Tag Archives: PMO

Atidan Week in Mumbai

I had the honor of spending this past week with the Atidan team in Mumbai, India and once again it is amazing to experience everything India has to offer, from brilliant engineers, entrepreneurs, and one of the busiest cities in the world.

 

Not to brag, but the Atidan team is approaching 75 amazing engineers, program managers, human resource team members, IT professionals, testers and a growing business process outsourcing team.

During our project reviews, they demonstrated amazing solutions built on multiple platforms from Microsoft Cloud to Open Source to IBM Watson artificial Intelligence. Mobile, Social, Business Intelligence, search, security and portals are driving much of our growth in 2016.

 

The credit to our success over ten years has been the steady leadership of Kartavya and Advait Chitalia. Our team is diverse, inclusive, team oriented and highly focused. Most of our stars have come up through the ranks and it is thanks to a rigorous screening, training and mentoring program that we have a fantastic retention rate.

Atidan Company Cricket DayIMG_2190

This week is the Make In India conference and it is being said that India will become the most populated country in the world by 2030. With economic growth at 7.5% in 2015 and over 600+ million people moving into cities (that need to be built) India is

And finally, no trip would be complete without a visit to my favorite family owned enterprise from Kashmir…yes I filled three suitcases including a gorgeous silk carpet and gifts for clients 🙂

IMG_2185

The Future of Planning -Online Project Planning in the Cloud

For almost any company, whether large or small, project management is necessary for getting—and remaining—organized. There are multiple project management tools available to help your business manage resources, project and control costs, communicate effectively with multiple team members, and track progress on any given project. While some of these tools can be installed as software on individual network computers, a great many of them are web-based—in other words, they’re available in the cloud.

Project planning in the cloudBenefits of project management tools in the cloud

You may be one of those people who shudders at the phrase “cloud computing,” but take a moment to consider what it really means. While on-premises project management tools have their place, cloud-based software comes with a plethora of benefits, including the following:

  • Lower upfront cost. When you use on-premises project management software, you have to pay for a number of items, including software license investments, server hardware, IT staff for support, lengthy deployments and more. Alternately, a cloud-based solution typically only requires a monthly or annual fee.
  • More secure than ever. Despite what many business executives have believed in the past, the cloud offers just as much security as on-premises solutions—the company simply does not control the physical servers. As a recent article in Forbes suggests, “cloud computing is no longer an oxymoron.”
  • Accessible from anywhere. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can access your project management software in the cloud. Because access is achieved through a web browser, it’s also possible to allow team members to view, edit and manage documents via devices other than computers.
  • Connected team. Even when workers are separated by miles, they can feel part of a cohesive unit with a cloud-based solution. Because everyone receives to-the-minute updates, no one relevant to the project is accidentally left out of the conversation. Furthermore, conversations can be conducted in the project space (instead of via email) and stored for future reference.
  • Increased productivity. Thanks to a centralized location where all project summaries, tasks, documents, newsfeeds and calendars are kept, cloud-based project management solutions can save time. And when time is saved, productivity can increase. In addition, a centralized location allows team members to access project documents in real time wherever they are located.
  • Real-time communication. One of the biggest benefits of using project management software in the cloud is the ability to give quick feedback on information as soon as it’s uploaded to the project workspace. This can also increase productivity because it lowers the instances of work that needs to be redone.
  • Up-to-date, data-driven decisions. As a business looking to become—and stay—profitable, it’s important to base decisions on more than just a whim. Thanks to the fact cloud-based software is instantaneously updated, you have the necessary information at your fingertips. In addition, most tools will have built-in reports to bring you the insights you need to make business-related decisions.
  • Simplified IT. When you use on-premises project management software, you are typically responsible for server maintenance, which requires the attention of internal IT personnel. Cloud-based software, on the other hand, is maintained for you by the service provider (or another resource)—saving you the time and hassle of dealing with any updates or bugs, and allowing you to focus on running your projects smoothly.
  • Instant updates. Unlike on-premises software, which requires you to download updates whenever a new version is released, cloud-based tools are updated automatically. There’s no need to pay to upgrade your entire application suite or wait for your IT team to have the time available to implement the updates.

Steps for finding the best cloud-based project management solution for you

Unfortunately, getting started with a new project management solution isn’t as simple as understanding the difference between on-premises and web-based, cloud choices. Selecting the best solution for your company requires several steps—but the end result is worth the effort you put forth. Follow these steps to decide on a qualified service provider.

Step 1: Conduct a needs analysis.

This won’t come as a shock to you, but every company is different—with different sizes, different goals and different needs. That means it’s up to your company to decide exactly which solution fits you best. Be sure those who actually will use the product have a voice in the discussion. Consider factors like whether your projects only involve internal employees or external clients as well, or what kinds of reports you will need to run. Once you know your needs, it’s easier to evaluate service providers based on the features they offer.

Step 2: Research, research, research.

When searching for a service provider, be on the lookout for those that offer the following features:

  • Enterprise-grade reliability
  • Ability to add teams and projects quickly
  • Reporting features that give quick insights about your portfolio
  • A familiar environment or at least one that’s easy to navigate and use
  • Ability to see and act on tasks in one location
  • Scheduling capabilities that allow you to plan and manage tasks effectively
  • Summary dashboards for data-driven decisions
  • 24/7 IT support
  • Continuous data backup, disaster recovery and globally redundant data centers
  • Scalable solution that grows with your business

Step 3: Take a test drive.

In the same way you’d test drive a vehicle before purchasing it, you should try out a project management solution before implementation. Test drives allow you to get a closer look at a tool’s features and imagine how the tool would work in a situation similar to yours.

Step 4: Consider timeline and process for implementation.

If you’ve decided to go with an online-based tool for project management, it doesn’t matter if it matches up well with your current applications—this only applies to on-premises solutions. But you will need to consider when you will have the manpower and budget to make the switch, and then coordinate with your chosen service provider to make it happen.

Step 5: Implement and train.

You’ve finally implemented a new project management software solution. Congratulations! But unfortunately, your work isn’t complete. It’s important to make sure your employees have the training they need to use the new tool effectively. Set up multiple sessions so everyone can work one into their schedule. In addition, create practice projects so everyone has a chance to explore and become familiar with the tool’s features before they have to use it in the real world.

Project management in the cloud is the wave of the future. Find a tool that works for you—and don’t be left behind.

For more information about moving to the cloud check out our eBook: Myths About Moving to the Cloud.

Contact the Atidan team at http://bit.ly/1QwmS5Y for additional information and a no obligation PMO / PM briefing!

Credit to https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/18/the-future-of-planning-online-project-planning-in-the-cloud/

The Project Manager’s Guide to Planning a Perfect Project

Being a project manager (even here at Atidan) is a tough job. There are constant demands on your time, people to keep on track, pressure to do a certain amount of work in what often seems like an impossibly short amount of time and much more.

With the launch of Project 2016 from Microsoft, we are excited to expand our PMO offerings and are offering free trials and demonstrations. Contact us at project@atidan.com for additional information.

Working as a project manager is also a necessary role that can bring extraordinary value to your company. In fact, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than 60 percent of project failures are linked to internal issues such as insufficient resources or missed deadlines—i.e., situations a project manager can help avoid. In addition, it’s a growing industry, as more and more companies realize the importance of solid project management.

Project Manager FI

Being a project manager is like being a juggler who spins several plates in the air at once—not easy. There are constant demands on your time, people to keep on track, pressure to do a certain amount of work in what often seems like an impossibly short amount of time and much more.

In addition, it’s a growing industry, as more and more companies realize the importance of solid project management. Specifically, a separate Project Management Institute study estimated nearly 16 million new project management positions will be created around the world between 2010 and 2020, and the industry will grow by $6.61 trillion.

All that said, managing projects is a huge responsibility, no matter who your employer is. Whether you’re an official project manager or simply leading a project, the following seven tips should help you get your bearings and set your project up for success.

Tip 1: Establish clear goals for the project

Take a look at the big picture and determine what you want to accomplish with this project. If a client or outside stakeholder is involved in the project, external sources will obviously help determine your goals. Overarching goals you should consider include:

  • Preventing scope creep, which means keeping the scope of the project from growing.
  • Staying within a given budget.
  • Completing all aspects of the project.
  • Providing quality work.
  • Completing work on time.
  • Securing the right resources in advance.

Tip 2: Set expectations up front

Everyone should be on the same page in order to guarantee a successful project. Clearly sharing your expectations as the project lead and asking others to communicate their own is an important step in setting up any project. These expectations should include specific ways your team can achieve the goals you’ve already established. In addition, you’ll want to include the following:

  • List of deliverables and due date.
  • Statement of scope.
  • Roles and responsibilities defined.
  • Q&A process.
  • Communication plan, including how often you plan to communicate with stakeholders/client.

Tip 3: Outline potential risks and how you’ll manage them if hazards arise

Let’s face it—even if you’ve planned everything to the minutest detail, the unexpected can still occur. So what’s a good project manager to do? Make a plan for the unexpected, of course! Obviously, you may not be able to predict the exact hazard that might befall your project—everything from bad weather to political unrest to technology flubs can occur – but it is still possible to lessen the potential impact of hazards through risk management.

Tip 4: Minimize the number of meetings

A study by Verizon Conferencing found that only 22 percent of meetings are considered “extremely productive” and 44 percent “very productive.” That leaves 34 percent of meetings as only somewhat or not at all productive. Obviously, meetings are a necessary part of project planning, but really consider whether a meeting is a best use of your time or if email or some other form of communication—like project planning software, which allows you to share files, assign tasks and exchange ideas without having to meet—can do the trick just as well. The more time spent in meetings means less time spent on actual deliverables. Consider that before sending yet another meeting invite.

Tip 5: Plan the perfect kickoff meeting

Speaking of meetings, the kickoff meeting sets the tone for the entire project. When planning this meeting, be sure to adhere to the following standards:

  • Invite the right people and ensure the key players can be in attendance.
  • Create a detailed agenda stating what the meeting will cover. This will help everyone stay on task and understand the meeting objective.
  • Determine if this can be an online meeting or if it needs to be held in person. This will be different depending on how large the project is, whether you’re working with a new client, the budget for the project, etc. Keep in mind that in-person meetings are usually more complicated to plan—and more expensive too, especially if they involve travel.
  • Reschedule if the key players can’t be there—there’s no point in holding a meeting without them. You’ll often have to hold another meeting to update them or get their input.
  • Before forming the agenda, be sure to understand the point of the meeting and what information people should walk away from the meeting knowing.

Tip 6: Pull reports throughout the project

The only way to know if your project is on track is to pull consistent reports. This can often be accomplished through your project management software program. Reports help you measure the efficiency of your resource allocation and make sure you’re on track to reach your budget goals and deadlines.

Tip 7: Get the right tools

While there are many project management tools on the market, not all are created equal. Decide what you really need and compare the products that interest you. At the very least, be sure to choose a tool that allows you to do the following:

  • Organize and link tasks to create timelines and plans.
  • Share insights that help you better communicate progress.
  • Quickly understand how to use the interface.
  • Customize your plan to fit your team’s needs.

Even though being an amazing project manager is difficult, it’s still doable. You simply need the skills, know-how and appropriate tools to get the job done and achieve the right results.

Content credit: https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/08/project-managers-guide-to-planning-a-perfect-project/

How to Set Up a Program Portfolio for an Executive Team in SharePoint – September 16th, 2PM EDT

Join us and learn how to utilize SharePoint and BrightWork’s PMO solution to create the ultimate project office for Program and Portfolio Management for an Executive Team!  See a single, central system to view, manage and collaborate across all projects and deploy best practices for project and portfolio management.
David Rosenthal, CEO of Atidan will show configurable templates, iterative deployment of PM process and amazing project metrics, portfolio views, status reports, mobile enabled forms, task tracking, KPI’s and more.
We will cover:
1. Project Management Office Overview
2. Program/Department level Dashboards
3. Organization-wide Dashboards including Exception Reporting
4. Key Performance Indicators and Metrics
5. Automated Reporting

All Attendees will receive a free project management template for Microsoft SharePoint and a chance to win a copy of Windows 8 Pro.

Brightwork Template Spectrum - Atidan Brightwork Portfolio Management from Atidan

A Free Template To Get You Started Using SharePoint 2013 for Project Management

We talk a lot about extending SharePoint for managing projects, and we cite the collaborative benefits of having project teams working together in one organized and easy to use environment.

It's here and it's still free!

In fact, we offer a ton of free guidance on our website and a trial of the full BrightWork solution for PPM on SharePoint – the templates, dashboards, metrics, training guides – the lot!

But for many taking the first step to initiate and formally manage a project in SharePoint isn’t easy.  Questions arise that almost always stop folks in their tracks straight away.

How do we structure the project?  What deliverables and reports are needed by each stakeholder?  How much process is enough?  What best practices/methodology should we follow?  Do we have the skills to set this up ourselves in SharePoint?

So we decided to give people a really easy and risk free way to get started, and we created a set of two free project management templates – based on best practices – that will run on both SharePoint 2010 and 2013.  They’re simply called Project ‘Lite’ and ‘Structured’ and differ in the level of project management process and coordination built in.

The Lite template has been available on SharePoint 2010 and 2013 for a while now with the Structured on 2010 only – until today.  We’ve just released the free Structured template on SharePoint 2013, which I hope will bring a smile to the several thousand of you that have been asking for it.  We know this latest addition will add value as there are now over 15,000 organizations using the current versions and that number is growing every day.  Wowsers!

Here’s what you get in the new Structured template on SharePoint 2013

  1. A best practice template with a structure built in to guide the Initiation, Planning, Tracking, Managing and Closing of a project.
  2. Pre-defined project deliverables including Goals, Tasks, Risks, Issues, and Documents.
  3. Reports and dashboards including Project Status Reports, My Work, Metrics, Gantt Charts, Resource Reports.
  4. Project team collaboration with Discussions, Lessons Learned, Email, and Team Calendars.
  5. An optional two-way sync to Microsoft Project Professional for more advanced scheduling.

SharePoint 2013 Free Template

The icing on the cake?

As with the other free templates, the project Structured is completely integrated with SharePoint 2013 and is highly configurable.  You can make changes to the forms, reports, fields, columns, create new reports etc. with no programming needed.  AND you get installation guides, training videos, and free access to an online community and forum where you can connect with us BrightWorkers, other users worldwide and ask questions etc.

Getting started with project management on SharePoint may seem daunting. But with the right tools and guidance, it can be easy and put you on a path to real project management success.  This new free template is a risk free starting point and it works.

You can download your copy here.  For you admins out there, it runs on all versions of SharePoint 2013, including Office 365.

I have one favor to ask.  Check back in with us in the forum and share your experience.  We want to deliver solutions that make project management success, easy for everyone.  It’s feedback from you, the real users, that matters.

SharePoint Reporting for Project and Portfolio Management – Webinar October 17th 2PM EDT / 18:00GMT

Atidan is pleased to invite you to our live event on Thursday October 17th, 2013 at 2 PM EDT where we will demonstrate how to create project metrics, portfolio views, status reports, KPI’s and more with BrightWork for Microsoft SharePoint. BrightWork enables any organization to instantly deploy an affordable amount of project, portfolio and everyday work management, delivering immediate visibility and control.

Register here for Thursday October 17th!

During our demonstration, participants will learn about:

    • Managing projects with simple KPIs
    • Managing medium sized projects with metrics
    • Getting metrics from Microsoft Project into SharePoint
    • Managing across a portfolio of projects with metrics
    • Delivering status reports and personal reports

BrightWork’s suite of templates for project, portfolio and everyday work management includes a full spectrum of support for team members, project managers, program managers and project office teams. The Project Office Jumpstart includes templates for:

    • Project Management: Issue Manager, Project Lite, Project Standard, Project Structured, Agile Software Manager, IT Project Manager and Scrum
    • Portfolio Management: Issue Office, Projects Tracker, Project Office and Project Office Portfolio and Program Management Office
    • Demand Management: Project Request Tracker, Project Request Manager and Project Forecast Manager
    • Work Management: Work Tracker and Work Manager

Special Offer:

Through December 31, 2013, qualified Atidan clients can receive the BrightWork Project Office Jumpstart for $20K, a $35K value.

BrightWork Solution Data Sheet

Using SharePoint for Project Management

Free SharePoint 2010 / 2013 / Office 365 Templates from BrightWork

Contact the Atidan team for additional information about our project management and SharePoint solutions, development and support services: brightwork@atidan.com 

Project Office Jumpstart Offer from Atidan and BrightWork – Three Week PMO

Atidan is pleased to partner with BrightWork, the first collaborative Project and Portfolio Management solution built on Microsoft SharePoint. BrightWork enables any organization to instantly deploy an affordable amount of project, portfolio and everyday work management, delivering immediate visibility and control.

Contact us at brightwork@atidan.com for a personalized demonstration, free trial and for our special Project Office Jumpstart offer!

Have your SharePoint Project Office up and running in as little as three to four weeks!

The Project Office JumpStart uses best practices and a proven deployment approach to rapidly implement a fully working Project Office using Microsoft SharePoint, BrightWork and Atidan integration expertise.  The JumpStart bundle includes: (i) software; (ii) mentoring / training; (iii) support for one year. The JumpStart is available in both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.  SharePoint 2013 is coming very soon!

Software

  • 50 perpetual end-user licenses of BrightWork with all BrightWork templates included

Deployment Services

  • Project scoping, planning and setup, and needs definition
  • Installation and configuration of the BrightWork solution
  • Design of the local Project Office hierarchy
  • Configuration of at least 2 templates to manage 2 different project types
  • Configuration of 1 Project Office/rollup template for program level reporting across projects
  • Introductory training for support staff and end users

Support and Upgrades for 1 Year

  • Support & New Releases: access to all core product and template upgrades and releases including new platform upgrades.
  • Training Environment: access to the Customer Training Environment and associated training materials with the rights to customize as needed.
  • Health Check:  Atidan will conduct an annual Health Check to include advice and recommendations.

Pricing

  • Special offer through December 31, 2013: $20K

Templates

BrightWork sites are created using templates. BrightWork is supplied with number of templates of varying complexity, for managing work, single and multiple projects and managing project demand. You select the template you need based on the degree of project management process and structure that you require. Unlike with the SharePoint Site Gallery, you can examine and configure a template before you decide to use it. You can also create your own templates from project sites or other templates, allowing you to reuse a successful project site so that both you and your fellow BrightWork users will be familiar with it and harness lessons learnt from previous projects.

View our latest webinar HERE

View or latest presentation slides HERE

The current release of BrightWork includes:

The BrightWork templates are not just for project managers. BrightWork templates support the four main project roles typically involved in project management: (i) Team Members, (ii) Project Managers, (iii) Program Managers / Senior Managers and (iv) Project Office teams.

Manage Work Items Manage Single Project Manage Multiple Projects Manage Incoming Project Requests

Project Management Capabilities

There are a number of very well defined industry project management approaches such as the PMI®, PRINCE2®, MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework), SCRUM, SEI-CMMI®, etc. These models all define the process of project management in similar and at the same time different ways, however they all bring something valuable to the table.

Rather than map BrightWork to every model this page seeks to describe a common set of project management processes that are covered to varying degrees in most of the formal models and then to map BrightWork to these common processes.

Many of the common project management models break the project management discipline into key areas.  Presented here are a set of common project management key areas and the related support they receive from BrightWork on the SharePoint platform.

Project Management

BrightWork comes with a variety of single project management templates covering projects of different types. These templates can optionally have a Microsoft Project style project management schedule with task dependencies and an optional import / export with Microsoft Project.

All BrightWork project management templates come with many project reports (including Gantt reports, My Work reports, Work reports, Resource Usage Tracking reports, Issue reports and all with Charts and graphs). Importantly all of the reports can be distributed in a number of very flexible ways from the web-part user interface (e.g. printed, emailed and exported to Excel or XML or SQL Server).

Program Management

BrightWork comes out of the box with templates that give organizations a very fast starting point for managing across many projects.

As all BrightWork templates are delivered on SharePoint, they are extremely customizable using the normal features inherent in the SharePoint platform for customizing sites, lists, web-parts, etc.

Process Management

Organizations are typically so challenged when it comes to managing the actual projects, that managing the process that is used for project management becomes too much to get to in many cases. BrightWork allows organizations to bake the local processes into usable project management templates thus reducing the need for extensive process documentation, as the process of how to manage the project is largely contained in the template that the project teams use.

Next challenge is figure how to capture the actual project management process improvements that are used on real projects. BrightWork comes with a Templates area and with functionality that allows for the easy capture and subsequent reuse of best practices.

BrightWork also has hooks from the actual project sites to allow teams to point from the project site to process documentation as needed.

Product Management

Each of the lists in the BrightWork templates is composed of Special Columns (e.g. Visual Indicators, Unique Id’s, etc.) and BrightWork comes with enhanced SharePoint lists for the major work products of project management (e.g. Risks, Issues, Teams, Roles, Project Statement, Change Requests, Bugs, Iterations, Phases, Milestones, Goals, Commitments, Deliverables, Requirements, Project Post Mortem, etc.).  BrightWork will also work with custom lists your organizations defines for work products that are particular to your own organization.

Portfolio and Priority Management

Organizations have competing demands for limited resources.  Customers (whether internal or external) ask for new projects, extra deliverables on existing projects, support requests, minor enhancements, issues to be sorted, etc.  BrightWork has lists, reports and templates to facilitate the management of the different types of change requests, including templates to manage the pipeline of new work and project requests.

People Management (incl. Resource Management)

There is a huge variety in the work assigned to people right across any organization.

There is also a multitude of sources from which the work can be assigned. This is not ideal as it is harder to manage but it is the reality of managing work and projects in today’s dynamic organizations.

BrightWork eases the pain by making it easy to assign work or project assignments to individuals.

BrightWork also notifies or reminds people of the upcoming or overdue work on their plates.

BrightWork also delivers reports of who is assigned what work and also can indicate who is over loaded / under loaded.

Partner Management (incl. vendors and suppliers)

Many BrightWork customers use the project management templates to manage projects with external stakeholders like partners and vendors and customers.

Since BrightWork sits on SharePoint it is fully web accessible. BrightWork also has the unique capability to email project update reports from SharePoint to the various stakeholders.

Some BrightWork customers have added their external partners to their own sites while others have elected to use BrightWork Online, the hosted version of BrightWork.

Price, Cost and Budget Management

Most of the BrightWork lists and reports are setup to optionally support the tracking of planned and actual cost information.

Thus teams can elect to track or not track cost in BrightWork. Indeed some teams and templates may track cost and some may elect not to if this is the right decision for the organization.

The BrightWork reports have the unique facility added to SharePoint where they can total and display costs information from multiple lists in many different projects.

BrightWork also has the ability to chart and graph this cost information as needed.

Again BrightWork can be used to manage projects with or without cost information.

Unique Capabilities

BrightWork includes many unique capabilities and features that truly take SharePoint to the next level for successful project management.

Templates

The BrightWork templates approach means that you get to decide how much project management to apply in each situation. We think templates are so important that we gave them a section all of their own. <more>

Reporting

Work and Project Management is all about knowing what is going on. Is my project late? What work do I have to do today? One of the advantages of the SharePoint platform is that it so easily stores information in lists and libraries. However it is very difficult to get the information back from the same lists and libraries with the native SharePoint capabilities.

BrightWork includes many different report types (Gantt Charts; Project Status; Resource Tracking; Work Tracking; Issue Tracking; Charts and Graphs).

Reports can be Printed, emailed and exported to a variety of sources: Microsoft Excel (including to a web query); XML; and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

All reports are highly configurable through the BrightWork web part’s settings page and can be further reused, edited and extended via the BrightWork Reporter Library and Report Editor.

Smart Project Management

BrightWork also includes a number of SharePoint enhanced features for Smarter Project Management. See below for selection of highlights.

Project Metrics & KPIs

Project metrics are important because they give you and the other project stakeholders an easy, objective and scientific way of measuring the progress of the project, and also the grounds with which to make important decisions as to the direction and scope of the project. The BrightWork Project Metrics list enables you to track and capture metrics (e.g. number of red issues; Project Health; number of overdue items) relating to the project and feed this information to reports, charts and KPI web parts. The Metrics list also enables you to define Target, Warning and Danger ranges for the metric and to associate traffic light indicators (KPIs) with these ranges when the metric is compared to a fixed target value or to a value in another metric.

Status Reports

BrightWork of course includes live up to the minute status reports, but what if you wanted to review the project status from a week ago or a month ago? BrightWork includes a workflow that enables you to capture a snapshot of the current project status. This enables you to maintain a historical record of the progress of the project.

Enhanced Project Plan Syncing

The Microsoft Project Professional 2010 to SharePoint 2010 sync feature brings some much needed project collaboration to Microsoft Project; however, this does not mean that the feature cannot be improved for more streamlined project management. With the BrightWork Project Structured template, the relationship between the project site and the Microsoft Project plan is established automatically. Additional column mapping is provided for reporting on extra Microsoft Project data such as costs, baselines and durations.

Smart Site Copy

BrightWork includes a proprietary site copy feature that does not rely on the Solution Gallery and gives far greater granularity than is offered by vanilla SharePoint. Advantages to the BrightWork Copy Site feature include:

  • All Solution Gallery Issues are addressed and remedied
  • Assignee and Owner values are preserved
  • Ability to specify which list and library content (i.e. list items and documents) is copied
  • Views in sites that use the List View Web Part (LVWP) – likely if the source was originally upgraded from SharePoint 2007 – will be created using the new XSLT List View Web Part (XLV). See here for more information on the XLV.

Enhanced Lists

BrightWork includes a number of additional list types such as Project Risks, Project Goals, Project Statement that are designed with specific project management functions in mind.

All BrightWork lists included tailored alerts; assignee email notification and reference numbering.

Hierarchy Support

Out of the box SharePoint tends to treat every site like an island. BrightWork believes that this is not appropriate for organizations with more than one current project! BrightWork supports and enhances the SharePoint as a hierarchy concept, for example, every department (e.g. marketing, engineering) may have their own subset of projects. They will need a location where they can see rollup information pertaining to these projects in a single location. All BrightWork reports can report on sites located below them in the hierarchy. The hierarchy web part provides access to the hierarchy.

Atidan Releases ProjectExplore™ for iPad: Mobile Project Management for Microsoft Project Server

Atidan released today ProjectExplore™ for iPad, a mobile application for project managers to work with Microsoft Project Server 2010.  It provides a flexible and productive project management solution with the ability to view an enterprise dashboard of projects and resources, detailed individual project plans, resource & project allocations and work distributions.  ProjectExplore™ delivers the best of Microsoft Project Server 2010 in an elegant, intuitive and simple iPad application.

“Effective project management requires clear communication, fast decisions and efficient allocation of people and resources,” said Sophie Shuklin, Vice President, Atidan. “ProjectExplore™ provides real-time project information and reporting anywhere you need it to enable collaboration and the alignment of business priorities”.

This innovative iPad app does not require any Project server plugins and works with Windows Authentication.

Available for purchase from the Apple App Store with an introductory price of $4.99.  Download today!

Key features:

}  All Projects Summary (dashboard view)

  • Timeline and progress chart
  • Work distribution charts

}  Resource Center

  • Resource allocation plan with color indicators for over-allocation
  • Filter by resource name, dates

}  Project Plan

  • Search by project name
  • See detailed plan with hierarchical view of tasks
  • Apply filters to view completed tasks, specific resources, or dates

}  Export and Email

  • Email a project plan or all projects summary in .csv format

}  Connects to multiple project server sites

 

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