Too often people purchase a new project management software solution and want to put their first project in right away, without doing the 'homework' first. Before you enter in any information, be sure to follow your software provider's best practices.
Attend the webinars
The first step with Project Insight is to understand the global settings in the system administration. You may do this by attending one of our webinars. It's an hour well spent! It is very simple to enter data in our software, however, the key is WHAT data or information SHOULD you put in the solution? Once you have attended the webinar, you will have a foundation for doing the homework assignment.
Read the Best Practices
We have developed Best Practices on many subject areas. It is a good idea to read and understand these documents as step two. You will find these resources in our customer Community.
Do your homework
We provide you with an outline of questions that you need to ask yourself and quite possibly the entire team. I won't reiterate the whole list here, but as an example, let's take project types. You will need to populate your global settings with the list of project types that your team performs. In some cases, you may already know what the list is. However, it is also beneficial to ask the project team members, so that your list is complete and thorough, and you don't have to change it later. In our example of project types, this information is tied to the reports and dashboards. So, you will want to ask yourself, how would I, or my management team, like to see this data rolled up? Make sure the terminology is familiar and agreed upon. Do this for each of the global settings.
Input the information
Now that you have an understanding of the functionality, you have read the best practice documents and met with your team, you are ready to input the information. This will lay the foundation for the project managers to input their projects and templates. When they go in to add their projects, all the pull down menus and select lists will be in place to make their jobs easier!
Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight
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West is Vice President at Project Insight where she oversees the sales and marketing efforts for the project management company. West is a ‘serial entrepreneur‘ with over 15 years of experience in IT. She specializes in building the sales infrastructure for new companies or divisions.