that need to be able to work together with ITM Platform. JIRA is an example but there are also financial, accounting, or ERP systems that companies use to manage their day to day operations, like for example their order process. The need to integrate those systems with ITM Platform is why we’ve already built a very extensive library of APIs.
We’re constantly looking forward to enabling integrations with other systems, either through open APIs or through specific integrations like the one we did with JIRA.
"Our vision is to be an open product that any company can integrate with their legacy systems"
Q: Are you currently working on any other similar improvements?
S: Yes, we are doing an integration with Slack that is focused on team members, who will be able to do all the basic actions they can perform on ITM platform.
They can see what projects and tasks they are assigned to, they can leave follow-ups, they can comment on tasks, they can report their hours, etc. And they can do all that by just chatting, even from their phone. It’s an interesting trend that we’re seeing more and more: chatboxes are replacing traditional interfaces.
We’re not pretending to completely replace our solution with Slack, because ITM Platform is way more complex, but we want to offer the basic functions through Slack because it’s a very interesting option for team collaboration, which is ultimately essential for solid project management. And that means that, by going to where the conversations are instead of forcing users to log into your systems, you can bump up productivity and ease of use with very little trade-offs.
"Developing for Slack is an adventure. They live in constant change and force you to keep developing and providing value"
Q: How does developing for the Atlassian environment compare to developing for the Slack ecosystem?
S: It’s a different experience in the sense that JIRA is a more established, finished and well-refined product. We had a very clear scope, we took a few decisions for the enhancement but it was a quite finite iteration.
But developing for Slack is more of an adventure in the sense that it’s difficult to define upfront how ITM Platform will work on Slack, also because they are constantly in motion and going forward, so your first mission is to figure out how Slack actually works. And down the line this dynamic means that we have a first integration, but as Slack keeps changing we will adjust to how our customers can best exploit it to their advantage.
"Our integration with Slack is going to be very ambitious. We want our clients to enjoy the product and save time"
Q: Have you seen any Slack apps that allow you to manage projects?
S: We’ve seen a few products, but they’re not very ambitious. Trello has an integration, JIRA itself has an integration. So far all this products are very limited in what they do. It seems like companies want to be on Slack, but they haven’t done a very extensive development. On the contrary, we are giving team members the power to do on Slack most of the actions they can do on ITM Platform. This is not a joke or an empty marketing tactic, we want to be a serious integration that our customers can enjoy and that actually saves them time.
Q: What about the API? Who is making the most of it?
S: The idea behind the API is to ensure companies that they can integrate ITM Platform with their legacy systems, eliminating duplicities and connecting information. It’s very important for us that onboarding is as seamless as possible, so the idea is to make ITM Platform more transparent, so it can be enmeshed with internal systems in ERP, accounting or what not.
Under this premise, the API has grown to something very complete. We started with a few APIs and then added more under request to make sure that they meet the most basic demands for integrating with company’s systems under any circumstance.
Sander Hoogendoorn is a senior Interim Manager and Program Manager with over 15 years of experience in international implementation projects, product development and business development in various industries such as retail and online gambling, telecommunications, public organizations and internet startups in Europe and Latin America. He holds degrees in Political Science and Business Administration and is fluent in English, Spanish, German and Dutch.
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