meditating businessman balancing work and personal life, heart and tool 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 us explain the model of Software as a Service with ITM Platform.

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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vector set of customer relationship management and business negotiation icons. flat linear pictograms and infographics design elementsIf you lead a consultancy firm in project management, odds are that things have been good for you in the last couple of years: the industry has recovered from the global recession in many sectors, and PM has rapidly grown as a management philosophy to expand beyond the niche areas of software development, construction and infrastructures. In fact, many of our best customers come from industries as different as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or the food industry.

However, we still find it very surprising that many small-to-medium consultancy firms with great talent offering highly specialized consultancy services in project management are not stocking up in a solid and diversified portfolio of project management solutions.

Sure, many players choose to go hand in hand with a top vendor. This grants them access to big accounts and ensures that the complexity of the solution is a golden gate to offer on-boarding services. However, there are several reasons why you should not be content with doing just that:

  1. Improve your vendor portfolio

No matter how much you love your expensive and sophisticated solutions, some customers won’t fall for them for a number of reasons: price, past experiences, or very specific needs. It’s always a good idea to add additional vendors that stick out for different reasons: whether they’re targeted at specific industries, have a focus on certain buyer personas, a methodological edge or simply a lower price point, they’ll be a catch for a number customers you’d likely not convert on your own.

  1. Diversify

If built properly, a diverse vendor portfolio can better support your own service offerings. Different software solutions will need different forms of supplementary training and support, and the chances are that, unless you build your strategy around your main vendor, smaller players can better adapt to some of your already existing services.

  1. Care about your level of Sales Relationships

People outside the industry may think otherwise, but we know that selling technological services is fundamentally a matter of trust. Trust not only takes time, but the bigger the other size it is, the more laborious it will be to establish it.

What I’m trying to say is that the ladder of sales relationships can be very long if you’re partnered with an industry giant, but just takes clear strategy, periodical meetings and some sales with a smaller company.

  1. Grow your reputation as independent advisor

The more diverse your portfolio of solutions, the likelier it is that you can be perceived as a recommender with the ability to provide reliable, independent expertise, including non-biased advice on what solutions should be implemented in a given situation. A limited vendor portfolio immediately defies that purpose.

The example of ITM Platform’s Partner Model

Over the last three years, ITM Platform has built a network of partners to sell our PPM software solution globally.

A recently added partner in Mexico landed a $ 250,000 job after we referred them a company that had recognized their need to reorganize their processes on a project basis.

In a Southern European country, a former user of ITM Platform was put in charge of creating a new food processing plant and decided to stay with the solution he was already familiar with. Our local partners were able to secure the training and capacitation for the factory set-up in the first yearly period.

In all these cases, the price tag for licenses we sold was a mere percentage in single digits of the revenues that the services provided by our partners generated for them.

That’s not a problem. “We’re in the business of providing a solution and generating recurring monthly revenue from satisfied customers. Asking our partners to share their revenues for associated services with us would only distort the model and distract us”, says our CEO, Daniel Piret.

“We think we can have a particular appeal for firms that are interested in moving from the traditional model of service provision to the juicy recurring SaaS business model”, points Daniel.

Our mission for 2017 is to transform our partner network in our main channel for sales, and to do that we have designed new partner-friendly policies.

In other words, our growth strategy consists in helping our partners attract big business.

What do our partners get:

  • A PPM solution that, added to their portfolio, competes in functionality with the top players, while having the extra appeal of being incredibly cost-effective.
  • Our partners have priority as re-sellers: they can sell licenses for a lower price than our official price lists. It’s our way to make sure that customers won’t contact us directly after being approached by a partner.
  • Hot leads coming from our marketing campaigns
  • Recurring net margin
  • And much more!

To apply for the program, register at our partner website, or download our brochure here.

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brain, 2017, light, tools, question mark, cloud, arrow going up, exclamation markWith more than a million and a half new professionals in the next three years, many things are changing in the industry.

There are many factors that are generating major changes in project management. To begin with, the community of project management experts has long since ceased to be a highly specialized niche for engineers: more and more professionals are involved in fields as diverse as marketing, translation, product and service development, or even Finance have titles or responsibilities related to project management.

Take control of your Project Management this year with ITM Platform

Of course, this means the practice is developing in many directions. Here we highlight four that will be fundamental during this year.

1. Project management in extreme situations

Brexit, Syria, climate change, Trump. This is only a quick summary of the political difficulties that are testing the global economy ... and with them all companies with international scope.

Faced with this situation, it is essential to have tools to deal with unforeseen events and respond promptly to threats. The evaluation of investments and risk assessment will become increasingly important, moving from the strategies of internationalization to the dimension of the projects and their impacts.

2. Strategic value, not just tactical

Projects have ceased to be watertight drawers that can be planned and developed in a vacuum. The habitat of a project and the integration of the manager's responsibilities into the company's overall strategy are the measure of credibility, both external and internal, when developing projects. That is why transversal competences, the ability to listen and to go beyond predetermined processes are increasingly valued.

3. Combined methodologies

Especially in companies with business models that are not dedicated exclusively to software development or foreseeable engineering projects, such as construction or infrastructures, the combination of agile and predictive methodologies is increasingly gaining acceptance to cover the different operational phases of an organization.

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In the financial sector, for example, many teams already employ a methodological sandwich structure to deal with a new credit product.

Kanban board

To cover the phases of market research, identification of barriers, niche, etc. The objective of this first phase is to build sufficient knowledge to define the essential characteristics of the product. Kanban board, ITM Platform

Gantt chart

When the product is profiled, it is possible to introduce predictive guidelines that allow it to become a reality. A Gantt chart is still highly valued to develop the product with some fixed dates. Gantt chart, ITM Platform

How to land the go-to-market

Finally, the phases of business development and client acquisition usually follow agile procedures that allow reacting to market acceptance in a flexible way. In other words: how to land the go-to-market. In some ways, this approach allows us to treat each product or service as a project. But on other occasions, even the teams themselves or the organizations themselves are organized on a project basis. For this reason, it is important to have tools like ITM Platform, which allow to combine both methodologies in a flexible way in a single portfolio. The Design Thinking approach, coined by Stanford University, resembles in its goal the sandwich of methodologies combined in the sense of providing a process that allows to incorporate technical experts and personnel with other training. However, the commercial orientation is clearer, as the different phases are a formula for creating a solution from the public and their needs.

4. Project Intelligence

We have been talking about Big Data for years and it does not seem that this trend is going to leave us. Applied to project management, orientation to big data involves learning, creatively, from all the information of the projects that is automatically collected during its development. In this sense, the leap beyond mere statistical guidelines towards creative data science can be a very interesting dimension for 2017.

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business man shake hand puzzle background agreement concept flat vector illustration

Although collaboration is an essential principle for a modern and innovative organization, it is worth remembering that it is not recommendable to embrace collaboration at all costs. The definition of a collaborative culture will have to be oriented to different parameters specific to each organization.

Collaboration for PMOs: advantages and disadvantages

If you are convinced that your organization needs to improve project collaboration, you must make sure collaboration is properly oriented and directed towards the goals of the organization.

For example, collaboration is a priority in innovation intensive organizations dedicated to the design of new products and services: the more ideas are gained, the greater the innovative potential. In these cases it may be important to collect inputs from all interested parties and even to determine a iterative procedure, whereby each design phase is subject to an open round of discussions.

However, in organizations with more predictive projects, a culture of open and uncontrolled collaboration can be pernicious. Even destructive:

  • Hierarchical validation procedures are proportionately related to deadline compliance
  • Informal communication relies on people, not processes. That is why large organizations and teams with high turnover suffer especially when they fail to combine collaborative elements with standardized procedures.

1. Project Management

Despite the risks of open collaboration, the risks of not collaborating are also high. A project manager who does not delegate, share information, or accept comments beyond the established channels becomes a bottleneck that can choke the entire organization.

On the contrary, among the collaborative responsibilities of the project manager is the habit of sharing knowledge with all stakeholders: team members and executives, clients, suppliers, or public entities in the case of tenders.To avoid being lost in this web, it is very important from a certain complexity to determine what tools, documents and processes are right for each stage.

2. Project collaboration

​ Another advantage of a collaborative controlled culture is that team members can benefit from cross-pollinization. Again, this is a very important aspect when the project presents unknowns or new problems to solve.

Some practices to make ideas flow:

  • Use open spaces
  • Use equally open chat tools: instead of email, a chat service for channels such as Slack, for example
  • Adopt SaaS tools, so that your computer's hard drives do not become black boxes

3. How to combine closed communication and standardized procedures

Unfortunately, these days it is not enough to be productive and execute a list of tasks within a project. Actually, we have many applications based on a timeless distribution of activities or the check-list approach , which, although they are very valid for certain functions, do not serve for the execution and planning of professional projects. The most difficult in these cases is to get the right balance between collaboration and controlled information.

ITM Platform Teambot is an application for Slack that allows, precisely, to speed collaboration through the messaging chat that has taken a robot to Mars while incorporating the strengths of an ITM Platform capacity planning tool. Where Slack adds the collaborative dimension, ITM Platform adds the control.

In fact, ITM Platform Teambot, created for all team members, is the most convenient way to use ITM Platform:

  • It allows to recall tasks and projects
  • facilitates reporting processes
  • Links seamlessly to ITM Platform

Advantages of ITM Platform Teambot:

  • Teambot is the only project management application in Slack that, besides allowing to recall information, offers the possibility to use agile and predictive methodology in the same integrated portfolio
  • Share knowledge and cooperate with organizations that integrate different hierarchies or open teams
  • Check projects and tasks in seconds
  • Report your progress from Slack and without ever having to log in to ITM Platform

Request a demo of ITM Platform and we will tell you how to establish successful collaborative practices for your projects.

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Slack logoSlack has its own guidelines on how to make the best use of your team chatrooms for managing your projects, and they’re a great way to maximize your productivity if your teams is already using Slack to coordinate your team communications. We particularly find that having a policy to create project-based channels is a great way to ensure that the right people are always getting the right information on time. And if you have a consistent naming guideline, the search box can become a powerful database of everything that is going on in your company!

project, Slack

Source?  Of course, Slack themselves. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/218130338-Slack-for-project-management#apps-for-project-management

In fact, while the case for Slack may seem already redundant for American companies given the platform's soaring popularity and the power of its free version, many companies in different markets still haven’t heard of Slack, so it’s never too late to go over some of its pillars.

1. Familiarity of the design

Something I often hear around me is that people dislike Slack because they haven't invented anything. Well, you know, anybody familiar with the history of technology will debunk the romantic myth of originality: technology creates technology. New technologies, particularly successful ones, are combinations of already existing artifacts.

Feels familiar

  • So yeah, Slack’s repurposing of an IRC interface is not original, but at the same time it’s crazy brilliant because it goes back to the foundations of consumer satisfaction.

    You can think about it like the free food and napping pods at Google’s offices transformed into a digital environment. Chats and texting feel leisurely, and that’s precisely the feeling you want to give your team when you want to motivate them to use a specific tool. Particularly if you have a young workforce, trying out the giphy command can be the best way to guarantee people open their Slack account every single day.
    respekt

    2. Cell phone reporting

    Slack stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”.  Although it looks like a chat, it is actually designed as a repository of information that you can search at any time.

    Now imagine how powerful this can be for teams that have workers deployed on the field. On one hand, they can send useful information from their cell phones knowing that the app is a validated form of communication; on the other, project managers will spare time on data management and the enforcement of reporting tools.

    3. An app environment for chatbots

    The main one? You guessed it: while Facebook is driven by procrastination, Slack is driven by productivity.

    The integration of third party applications follows its own patterns, starting with chatbots. Although the passion for chatbots has been heavily criticized by some as a passing fad, the truth is that they are a good example of simple products that do small things, but do them good. No team will have use for every app on Slack, but some of them are really powerful.

    Slack doesn’t have a very targeted public. If you work in an office, you can enjoy it. However, these guys have made sure that they meet the needs of any technological firm. In fact, besides giving access to specific apps for developers that go from GitHub and Heroku, there’s a specific feature that allows to share lines of code.

    Create snippet, Slack

    All in all, the main reason why you want to be on Slack is that, whatever your core business is, you will find ways to save time, connect your team, and increase the effectiveness of your internal communications. At the end of the day, that translates into a more solid organization and better project management.

    Did you know that ITM Platform also has it's own integration with Slack? If you want to check it out, click here.

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