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.
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.
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