Posts of Blog

Google Apps - Embrace the Cloud!

2011-09-03T02:43:18.951Z

Many customer's ask us about the various ways that they can embrace the cloud and be more efficient. Here is a great video of the Google Apps for Business suite. It really speaks to the value of moving your messaging and collaboration apps to the cloud. Give us a call or email us to learn more about how to sign-up for Google Apps For Business.

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Organize your work and reach your highest goals!

2011-08-25T00:37:30.895Z

If you look at the market place for what most people think of as “project management” software, you’ll see that there is a fragmented set of solutions out there that address specific problems and do not address all of the needs that a project portfolio management (PPM) solution addresses.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

We highlight the major differences between manual, project management, and PPM solutions in the following table:

	No Software	Project Management Software	Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Software
Demand & Portfolio Management	Limited to no visibility to new project demand	Not included	Included; demand pipeline visibile and can be grouped together into portfolio views
Project Planning	Projects are run on an ad-hoc basis; results may miss the mark	Limited; some functions included depending on software selected	Included; ability to fully plan project, including stakeholders, goals, resources, scope, and risks
Work Breakdown Structure	Spreadsheet, Plan Documents	Included	Included
Project Scheduling	Spreadsheet, Plan Documents	Included	Included
Resource Management	Limited to no visibility to resource usage, availability, and productivity	Very Limited; usually consists of over- and under- allocation charts per resource	Included; ability to fully manage project and organization resources and define ad-hoc report requirements
Budget & Cost Management	Limited to no visibility on whether you are tracking over / under budget. No integration with back-office systems.	Not included	Included; real-time, centralized updates to budget and cost information
Project Health (Issue, Risk, and Action Item Management)	Rarely done if a solution not in place, leading to customer satisfaction problems, delayed projects, and cost over-runs.	Not included	Included; centralized management and quality control on project health
Project Collaboration (Documents, Status Reporting, Meeting Minutes, Social Features to connect colleagues and information)	Limited to no visibility to content; artifacts are stored in various locations	Limited; usually consists of email notifications from system	Included; centralized storage of all project collateral
Mobile Access	No remote access capabilities; need resources to be accessible for updates	Not included	Included; everyone can access centralized PPM capabilities from their current location

Upon reviewing the table above, you should have gleaned one major theme; project management software is not PPM software and maintaining the status quo could lead to problems.

Assess where you are at today...

If you are still wondering if you have any problems or symptoms resulting from the lack of a Project Management software or PPM process and solution, here is anoher piece of advice. Review the following list of questions and ask yourself if you can answer these today with the click of button. If you can, you are likely using a PPM tool and have ongoing success in terms of sales, profitability, and customer satisfaction. If you can’t answer a question, it’s likely that you have gaps in your Portfolio & Project Management processes.

What resources are not working on any projects or on less than the desired capacity?
Are you using a growing stack of post-it notes, to do lists, status reports, and project reporting spreadsheets to plan your company’s projects?
What administrative (non-billable / value added time) tasks do I have, who is working on them, and how prevalant are they?
Which projects are aligned with a given organization’s goal?
Which project milestones are being missed?
Is your team working on the most profitable projects?

Bottom Line

A PPM solution will serve as a repository to transfer the knowledge across the company of who is working on what, why, and when is it due. A PPM solution will help you to identify and continuously improve the linkage between your management, marketing, sales, and project team members.

Click here to learn more about our Agile Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software

The Agile Renaissance

2011-04-05T20:28:07.321Z

Reid & Associates is sponsoring a new LinkedIn group to help channel the thoughts of like-minded professionals interested in learning about pragmatic approaches to implementing and using Agile methodologies. Please join us on LinkedIn.

Summer 2011 Release for Agile PPM - Now Available For Free 15 Day Trial or Upgrade For Existing Customers

2011-04-08T14:29:34.261Z

Version 1.6 - Released April 7th, 2011 - We've added exciting new features around Agile Project Management using the "Scrum" pathway and other highly requested features.

To sign-up for a free trial click here and click the Get It Now Button. To upgrade your organization OR for any questions about this release, email us at agilepm@thinkreid.com

Agile Project Management

Added capability to do release and sprint level burndown charts!
Added capability to move sprint backlog items back into the product backlog.
Added capability to track backlog items against a product to create a product backlog.
Added capability to to track backlog items against a release (project), theme, sprint (new sprint object), or account.
Added capability to define tasks for a user story / backlog item.
Added capability to conduct sprint review, sprint retrospectives, and document definition of done for each backlog item.

Project Management

Added new workflow for team member's to get notified via email when new assignments get made.
Added new workflow for a project manager to escalate a risk, issue / action item, or decision.
Added capability to view a project plan assignments from any project detail screen.

Resource Management

Added capability to define resources as leads or users.
Added capability to easily keep track of resource allocations expected by resource.

General Demand, Portfolio, or Program Management

Added capability to link demand to opportunities and accounts.
Added method to prioritize all demand and create a scoring system to rank demand easily.

Dashboards and Reporting

We've added and enhanced reports and re-organized our reports into useful categories.
A new dashboard has been created for Project Managers and for Portfolio / Program Managers.
New report types have been created to enhance your reporting capabilities; all existing report types have been updated to include all the latest data elements.

Reid & Associates, LLC is Now Hiring!

2011-04-14T14:43:28.153Z

Reid & Associates, LLC is looking to hire exceptional employees or consultants into following positions:

Implementation Manager - Click on link to learn more and be considered as a candidate.
Salesforce.com / Force.com Architect - Click on link to learn more and be considered as a candidate.

To learn more about Reid & Associates, LLC, please visit: http://www.thinkreid.com/home/careers

NOTE: All Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Spring 2011 Release for Agile Project Portfolio Manager!

2011-02-19T04:55:45.245Z

It's been a while since we last released a new version of Agile Product Portfolio Manager (APPM) back in September, 2010. After much demand, we've enabled the product to support basic Agile / Scrum Project Management capabilities. You can define product backlogs, slot user stories to projects, sprints, etc. We've greatly improved the metrics you can capture and calculate automatically on projects and added small updates to the resource management and demand, portfolio, and program management tabs.

If you haven't yet had the opportunity to check out all the features of application, please check out our product overview page and get the latest version's free trial.

Here is a sampling of the features added this release:

Agile / Scrum Project Management

Due to the explosive growth of how company's are managing projects using Agile techniques, we've finally added much anticipated functionality to help you and your company start running your projects following an Agile methodology. In just a few days, you and your team can use the demand functionality to define a back log item to keep track of the pent up demand specific to your products and/ or services. Then, when you are ready to start working and elaborating on the needs of the backlog item, you can start keeping track of attributes like the project to associate the backlog item to, who the product owner is, and input high-level estimates of what it will take for the work to get done. You can define as many sprints as you'd like and then associate the features/backlog items/user stories to sprints.

Project Management

If your company has clients or resources in different locations, you'll be pleased to know that you can now keep track of your projects by geographic location. We've also rearranged the project screen based on user experience feedback received from our customers. Also, for those customers who need to cross references actual invoices to their project work, we've added this capability.

Resource Management

We've made it super easy to view a list of your organizations booked or open resource requests. You can even define not just labor resources, but material resources (e.g. think licenses, hardware, software, equipment, materials, printed materials, shipped materials, etc.)