Project Management Software Implementation and Adoption Best Practices

When building a full service integrated application for portfolio and project management many factors must be considered. The “home grown” approach can be the right decision if you really need to substantially customize your application for your team’s needs. On the other hand, there are some drawbacks as well.

-Your application is unique and does not benefit from the economies of scale that are provided by commercial applications.
Commercially available applications are buoyed by hundreds of customers who demand new feature sets. This forces the software vendor to provide constant updates in order to keep its customer base happy.

-Upgrade costs for home grown applications may be costly.
Whatever technology platform you build upon, the upgrade costs for subsequent releases of database engines and security standards will require you to foot 100% of the bill.

Many companies have custom built applications that no longer run securely on an old operating system platform. The problem with this is that the custom applications will often not run on upgraded systems and must be migrated (and re-programmed) by a custom developer to meet the new requirements.

-The cost of fixing bugs may be high.
As no other company is using your application, this means that no one else will be investing in fixing the problems…just your organization.

- The risk factors of custom built “one-off” applications are many.
According to a 2001 Standish Group report, only 28% of all business enabling projects are completed on time and on budget. The delay in the other 72% is caused in large part to the miscommunication between the people developing the technology and the people deploying the technology.

Proper software development involves the culmination of specialized knowledge and vast intellectual resources into a proper solution. The solution must have solid standards for proven processes, having invested thousands of hours in programming, while maintaining the flexibility to adapt those processes into the unique aspects that are part of your business. Pulling all of these things together in a one-off custom application can require budgets far into six figure amounts.

If you have never deployed a business critical custom software application within your company, please speak with somebody who has before making this investment. If you have, make certain that you review the real cost of the deployment and evaluate the end results carefully to properly estimate the cost of building a complete project and portfolio management solution.

Choosing an enterprise project and portfolio management solution is only part of a successful software implementation. When choosing project and resource managment software, you must also choose a solution ‘partner’ not just a vendor, to assure a smooth implementation.

First, you need a well thought out implementation plan executed by an experienced team. Some of our customers have experienced software implementation project managers and business process consultants on staff who fill that requirement. However, many of our customers do not. The Project Insight team has over 10 years in the web based project management software market and can provide you with expertise.

To take advantage of Project Insight’s powerful features, you must have objectives clearly outlined and a timeline for achieving each objective. Again, if you have professional business process personnel on your team, you may ask them to map these objectives out. If not, Project Insight can help you document the scope of the implementation and the impact it may have on your existing processes. Based on this analysis, you can assemble the appropriate team of internal personnel, and we can provide our resources to complete the project software implementation successfully, on time and within budget.

Implementing enterprise software is easy if you have expectations outlined and a workflow with well-defined states. Based on our experience in deploying Project Insight, we have developed a consistent and highly effective workflow for the implementation of process optimization software across the organization. This workflow ensures that implementation is successful, rapid and within budget.

The implementation workflow consists of the following steps:

• Analyze your business needs and identify the best practices achieving your goals
• Define your objectives and the deliverables of the project
• Plan your organization’s implementation
• Model the global settings to fit your business processes
• Integrate the Project Insight software into your existing processes and systems
• Look at the total picture
• Deploy the solution across the organization
• Train users and teams to achieve user acceptance
• Support the software to ensure continued success
• Measure the success of the initiative at specific intervals

Analyze Your Organization's Needs
Analyze your existing business processes to determine what processes you need to optimize as well as the timeline and desired outcome of each process. To do this, interview key personnel and collect data to make sure that the right needs have been identified and determine how the Project Insight software addresses them. (If you need assistance with these steps, our trainers are available for hire.)

The business analysis identifies what processes can be optimized, automated, streamlined or completely redesigned. Often, the apparent problem is a symptom of a more serious, underlying inefficiency. An in-depth analysis can determine the root cause. Many organizations try to address the symptoms while ignoring the source of the problem. For example, if you are having problems invoicing clients on time you should determine the cause. Is it the accounting system, the time tracking system, lack of integration between the two systems, inaccuracies and double entries, or too many manual steps in between?

Define Objectives
Optimization goals and objectives are set based on the detailed analysis of your business process. Set the goals and objectives to be attained. It is important to clearly define the objectives of the enterprise software project. The objectives must be clear and quantifiable. Your goals are the major metrics used to measure success. Examples of objectives are: reduce invoice cycle by two weeks; improve project on time delivery; increase customer retention rate by 10%; and improve employee productivity by 5%.

At each stage of the implementation process, you must ensure that the goals and objectives are being respected. For example, if your goals include improving the project on time delivery to +/- 10%, then you must make sure you analyze your existing delivery issues and current timeframes.

Plan the Implementation
After defining needs and processes to be optimized, we can demonstrate the various features of the Project Insight solution offers and decide on the functionality and features that are required for your specific needs.

Then decide when to rollout each feature set based on your business priorities. Project Insight offers the flexibility for phased and scaled deployment without impacting the overall system. For example, if you decide that your urgent need is for understanding what your resources are doing and how much work they are assigned to, then we can train you on project scheduling and resource management first, leaving less important objectives for completion at a later date. This greatly reduces the risk and maximizes success.

Model Project Insight to Your Business Processes
After deciding on the implementation plan, we can help you obtain adoption of the Project Insight software within your organization. Based on the features used, we can help you document your organization’s best practices and processes.

Business modeling is an extremely important step in the implementation process. You can work closely with our application experts that have a strong knowledge of your business and industry. Each business requirement is different, but our specialized experts can help you achieve that fine balance between ease of use and your organization's detailed analysis and reporting requirements. It is always a compromise between ease of use, minimum overhead and capturing important information for proper business process management and operational control.
This Business Modeling process consists of several steps:

• Organization Breakdown Structure (OBS): Maps your organization such as sites, departments, business units (or cost centers), teams, and employees

• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): Maps your work hierarchy such as customers, engagements, products, projects, tasks, and work types

• Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS): Hierarchical organization of resources that facilitates both roll-up reporting and summary resource scheduling by enabling you to schedule at the detailed requirements level, and roll-up both requirements and availabilities to a higher level

• Terminology: Maps Project Insight software terminology for OBS, WBS, RBS and document terms to fit your organization’s standards. This step minimizes the learning curve of the new application and increases the comfort level of using the Project Insight solution on a daily basis

• User Roles: Defines the different roles required to successfully use the new processes. It also defines access rights to the system. Roles can include Team Members, Project Schedulers, Project Managers, Executives and Report Viewers, Systems Administrators, Invoice Managers, Timesheet Approvers, Expense Report Approvers, and Issue Managers.

• System Global Settings: Global settings may be customized to match your organization’s terminology.

Integration and Pre-Deployment Planning

Pre-Deployment
If you plan to integrate Project Insight with other enterprise solutions, then a pre-deployment phase can occur. At this stage, identify existing processes and systems that can need to interact with the Project Insight solution or that can benefit from the information available from the new processes.

Integration between the new and existing processes is a major point of failure if not handled correctly. Identify how Project Insight affects all the dependant processes and eliminates inconsistencies or redundancies. A critical aspect of process integration is eliminating redundant data and repeated entries in multiple systems. All processes must tightly integrate and data must seamlessly flow across the different processes. For example, suppose your organization is using an existing time tracking solution that is working well, and you want to push data from that system into Project Insight. Make sure that your team does not have to enter data in two solutions.

Business Intelligence and reporting are key benefits of the Project Insight solution implementation. Take the time to analyze data captured by the new processes and see how they can integrate with existing data to improve accuracy and timeliness of reports. For example, implementing the time tracking features of the system with advanced cost and billing capability can generate valuable data instantly; this data can then be used for better project status, cost, revenue and work in progress reporting.

Finally, develop a detailed deployment plan that schedules and assigns all the critical components for a successful implementation based on your organization’s requirements.

Deployment
Based on the actions taken in the previous steps and the integration requirements you may have, it is recommended to roll out the solution to a set of early adopters. Select your pilot group carefully to make sure it has a true representation of the organization. You must communicate the project's strategic importance to the pilot group. We can make sure that we provide enough training to the pilot group to make sure they are at ease with the Project Insight solution. In addition, we recommend that there are clear communication channels for user feedback and comments during the pilot process.

The pilot group can allow us to find the weak spots in our planning and resolve them before the organization roll out. This can also improve user acceptance of the new processes since they feel that they have participated in the deployment, and the solution was not imposed on them.

Now the time has come for us to put all our pre-planning to the test. Based on the size of the installation, it may be more beneficial to follow a phased deployment approach. Implementing Project Insight in a phased manner gives you quick wins and momentum even initially. In addition, users can learn the new system more efficiently in smaller increments, resulting in immediate productivity gains.

The phased approach also gives us more time to understand and assess your future requirements, and to make changes more easily during the implementation process. Phasing the project also reduces risk, partly because risk is easier to manage in smaller chunks. Moreover, defining the scope of the project well in advance and breaking it down into phases minimizes surprises and isolates potential problems.

Training
Training scenarios vary depending on your requirements, the number of employees being trained and the features being implemented. We can employ a train-the-trainer approach, where internal resources are trained on the system, and then in return train other users. This is usually more cost effective for end-user training, where the related functionality is limited. Training by certified trainers is recommended for administrators, support personnel, and power users.

To achieve the maximum results, we usually start by training the systems administrators. They then take some time to input information in the global settings. Once relevant data is set up in the global settings, we can turn to the project manager training. This covers all of the project creation, scheduling, resource management, and other functions that are not relevant to basic team members.

Then when team members are trained, we highly recommend training functional and/or departmental teams together. Entire teams must receive training together, and all teams within a group should receive training during the same time frame. Experience has shown that team focused rather than employee focused training can create excitement and reduce resistance to the new process. Teamwork also increases and encourages the adoption of the Project Insight solution since everyone starts using it at the same time and follows the same track.

If your team plans to use the Project Insight Software Development Kit (SDK), web services or other integration tools, then we highly recommend reserving some training hours for these key individuals.

As you add new team members and/or employees, they may attend the free weekly webinar as an introductory session.

Measuring Success
Throughout the software implementation, we can ask you to measure the success of the project at every milestone based on the goals and objectives set at the start of the implementation project. After the completion of each phase, analyze the results achieved and compare them against the initial goals. Also analyze the improvement in the process and the savings achieved based on results of using the new software.

An organization’s requirements change over time and/or new requirements arise that were not considered during the initial installation. To ensure that Project Insight is producing the most optimal results based on the current business environment, it is wise continuously monitor, evaluate, and communicate what needs to be changed (this is typically done once every six months). The main objective of the periodical evaluation is to recommend system, process or people changes/realignments that may be needed to increase efficiency.

We learn a great deal about your organization and its processes during implementation. Project Insight, in collaboration with your team, can be able to provide you with an analysis and recommendation of what other processes can be streamlined or require closer scrutiny to further improve efficiency, drive down cost, and improve revenue.

Support
To ensure successful implementation and optimal usage of the software you must invest in resources that can help you reach the desired outcome. Make sure that feedback from users is acted upon quickly and any issues or problems that arise are handled in a timely fashion to reduce resistance and guarantee success.
Support is conducted as follows:

• User support: You select two individuals who are the systems administrators of Project Insight to act as the designated support contacts. The end users will send support queries from the ‘Help’ ‘Request Support’ feature inside of Project Insight. These questions get routed to the two designated support contacts.

• Project Insight support: Your contract allows the two designated support contacts to phone and or email in for technical support. We prefer to receive support queries directly from the application as well as a lot of information is conveyed to the technical team, such as browser type, page your having a problem on, etc.

Conclusion
The cost savings, benefits, and efficiencies that result from using Project Insight will be realized if your team plans ahead before the implementation is completed. The methods above are proven techniques that we have used with many customers. To attain your goals in time and within budget you must follow a well-defined and proven workflow with measurable results at each milestone in order to ensure full and seamless integration of the software into the organization.

The Project Insight professional services team has in depth experience in enterprise software deployment with more than 500 customer implementations worldwide. If you need assistance with any of these steps, our Professional Services team can help.

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

I've blogged about this before, but when implementing any software solution, whether project management or other, the executive leadership should play a key role. The leadership needs to sponsor, support and stress the importance of attending the training sessions. In fact, it is a wonderful idea to have the leadership attend the sessions. Why? They have incredibly valuable input to offer and they will assure that they not only lead by example, but also get the results they desire.

Real World Examples of What NOT to Do

We had one customer purchase our software, then turn around and tell the team it did not matter whether they attended training or even if they used the solution. When we called this executive on the carpet about these statements, he said this, "They are grown ups. I can't tell them what to do...." Needless to say, the results were terrible. Some folks used the software, others did not. Result? Unreliable data.

Another example comes from a several hundred team member roll out. This customer's leadership did not state the ground rules during attendance of training. So, while our trainers did clearly state, please do not bring mobile phones and notebook computers, this was disregarded. While the team members were present in body, they were not present in mind. Result? The customer asked our trainers to return to re-train people that had attended training in this way, wasting their valuable time and money.

Best Practices of What TO Do

1 - Create a communication plan to let team members and stakeholders know why the training is important. After all, it is going to improve your current challenges and improve your business processes, right? Then communicate your message frequently until it is heard by all. 

2 - Make the training required for key stakeholders, not optional. Why? Life intrudes...that is to say, work is always there and present and it is easy to say to ones' self that work is more important than investing in improving processes.

3 - Assess the team member's knowledge after the training. Either have the team members take a test displaying product knowledge, or sit down with each individual and assure yourself they they understand enough to accomplish your goals.

4 - Ask the team to aggregate questions in Project Insight. Use the issues item type. Then meet with the team once a week. Pull up your issues/questions list. Have your power users answer all basic questions. If there are questions that remain, of course, email those over to our support team to get the answers. Then follow through in the next meeting with the answers. That way everyone feels heard.

5 - Document your business process decisions. As you decide how to use the project management software, you may want to create 'QuickStart Guides.' These are quick reference documents or articles in Project Insight that tell users, by role, how you want them to use the solution. If you do not have time to invest in this, our Professional Services team would be happy to help you with this exercise. This is valuable on many levels: when you hire new team members, they may learn from the guides, if you use the software with contractors, partners, or vendors, they can learn on their own, and it will remind you of the decisions you made should you forget down the road.

6 - Create an incentive for your team to learn, use and adopt the software. It can be something tangible like a bonus, or simply add it as an element to your performance review process. One customer had a team bonus for the successful implementation (defined by them) of Project Insight, all or nothing! It was very motivating and they hit their goal.

As Goethe wrote, "Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." Be bold!

 I'll never forget the conversation I had with an editor from a well-known IT publication who remarked with sincerity, ‘no one cares about project management.' Since then, with that comment in the back of my mind, I've noticed how many cool projects are being performed. Of course, my personal access to these projects is from our customer base.

Last month, NASA held its annual PM Challenge meeting and show. We exhibited at the show and a few of our customers stopped by to say hello. During these conversations, one PI team member mentioned his latest project. He is one of those intimidating, brilliant Ph.D. ‘rocket scientists.' The team is currently using Project Insight to develop a mirror which will help take better photos of stars. As you all know from the child's song, stars twinkle. This movement makes it difficult to get decent photos of stars. The mirror project will ‘deflect the photons' so the image can be stilled for a better picture. If you are a rocket scientist reading this, please forgive the over simplification here.....

Cool, huh? Share with us your projects!

As we all know, the Project Management Institute (PMI) definition of a project is a ‘temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.' By definition a project is unique, meaning that no two are exactly alike. However, most organizations have projects that they repeat on a monthly, quarterly or even more frequent basis. For these efforts, it makes sense to create a project template.

To create a good project template, get your team together in a meeting room or virtual conference call, and encourage participation. The purpose of this meeting is to gather all of the tasks or work that the project requires. Each participant may have valuable information to add, which is why you want all team players involved. Plus, if you build a project schedule with everyone's input, you will earn more ‘buy-in.'

Activities or tasks

Write down all of the individual tasks on sticky notes and place them on a white board or wall. Initially, do not worry about the task order, just get all of the required steps down. Once the team is satisfied that they have listed all the activities or tasks that will comprise your project, then you can create the order or work breakdown structure (WBS). Do this by putting the sticky notes in outline format on the white board. It is helpful to use a work breakdown structure (WBS) format which is like an outline format for your project tasks. For example:

1.0

2.0

3.0

          3.1

                   3.1.1

                   3.1.2

          3.2

          3.3

Group your tasks under appropriate umbrella or summary tasks. Once you have ordered your tasks and the team agrees to the order and structure, you should then ask, to what level do we want to manage the work? Some teams outline every miniscule task but then decide that they do not want to manage at that detailed a level. This seems particularly true of fast-paced environments. The faster the pace, the higher level the team should manage the work. Otherwise, the team will rapidly get bogged down in updating tasks, rather than performing work.

Once the above is complete, you can build the tasks into a formal schedule, using either Microsoft Project desktop or an enterprise project management solution.

Resource types or skill sets

The next step is to associate the appropriate skill set or resource type with each task or activity in your WBS. Because you may vary the actual resources you end up assigning to tasks, a good template is built with resource types in them so you can make assignments at the last moment.

If you do not have a standard list of skill sets required for your projects, you will first need to build consensus on what that list should contain. Once the list of agreed upon skill sets is made you may associate each task with a skill set. The value of associating tasks with skill sets is that when you turn to forecast your resource needs, you will know what types of resources you require prior to making assignments.

Duration and work

The next step is to decide how much time in days each task should take. This is called duration, or the total timeframe given from start to finish. This is distinguished from the work or effort of a task. For example, a task might take eight hours to complete, but a resource may be given 5 working days to complete the work.

Once approximate duration is given to each task, then move to adding in the amount of work or effort each activity requires. It is always a good idea to pad the estimates a bit, but not too much, so you build in a buffer into your template. Adjustments may be made later depending on the seniority of the ultimate resource assigned and the like.

Dependencies

Your template will require task dependencies as well. Project tasks are best managed as a network of interdependent tasks requiring accurate duration estimates as the basis for project planning. Dates should be calculated based on the relationships of the tasks and the duration of the tasks that must be completed for the successful completion of the project as a whole.

Here are the basic task types:

1. Finish-to-start
2. Start-to-start

3. Finish-to-finish
4. Start-to-finish

Once these dependencies are defined in the project schedule, they may be displayed in a Gantt chart.

Budgets

If you are planning to track labor costs and/or fixed costs, you will need to input a general budget into your template as well. Stay as generic as possible with your figures so that you may copy over as many budgeted tasks as possible. Naturally, you will need to review the data in your template upon launching an actual project.

Documents and standardization

Many project teams also decide upon a standard set of documents that correspond to projects by type. For example, if you need to have a project scope form filled out, then that standard document may be associated with your project template. In Project Insight, you may set up a standard folder structure with forms or document templates in them. These will carry over with each new project you create. If you prefer to use custom items as forms, these may be linked to the documents repository as well.

Alerts

If you want to leverage all of the cool features of Project Insight, you may also set auto-alerts by role on your project templates. These will carry over to new projects, cutting down the time it takes to set up new projects.

Conclusion

After completing all these steps, you should have a working project template that you and your project team can re-use for similar projects or efforts. If you take the time to create a complete template, this will save you a lot of time moving forward when launching projects of a similar nature.

Remember to include all team participants in the planning stages and to HAVE FUN.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, two completely separate companies had finally decided to abandon using desktop applications like MS Project and Excel to manage project schedules and resources. Their challenges were similar. Sharing project schedules by emailing MS Project files around was confusing and time consuming, as team members were never sure which version was the most recent one. Project managers were tired of running around asking team members for updates. They had been reduced to glorified administrators, instead of career project leaders. Executives were frustrated by not having visibility into the overall portfolio of projects.

Something had to change! However, the manner in which these two teams went about acquiring and implementing the same project management software solution (yes, Project Insight), was radically different, as was the end result.

Let's uncover the different approaches to each stage of the process by telling the stories of these two organizations.  We'll start with requirements gathering and definition.

Requirements Gathering

Company A decided to gather requirements for their project management system among a few key players on the team.  While they had the blessing of the CEO, he declined to participate in the exercise.

Company B, on the other hand, decided to survey all team members impacted by the implementation of a new project management software tool. They conducted a formal survey among all stakeholders, not just executive sponsors, but also the individuals that would be asked to update the project tasks and activities.

The survey queried each project resource about his or her view of the organization's project management challenges. As the survey was anonymous, people felt free to express their opinions with candor. The team compiled the survey results and shared them with all participants.

From this initial research, both companies moved to the requirements definition stage.

Definition of Requirements

The project evaluation team at Company A sat down, had a quick meeting, agreed to the basic requirements, and then started calling vendors.

Company B evaluated the feedback from the survey and created a comprehensive requirements list, ranking their requirements in priority. It was not a complicated prioritization, simply the number 1 for mission critical, 2 for important, and 3 for nice to have. They shared this list with the team again and asked for buy in, keeping in mind that one may have to give up a couple of features here and there. They developed a consensus for the requirements list.

Only then did they start calling vendors.

Evaluation Process

Company A and Company B both conducted a Google search for project management software and web-based project management software. They visited websites, did product tours, called vendors, and watched presentations. At this stage, both organizations conducted thorough research.

One key difference is that because Company A's requirements list was only informally created and verbal, they spent more time with vendors that did not really fit their needs. Company B was able to narrow the list of project management software vendors that they needed presentations from down to 3, instead of 8.

Software Trial

Both companies' evaluation teams trialed their short list of products. Company A and Company B both spent a fair amount of time assessing the different project software solutions. Again Company B was able to direct the trial better as they had their formal requirements list to compare the product's features against.

Purchase

Since this is my story, based on two real Project Insight customers, you need to know that both organizations selected our online software. Yet, each customer had unique results.

Implementation Process

Company A decided to assign a junior project manager to the job of conducting this important organizational initiative. The CEO had given his blessing by informing the team that, yes, they had just selected a project solution and yes, it would be implemented by their least experienced project manager. The CEO did not lead by example, so he never attended any training sessions, nor did he develop any program to incentivize the team to participate.

Company A's junior project manager attended four hours of product training and was mandated to get all existing projects into the online project software, single handedly, within a week. Miraculously, and with our help, she achieved this goal.

Company B asked us about our successful customers. What did the most successful customers do to implement the project, resource and collaboration solution? We provided them with some of our best case and worse case scenarios. Based on the size of their team and what they were trying to accomplish, we advised them on the number of days of training and outlined some homework for them to perform.

Company B opted for 5 days of onsite business process consulting and product training, to be taken in two separate visits. Before the first visit, the team was to document their business process and email the Word document to our business process consultant and implementation expert ahead of time. In this way, our resource was prepared prior to the first visit. When he arrived, he interviewed the team members and asked a lot of questions.

After two days onsite, he returned to the office and wrote up his recommendations for how this particular team should roll out the project software. As with any solution, there are multiple ways to achieve goals. Armed with the knowledge of our solution AND the customer's process, he was able to define best practices so they did not waste time figuring it out on their own.

This set of best practices and ‘how to' documents was sent back to the customer for review. They asked questions, made changes and emailed it back. By the second onsite visit, our product trainer knew exactly what features to focus on and how to train this project team.

Back at Company A, the junior project manager was trying to train people, one by one, when time permitted. Without true executive sponsorship and no consequences to the team members that did not cooperate, the implementation floundered.

Communication and Feedback Plan

Company A had no communication plan, or way to handle project team resources' issues as they arose. In short order, the junior project manager had to respond to a lot of email training questions that would have been pre-empted with a more thoughtful training roll out.

Company B communicated very clearly that this initiative was of utmost importance and that everyone needed to attend the required training sessions. What's more, the executives decided to incentivize the team by putting the successful implementation of the project management software tool into everyone's performance review objectives. A specific timeline was also provided - by year end. This created a sense of urgency that was lacking over at Company A.

Company A started to hear feedback that people did not want to click a mouse three times to enter time. The junior project manager, with no authority over these team members, had to listen to folks whine and complain. All the while, she suspected the ‘squeakiest wheels' were the project team members that were doing the least and did not want to be ‘found out.'

Back at Company B, the teams were meeting weekly to go over their questions and issues. Then they would meet with our team to go over their questions and issues. We did this over the course of the first three months of their roll out. Week after week, the list got shorter and shorter and the team settled into utilizing the software.

The Results

After six months, each project organization has had very different results. Company A, realizing that they did not have the right executive leadership on the implementation is now in the throes of a re-implementation. They are facing some big challenges with the handful of resisters. It will be more of an uphill battle than if they had invested a bit more time and energy at the outset.

Meanwhile, Company A is a ‘poster child' for a nearly perfect project management software implementation. While they spent more time initially getting up and running, their planning paid off. Also, while they spent far more on initial business process, best practices consulting, and product training, they allowed the software experts to guide their implementation and thus saved time and money in the long run.

The moral of this story - there is a lot of value in taking time to plan for any implementation as well as investing in customized training during any software implementation.

While most of the time, I try to keep my posts project management solution agnostic, we've had some new ideas here about making our process here at Project Insight better which I will share with you here.

We have over 40 unique live training webinars that we offer to our customers. We also record these sessions so that our team members in far flung corners of the globe (we serve project teams in Papua New Guinea, Japan, India and other locations that are asleep while we conduct live webinars) can watch them later. We have developed best practices modules that are like courseware. Alongside these training resources, we have other self serve resources like tutorials inside the software, online help, tool tips, FAQs in the Community, and more.

With all these resources on hand, we are now encouraging customers to select the webinars that are right for them. Select the project team members that should attend each webinar, breaking the team down into the following groups (at a minimum):

-Administrators

-Project managers

-Project schedulers

-Resource managers

-Team members

-Executives 

You can even break the groups down into business units, departments, and/or process groups. Once that is done, select one webinar to watch as a group. Follow that up by performing the best practice module on the same topic. Then gather as a group and decide how your project team will use the software.

Once you have outlined the best practices for your specific organization. DOCUMENT those processes. This documentation may be as detailed as you wish. From those documents, develop one to two page 'Quick Start Guides' for each group listed above. That way, if new team members join the organization, they may refer to these Quick Start Guides that are particular to your organization and specific to their role.

Feel free to add comments!

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

I'm always talking about having three elements in your project management software implementation: people, product and processes. In order for your implementation to be successful, you need all three. Within each element, there are many segments, variables. I'd like you to make sure you have thought of the following: 

Product - Project Management Software

-Make sure that you are actually looking for project management software, and not task management software, or time tracking tools, or a help desk. Be clear on the business challenges you are trying to solve, then make sure you are looking at the right TYPE of solution.

-Make sure that the project management solution provider is mature and well-proven in use at other organizations with requirements similar to your organization. Many software companies are popping up and may not have the track record to serve you well.

-Make sure you select a flexible, customizable and USABLE project software solution. If the system is flexible it will serve your needs now and in the future. If it is integrate-able, then you can pass data from one application to another eliminating duplicate effort. 

-Make sure there are no major GAPs with respect to your needs and requirements. Make sure the vendors do not try to steer you in a direction that is not a part of your goals. You would be surprised how many people get distracted by the ‘shiny object' or feature that looks sexy, but has no relevance to their needs.

-Make sure you have enough resources to actually implement the portfolio and project management software you select.

-Make sure you select a product built on an industry standard platform. Project management products built with graphic artist platform tools are often lacking when it comes to robust scheduling and resource management.

Process or Business Processes

-Make sure you understand your current business process and which parts of the process you will maintain and which ones you will ‘throw out the window.' Not all processes are efficient, but some are. Keep those in place.

-Make sure you start to document your processes, even if it is a simple bullet list. You have to start somewhere!

-Make sure the project solution you pick is flexible enough to support your proven business processes. Do not worry about the inefficient or broken processes!

People - Leadership!

-Make sure you understand that any software you change to involves CHANGE. Change is easy for some, more difficult for others. Be prepared for all responses.

-Make sure you have a communication plan in place to handle hiccups in your implementation. Nothing is perfect, so acknowledge that, but also plan for how you will handle issues as they arise.

-Make sure your leadership is on board. Nothing is more frustrating than investing in a new system and then not having the management help with the leadership and communication plan.

Thoughts? Feel free to post agreements, disagreements? 

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned needing three mission critical elements to a successful roll out: people, product and processes. Similar to only having two legs on a stool, you need all three for a successful implementation. This week, I talked with a customer that had, early on in the implementation process, decided to let people have the option to use our project management software or not. It was going to be their choice. The problem with this is kind of like saying, I'd like you to go on a diet, but it's your choice. As we all know, change is difficult, and for some organizational cultures, it is more challenging than others.

 I was told by a child psychologist, that if you want your children to change a behavior, it takes 90 days of reinforcing that behavior. If one day, you are lax and slip from the message to your child, you have to start your 90 days all over again. The same is true of adults, I find. Just like children, it takes time to change a behavior. Like children, even grownups like a system of rewards. You can instill a system of rewards or of punishments, again depending on your culture and what you find works. 

One of the most positive systems of rewards I've witnessed of late comes from one customer that decided to give all team members a share in the profits for accurate and timely time tracking. Now, the point is not about the feature of time tracking, rather it is about the system of rewards for the behavior we desire. This is having a very positive effect on the team and compliance, as you might imagine is very high, as the reward is MONEY!

One of the most stringent punishment systems I've witnessed is a customer that expects all expenses to be submitted within one month of incurring them or else the team member does not get reimbursed. Again, hitting the team member in the pocket book is a pretty harsh penalty. When I asked how successful that is, the customer replied that it only happens to a team member once! 

The point is that the company's leadership must communicate what behavior is desired, clearly and frequently, as well as develop strategies for compliance or lack thereof. If the message your leadership is sending is 'I don' care one way or the other,' people will do what is easiest for them to do. This is either nothing or the old way.

Leadership is the key to a successful implementation!

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

If you've finished the project template creation process discussed in the last post, then you are ready to start thinking about how your tasks and activities link together. If you have worked with Microsoft Project, then you know about task dependencies. If you are migrating from Excel, then the idea might be new. Basically, tasks have relationships. That is, often one task must be finished before another one can get started. This is called a finish-to-start task type.  There are four task types:

1.Finish-to-start

2.Start-to-start

3.Finish-to-finish

4.Start-to-finish

If you set up your tasks with dependencies or relationships, then you can leverage what we call 'intelligent scheduling.' This allows a project manager to change the start date of the project and the tasks will automatically shift and correct (assuming you have not used any constraints, but we'll get into that later). The other advantage is that if you change the task duration or timeframe needed to perform the task, then the schedule will shift as well. The 'geeky' definitions of the task dependencies listed above are:

Finish-to-start - The preceding task must finish before the successor task (task following it) can get started

Start-to-start - The preceding task must start before the successor can start, but they can start in parallel

Finish-to-finish - The preceding task must finish before the successor can finish

Start-to-finish - The preceding task must start before the successor can finish A good project template will use these task types so that the projects created from the template will be as flexible as possible.

You may link your tasks using drag and drop on our interactive Gantt chart, or you may add predecessors in the task list view. If you are migrating from Microsoft Project, then the easiest method is to add the 'predecessors by number' and 'task number' columns. This allows you to work as you would in Microsoft Project, simply adding the predecessor task number and the same abbreviations in Microsoft Project. For example, 3SS means that task 3 is the predecessor task to the current task and it is a start-to-start relationship type. You may need to sit with your team to determine what the right task flow is, but believe me it's worth the time to get a great project template that is available for continual re-use.

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

While every project is unique, many projects of a certain type have repeatable phases and tasks. If this is true for your project team, then it makes sense to sit down and develop your project templates. We recommend getting the people that belong to the team or department or group together for a meeting. We like to perform the 'sticky note' exercise as a method of capturing all activities or tasks on a project. What's this? The team meets and one person acts as the moderator, writing down all individual tasks on a 'sticky note' and putting it on the wall or white board. The team outlines all tasks and activities without judgment about the level of detail or what order the tasks should be in. Just brainstorm and collect all the tasks, one per sticky note.

Once you are satisfied that you have outlined all activities that encompass that project type, then you may organize them in an outline or WBS (work breakdown structure) format. The first group of tasks is labeled 1.0 in your WBS. One rule of thumb is that phases or summary tasks should start with words that are nouns, whereas tasks start with verbs because they are things that you 'do.' A lively discussion usually ensues. Be patient and take the time to get the outline right. You are also building team agreement during the process. That is, you want 'buy in' from the project team about the steps that the project will take to complete. By participating in the process, the team members will offer less resistance, as they helped 'build the house,' so to speak.

The next step is to look at the level of detail that you have outlined. Sometimes it is appropriate to build out more detail, but in our experience, it is more likely that you will want to trim out some of the detail. This makes your task list or WBS more manageable. More experienced project managers know that the more junior the staff, the more detail you need to have. If your team is experienced, you may still want to have details in the task description fields of your project management software solution. Steps may be outlined there, instead of making the steps individual tasks. This keeps the team members' burden of updating tasks down and you will get more adoption!

We had a customer that had task lists initially built out to the 15 minute increment in Project Insight, project management software. That turned out to be too cumbersome for their fast paced environment. Imagine having to check off a task every 15 minutes! So they trimmed down the template and people were much happier. Another customer told me that she was out for surgery last year and because she had built out exact steps in the task description fields, the project manager that took over for her was able to complete the project on schedule without any hiccups. A great success story and wonderful use of project templates.

Summary

-Meet with the team

-Write down all tasks on sticky notes

-Arrange sticky notes into an outline

-Decide how much detail you need

-Then, put your results into your project scheduling software.

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

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

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.

If your project management software implementation includes asking team members to enter time in the system, then you will want to develop a communication plan to make the effort fun. Again, this top ten list is from one of our culturally young customers that wanted to use the 'carrot ' method to incentivize their team to enter time on a daily basis. Here are the final two reasons they came up with for tracking time in Project Insight, web project management software: 

#2 - Because your granddad punched that time clock on the shop floor every day for 30 years, and you can't click a mouse?

#1 - Because it's the second most fun thing you can do with your right hand.

We hope you had a good laugh over this list. Feel free to add your fun reasons as comments here.

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.

Like David Letterman's Top Ten list each night, this Project Insight, web based project software, customer surveyed their team as a way to get buy in from all team members. Creating  this top ten list was their way of incorporating all team members in the initial effort to get compliance on entering time. 

#4 - Better timekeeping promotes profitability which will allow us to donate underwear to major celebrities

#3 - Maybe this will finally end the east coast west coast wars

Wait a couple more days for the final installment......

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, Project Insight

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.