The Winner Is… itensil
As I discussed in our last post, “A Consultant’s PMO”, we are looking for a PMO (Project/Program/Portfolio Management Office, take your pick) tool to form the core tool to help manage the business of the Centivity group. That is a group of independents that function as a single market entity that I’m affiliated with. Based on our selection criteria we have selected the Knowledge Apps™ tool from Itensil.
What we’ll do in today’s post is examine why we made this decision. Clearly, Itensil is not a household name and they certainly aren’t a large company so why would we make this decision. I believe there are some interesting answers.
The first thing to remember is that we are looking for a tool to manage a collection of projects, resources, documents and manage a collection of proposals, including the creation of those proposals. Consultants have to find work before they can do it. When we include the creation and management of proposals into the mix we extend the scope for our tool beyond just a traditional PMO application. We must also have the ability to manage resources and their activities that are not associated with any projects. Also, we have no expectation that one tool will do everything. Our goal is to minimize the portfolio of required software.
First we must decide how to minimize the required software. To do that we have to decide what functionality is needed in each tool. Besides the list of requirements identified in the last post, we need accounting functionality and project scheduling functionality. We need for the selected tool to connect with an accounting package. For the SMB (Small to Midsize Businesses) we chose Intuit QuickBooks for starters. It is not an elaborate tool but will service our needs. Other tools may be used instead of QuickBooks based on client requirements. As for project scheduling, I confess I’m a Microsoft Project bigot. There are many other tools and several are web-based. However, Project has been around for a long time, has many users and is a solid tool for most projects. It may run out of gas for very large projects and it may be overkill for very small projects. It is still a great overall standard for the majority of projects that we’ll run into. It too can be replaced based on client requirements.
For us, workflow is actually fairly significant. We need to standardize our business processes so we’re not reinventing how we do business with every project and proposal. That is a typical problem with small companies. We must position ourselves for an active future. Being able to incorporate automated workflow into our tools is very important, if not essential.
Now let’s focus on the available solutions. Before we start I want to acknowledge that many of you can provide many alternatives to the field of candidates we chose. We make no claims that our process was exhaustive. It did include representation of the major solution types of interest to us, like minimum cost, maximum project management features, strong document management and collaboration capabilities. First up is Google Docs. It is definitely the low cost leader. We are definitely very budget conscious so this was an early leader. However, it runs out of gas on many fronts very quickly. It’s OK for light document management and can provide some project management capabilities but, frankly, won’t build a lot of confidence in our prospective clients. It may be useful to get started but doesn’t meet the client sniff test.
Now let’s consider a Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint solution. This approach is very capable for document management, proposal management and non-automated workflow management. It’s fairly expensive and we’re pretty much on our own for doing the plumbing connections to other apps (obviously we can always hire help). This approach is not intrinsically cloud-based so there are some IT management requirements. We don’t need to worry about those things for a while. It would produce very capable tools but there would be more up front work than we want.
Next is the Project in a box solution. This is very much a document-centric approach with a heavy focus on lean project management. It is not intrinsically cloud-based which, like the Microsoft-centric approach, means more IT management. While having DSDM Atern artifacts built in is a big deal to me, it doesn’t provide a good all around solution. Connecting other apps to it is problematic. The fact that it is supported out of the UK is very inconvenient, not a deal killer but definitely a problem.
Finally, we’ll consider the Itensil Knowledge Apps™ approach. Their Knowledge Apps tool is basically a framework that is, in turn, customized to the customer’s requirements. That customization is remarkably easy and fast. Their basic offer includes a customized Knowledge App to help us get going quickly. They are cloud-based and, therefore, easily accessible by all of our project resources regardless of location. Workflow is built in, as shown in the diagram on the right, which is a huge deal for us. Wiki-based document management is strong, making collaboration on projects and proposals very easy. It can manage proposal creation as a project and supports other forms of collaboration as well. They can he
lp us with connecting the plumbing to other apps as well.
On the downside, they are a small company and there is some risk there. We have made arrangements with them that will mitigate that risk to our satisfaction. On the upside, they are a small company which makes other small companies (like us) a big fish in their pond. That’s a good thing. It offers functionality similar to Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 in a cloud-based format. That is another good thing.
Overall, we were impressed with the tool. We like what it is now and what it will become. Everyone on our side was excited with what they saw during the demo. Oh yes, and we like the price. It’s one of the more affordable tools which is a big thing to us small companies. I also believe that we have a good relationship with their management. I think they’ll deliver on everything they’ve promised. We’ll keep you posted.
This post has run over my word limit so I’ll stop now. I believe that we’ve made the right decision for our PMO needs. We are looking forward to customizing the Knowledge Apps framework and working with Itensil to grow their product (the big fish in a small pond effect). Let me know if you have any questions.
Stay tuned for more…
A Consultant’s PMO
StrAIT Advisors is a part of the Centivity group. That group is a collection of independent companies which have committed to work together collaboratively, sharing resources and knowledge as one seamless group similar to what I have described in an earlier post. To manage such a group, we need to be able to collaborate, manage projects, manage proposals and share resources effectively in order to compete with larger, established traditional companies.
Essentially, what we need is an extension of a Project Management Office, or PMO, to accommodate everything. To that end, we have been searching for such a tool based on the criteria listed below:
- Supports Agile methodologies
- Web-based application
- Manages proposals like projects
- Resource leveling across multiple projects, possibly many small projects
- Time and Resource accounting
-
Collaboration
- Within project team
- External to project team but within same company
- External to project team
- Within project team
- Integrates with scheduling tool (MS Project)
- Document Wikis developed by sub-teams with sign-offs
- Similar functionality to MS Groove (MS SharePoint Workspace 2010)
- Integrated workflow
These criteria are distilled from several sources, including “Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO: Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed” (if they tried harder they could probably come up with a longer title). The image on the left is linked to that book. The experience of our team also played a major role in these specifications. From the book we extracted some common attributes for successful PMOs, listed below:
- Gather and report the initial portfolio information (see Table 14.4 for an example of the initial information required).
- Develop the goals, resource and asset portfolios (described in later chapters).
- Link project, goals, resource and asset portfolios, and perform an initial assessment.
- Determine the organization’s multi-project strategic resource (described in this chapter and in Chapter 17).
- Prioritize the project portfolio according to accepted criteria and the information currently available.
- Assess portfolio balance.
- Develop recommendations for improving ROI.
- Facilitate the Governance Board meeting and communicate the results.
Clearly, these attributes don’t include anything about managing a portfolio of proposals or a pool of project specific resources. There is also no mention of the project or resource accounting needs. However, once these considerations were added we had a reasonably complete set of requirements for our shopping trip for tools to manage our business.
We have neither the time nor the resources for an exhaustive shopping trip. We let the marketplace and our previous experience help us generate our short list. No one tool will address all of our needs so we included ease of integrating our main tool with other specialty tools, like accounting and project scheduling tools. The approaches considered are Google Docs, Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint, Itensil Knowledge Apps and Project in a box.
Google Docs offers a low cost, easily accessible solution to our basic needs. It definitely wins the cost comparison. The Microsoft products are very professional tools with an excellent support ecosystem (very important to a small group like ours) and some mature products. The Itensil Knowledge Apps is a tool from a small, new company that seems to have an intriguing offering and can provide more personalize attention. The Project in a box offering is very affordable and offers built in support for my preferred agile project management methodology, DSDM Atern. Every option has something to say for it, which is why they are on the list. The other tools most likely to be part of the solution are Microsoft Project and Intuit QuickBooks.
I will report on our selection in next week’s post. As always, your comments would be much appreciated. Stay tuned for the results…
First Use – Mindjet MindManager 9
I just upgraded my copy of Mindjet MindManager to version 9 and I wanted to update you on this tool. This isn’t going to be a product review in the sense of a list of features and my opinion on them. You can get that elsewhere in more detail than I can provide in my 500 to 800 word limit for this blog post. Last year I made another blog post on mind mapping that you can see here. You can review the whole idea of mind mapping here. I’ll try to offer something new and different in this post. However, for those of you who don’t want to look at my last post I will summarize the main point. Mind mapping is simply a technique that allows us visual thinkers the opportunity to capture some of our ideas in a visual way while retaining enough structure to keep our thoughts in context. I have included a link to the Mindjet site in their logo above. Just click on it and you can go there and check it out for yourself. The other image I’ve provided is just one of the templates that are installed along with the package. It’s here just to give you some context to what I’m talking about.
The only new capabilities I’ll discuss are the new Gantt chart feature and its improved utilization of resources. In earlier versions of the product, if you were using it on a laptop with just battery power, it would suck the life out of the battery in a hurry. They seem to have improved that with this version. That’s big if you’re using it on the road. The Gantt chart feature is also helpful if your chart includes linked topics (tasks in a project plan). It will display a Gantt chart which is useful for small, simple projects. If you want to include more complex projects in your map, the ability to export and import tasks between MindManager and Microsoft Project is very useful. Another non-feature I’m very happy with is the ability to make full use of a large monitor. My second monitor is 22″. In older versions of MM when I moved the diagram to the large monitor and told it to expand to full screen, it would only use a portion of the available real estate. I found that very frustrating. That is now fixed. That may not sound like a big deal 
but as your maps grow in size and complexity, being able to fully use a large monitor is a very big deal.
I am making extensive use of this tool in constructing the courses and strategy for the TechExecs Professional Growth Network, or PGN. It has been the subject of my last two blog posts (here and here). If you are using an approach like the one described in “Training the Active Training Way” it’s very handy to be able to build a core framework of the class in one section of the map and tie it to the appropriate sections of the methodology in another section of the map. We visual thinkers find that a much more useful way to keep the course structure aligned with the ideas presented in the book. Obviously, you can accomplish the same goal in a word processor like MS Word but this approach is much faster.
One idea under consideration is if mind mapping itself should be in the course material. Personally, I believe that it deserves some attention. What may complicate it a little is that not all mind mapping techniques are the same. For example, if you go the mind mapping link provided above you will see diagrams with a much more organic look to them. That was the original concept in mind mapping as invented by Tony Buzan years ago. I find that form of mind mapping to be a more deeply creative approach. That’s good for students but less useful for business use. The advantage of the approach taken by the Mindjet folks is its integration into MS Office tools and its enormously flexible visual outline style. Business analysis and decision making is a fundamentally hierarchical process that lends itself to the MindManger approach quite nicely for visual thinkers. Indented outlines can be very constraining to creative thought.
I’d like to encourage you to look at this tool and take it for a test drive. There are other tools available, like FreeMind (free) and iMindMap (similar price to MindManager). They are good tools as well. Heck, take them all for a test drive. I think that you will find at least one of them to your taste. I’d love to hear any comments you have on mind mapping being part of the PGN course material.
Thanks for stopping by…
Consulting Ecosystems – What’s Next
(Originally posted on 4/28/10 and reposted 8/10/10 due to technical problems)
I was recently at a SIM (Society for Information Management) dinner. The speaker was Jim Stikeleather, CTO of Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems). The title of his presentation was “Next Generation Computing”. I’m not going to try to repeat the presentation here, he did a much better job than I could do (it was a good presentation). I will focus on a few of the points he made. They relate to my last post, “A Consulting Ecosystem“. In that post, I warned you that there would be more on the topic. Well, here is the next installment.
I have included three slides from his presentation. All of these images are linked to full size versions, so click on them if you want to see the details of the slides. I have also included a PDF version of the full presentation here. The presentation includes some specific information about Dell Services that may be of interest to you as well.
In my last post I discussed the idea of the “Hollywood” business model and what it meant for small consulting companies. This presentation provided some of the inspiration for those views. I believe what I liked most about it was that our views of the future were so similar. Obviously, if he agrees with me he must be right on target. In the above slide he identified 
the trends and drivers in play. The point here is that as computing functionality becomes more available and less expensive, it can be more widely used. It also makes it less of a differentiator for individual companies. I have long believed that computing power has no intrinsic value. Its only value comes from those business capabilities that are enabled by its use. I’m sure that view is not well received by much of the IT community but my experience proved to me long ago that this is true.
I think another interesting point is show in the slide covering the evolution of cloud computing. In this slide, he provides a vision for the evolution toward the federation of cloud resources and applications. In this context, a “federation” means using multiple cloud applications together to meet a business goal or goals. What this means to me is that we should see more and more “specialist” applications being mashed-up and used together. This idea is some time away but I believe it is a reasonable expectation since we’re seeing it today to some extent. As standards mature this trend should accelerate.
Some of the slides in this presentation offer a specific timeline with forecasts by year. While these forecasts seem reasonable, I am a little nervous about forecasting specifics far into the future. However, I do agree with the overall trends. I do believe our comfort level with the use of cloud-based applications will grow steadily over time. I believe that standards will continue to mature. I do believe that more and more organizations will want someone else to provide the computing infrastructure. I believe that cloud-based applications will become more capable over time. I believe that the physical infrastructure of the cloud will become more capable and reliable over time.
The presentation document speaks to business process outsourcing, or BPO, more that the speaker actually did. The presentation was very interactive and so it was hard to get to everything. As a disclaimer, I must mention that my business does not include BPO but does include the analysis of business processes. The two are separate but the analysis work is often part of a larger consulting engagement for BPO firms. The question here is very personal for each BPO customer. Essentially, it boils down to whether a prospective customer is comfortable with their business process living outside their firewall. The data that I’ve seen implies that small to midsize businesses (SMB) are signing up quickly but larger businesses are taking more time to decide. It’s basically a cost reduction decision with some business simplification thrown in to the mix.
I can’t say that I’m as enthusiastic about this as the other topics of the presentation. Besides that, I can’t find a consistent definition of what BPO “2.0″ means. I’m going to assume in this post that it means more pervasive use of BPO than “1.0″ versions and includes the idea of federated BPO providers. Having run many manufacturing business processes over the years, I struggle with the idea of my business processes living outside the firewall. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. The closer an application lives to my company’s P&L, the closer I like it to be to me. I just worry about the exposure to cloud-centric risks like a patch or upgrade to the application coming as a surprise.
In conclusion, I think this presentation was valuable in that it collects insight from various sources, not just Dell/Perot. It did include some Dell/Perot sales material but that’s to be expected and wasn’t emphasized by the speaker. I encourage you to take a harder look at the presentation. It has some valuable nuggets of information. It does support the notion that the technology world is evolving in a direction which will allow smaller consulting companies to be far more scalable and effective than ever before (good news for us!).
Thanks for stopping by.
Training in a Social World
Now that we’re in to course design for the TechExecs Professional Growth Network (that’s the new name) I’ve confirmed that’s it is really a lot of work if you want to do it well (big surprise). To that end we’ve settled on using the active training techniques laid out in “Training the Active 
Training Way” by Mel Silberman for our base framework. Notice that I use the word “framework”. We don’t want to build just more “cookie cutter” professional training courses. We want a format that integrates the social component that TechExecs does well with a solid foundation of training best practices.
Clicking on the book image on the left will take you to its Amazon.com page where you can find out more about it. For more information on the whole idea of active training and what Mel Silverman is all about, click on the Active Training icon on the right. What attracted us to this approach is that it recommends various components that should be present in some form to achieve the desired course objectives. Our objective is to provide practical advice to IT professionals and leadership to help them build a better bond with their customers, either internal or external to their company. That means incorporating real world insight from multiple sources as well as a means for members to collaborate on customer relationship topics and business skills.
Most of us have been to some form of training at some point in our careers that failed to keep our attention and interest. When that happens, not only do we not gain anything from the training but we may actually become more negative about the subject in general. That problem becomes more acute today since wireless technology lets us do many things from any location. The students can engage in email exchanges on their phones or laptops. They can surf the web. They can even watch a movie or other video. For those of us who will be delivering the course content the bar has been raised for being interesting and relevant.
This is why Silberman’s work is so useful. He talks about some social interaction prior to the start of the class, getting the student’s brain engaged early and getting students more involved during the class. He discusses blending eLearning into the mix and helping them retain what they’ve learned. That plays well into the whole idea behind TechExecs which is 
to create a collaborative community of senior IT professionals. His inclusion of both social content as well as eLearning makes this approach an ideal fit for the TechExecs PGN.
We also have to have some overall view of what the PGN can be in the long term. While all the pieces won’t be there on day one, it’s vital that we have some form of a roadmap. Having done a tour of duty in the world of software product management, I can assure you that the absence of a roadmap for the growth of your software will result in a poor feature set as well as slow delivery. The same is true for training (just another product). The trick is not to get lost in “analysis paralysis”. We must have a basic roadmap but leave it open enough to adapt to what we learn from our experience and our customer’s needs.
That’s the trick. Taking one part lecture, one part coaching, one part social interaction, one part eLearning and one part collaborative environment then rolling them up into one cohesive offering that provides genuine value to our members. That will undoubtedly be an iterative process that includes as much feedback from our membership as possible. I’ve already received some feedback and offers of help. I will be following up on those offers as soon as I get a little more work done on the framework for the PGN. I still want to encourage more feedback from our members on what structure would be the most valuable to you.
This is tough work for us non-career trainers (that’s me whining) but I believe that the final product will be worth it. Stay tuned for more and don’t be afraid to speak up.
Thanks for stopping by…