Project Management Post

Free Enterprise 2.0 Conference Pass

Andrew Filev — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Those who will be at the conference will explore the newest trends and practical information, brought together in one place. The conference includes:

case studies from surprising pioneers, which will let you learn from others’ successes and challenges
tutorials and sessions led by top thinkers , showing you how to make your business more adaptive to the ever-changing environment .
keynote and plenary program, where industry visionaries will give their ideas about the future of Enterprise 2.0
Demo Pavilion, where you'll be able to see the latest technologies from established leaders and hot start-ups

This is just the tip of the iceberg, so check out the conference page for the full line up of speakers and workshops!

I have a free pass for the conference to give away. Leave a comment on this post, telling me why you need to attend the conference. The author of the best comment will go to the exiting Enterprise 2.0 Conference for FREE!

Social Project Management: Another Point of View

Andrew Filev — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Any work turns into a project

I think that the transformation in project management is even deeper and is indicated in the change of the people’s attitude towards their work. People now tend to regard any work undertaken to achieve a business objective as a project, although this work might be neither organized according to the rules of traditional project management nor controlled by a professional project manager. For example, writing a blog can be considered a project, however there’s probably only one person in the team - the blog author. Today, teams tend to become smaller, and project management tends to become iterative. These and other features of Social Project Management identified by Leisa Reichelt, can be observed in agile project management. Agile project management is a different way of managing projects in the software industry that helps to deliver projects faster and at a lower cost.

The change in project management has a social nature

However, speaking of social project management, Leisa seems to overlook the core element of the new-generation project management – collaboration. “Social” is the main word here. Projects now tend to be managed with the help of the wisdom of the many. As I stated in my post on definition of Project Management 2.0, collaboration brought in the form of collective intelligence is one of the two major principles driving the change in project management.

Collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve to higher order complexity and harmony, through differentiation, integration, competition and collaboration. In other words, it is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. In project management, collective intelligence may be a collection of valuable knowledge and ideas from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. Project management 2.0 software makes it possible to successfully collect and share this knowledge in a flexible, collaborative environment. This environment lets team members’ ideas penetrate into project planning and influence managers’ and executives’ view on the project. The project manager conducts the work and chooses the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from the individual employees.

Collective intelligence brought by Project management 2.0 technologies can also have an outside effect, as companies gain more advantage from their communication with clients. Social project management or Project management 2.0 is building new customer interactions and thus improving customer satisfaction. The project operations become more transparent to customers. Customers can easily follow the progress of a project on the Web. They can send their feedback, leaving comments in a project blog or accessing a project collaborative space and contributing to common tasks. Getting direct clients’ feedback makes it possible to quickly evolve project strategy and tactics and change project development plans when necessary. This way collective intelligence brought by the social project management software can help improve the quality of the products and services and make them fully satisfy the consumers’ needs. Collaboration with customers helps to encourage the strongest community goodwill, and this goodwill, in turn, promotes significant marketing and sales gains. Thousands of companies are already reaping the rewards of their investment in external project collaboration. For example, companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems, and SAP write project blogs on a regular basis. The number of non-technology organizations that use the new-generation project management tools is rapidly growing, too.

Thus, social project management also means involving society into collaboration. But collective intelligence is not the only factor causing the changes in project management. In my opinion, the term social project management does not reflect the second key element of the project management evolution - emergent structures.

Collective intelligence is not the only factor influencing project management

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. In plain terms it is a form of collective behavior, when parts of a system do together what they would not do by themselves. Therefore, emergent structures are the structures that appear as a result of multiple, relatively simple interactions of a number of individuals. The interactions are uncontrolled, but are purposeful. This means that individual team members’ interactions are merged by the software into the strategic plan for the whole organization. With the help of the second-generation project management software managers and executives see through the organization and lead it in the right direction.

Together these two powerful principles - collective intelligence and emergent structures - make the social evolution of project management possible. Empowered by these two principles, the new-generation project management software makes businesses more adaptive to changes. Companies that leverage this software, become more competitive, as they can react to changes faster and deliver successful projects in shorter periods of time.

Leisa Reichelt made a big step in attracting the audience’s attention to the change processes going on in contemporary project management. However, her concept of the new trend in project management does not seem to be fully developed. I’ve tried to elaborate of this point, coming to a conclusion that “Project Management 2.0” might be a better word to describe the evolution in project management. This term reflects where collective intelligence and emergent structures come from – Web 2.0 technologies. I also invite you to join my speculations and to offer your point of view on the change going on in project management.

How can collaboration and emergent structures do the routine job for you?

Andrew Filev — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Why plans become obsolete and useless

The way a project plan is structured can play a major role in how the project is delivered. In real life any employee has his own view on the ongoing projects. This means different perspectives and different access. For example, if we speak about a product development project, the designer has his perspective of all the design tasks, including the design of the Product A.

Each developer is the team sees the development perspective of the just one product.

The product manager has the picture of all the products.

The project manager has his view of the entire project plan that includes products as well as project phases.

Traditional project management software with one-to-many work breakdown structure, like Microsoft Project, can hardly accommodate more than one person conveniently, not to speak of many projects and departments. This inconvenience makes the old project management software less usable and thus people become hesitant to check plans and update them regularly. In turn it leads to problems with adoption and obsolete project plans. There needs to be a better way to organize tasks, information and projects.

Project management 2.0 software helps you structure your project plan the most effective way

Project management 2.0 tools have fewer restrictions. They let structures emerge, without strong central control. In collaborative planning tools, like Wrike, hierarchies are many-to-many, in contrast to the one-to-many hierarchy in Microsoft Project.

Collaborative planning tools allow team members to create lists of project-related tasks. Later these tasks can be edited and updated by the team members. Some of the tasks can be shared among the team members, so that the whole team has the big picture of the project. The to-dos of all the team members are automatically merged into project plans. These plans become the part of the strategic plan. Thus separated emails, tasks and plans are collected by the software into a bigger picture that becomes a master plan or a multi-face work-breakdown structure of the whole organization.

Collaboration planning tools, like Wrike allow having different views of the same schedule and applying different work-breakdown structures to it. That makes it really easy to reorganize tasks and evolve the schedule. Project plans become more flexible, which means that a project manager and his team can react to changes going on inside and outside the organization much faster. This agility helps to bring iterative and incremental practices into project management without giving away the control.

Project management 2.0 tools allow you to start with a structure with one item and evolve it into a model that perfectly suits the project. This helps project managers to apply elements of bottom-up planning and take advantage of collective intelligence.

Empowered by emergent structures and collective intelligence, project managers can combine field knowledge coming bottom-up with the guidance coming top-down. There is also a significant benefit for top managers: emergent structures allow them to get complete visibility that bridges the gap between strategic corporate plans and daily to-do lists of employees. Complete visibility helps to react to changes going on in business environment faster, thus the whole organization becomes stronger and more competitive.

Bridging the Three Gaps in Project Management

Andrew Filev — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

1. There is a gap between the strategic plans and the daily agenda of the employees. In many businesses, strategic plans, quarterly plans, project plans and daily to-do lists of team members are separated. All of these plans should be a part of one master plan. There should be a tool able to easily merge plans into a bigger picture. With the help of this tool, daily to-do lists should emerge into project plans. Projects should lead to achieving strategic goals. So this tool should utilize the principle of emergent structures. Emerging structures allow you to combine top-down and bottom-up planning to bridge the gap in the middle. The whole structure is then transparent and can be traced from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. This is a real-time visibility into a company that lets corporate executives lead their business in the right direction.

2. There is a gap between e-mail and project management software that made project management software inefficient. E-mail is the most widely-used software tool in project management, and at the same time traditional project management tools, like Microsoft Project, ignore this fact. This leaves a gap between the everyday project management tool (e-mail) and project planning software (Microsoft Project, Excel). This results in putting a heavy burden onto managers. They need to gather information from e-mails, merge it into a bigger picture, manually update plans, communicate the updated version to team members and report the progress to the top manager. This seriously decreases productivity on all levels in the organization, including top managers' productivity. It is hard to get a picture of where the business stands if you simply rely on thousands of e-mails spread across hundreds of mailboxes. E-mail buries a lot of valuable information. There should be a tool that will help to turn the e-mail mess into organized projects, increasing productivity and bringing control of business.

3. There is a gap between project management tools and Web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 collaboration tools, like wikis, are much more powerful than traditional project management software, because they leverage collective intelligence and emerging structures. At the same time they lack some pieces that are crucial in order to use them as effective management tools. There was a huge potential in bringing the best practices of Web 2.0 into project management software and business management software. Instead of being a complex, expensive and stiff tool designed for trained project managers, the new tool should be simple, agile and inexpensive and should be used by the whole company from top managers to employees. It will greatly increase productivity of the whole team and will make managers' jobs easier.

So when I started Wrike, the idea was to invent a project management application that would help businesses to deal with all three problems. Several years of extensive research and development resulted in the launch of innovative, online project management software, Wrike. The product has the best e-mail integration among project management tools. First, this integration makes Wrike easy-to-use. Second, it turns e-mail mess into neatly organized project plans helping to increase the productivity and making it easier to control the whole business. Our tool applies the principles of Enterprise 2.0 to democratize project management software. Wrike empowers organizations and makes managers' jobs easier.

Looking forward to MLab Roundtable on Evolution of Management Innovation

Andrew Filev — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Today the discipline of management is pressed by numerous factors, like globalization and shortening strategic lifecycles. Management is developing and embracing the benefits of openness, emergence, adaptability, and many other principles countering those of the management status quo (e.g., hierarchies, command control, bureaucracy) that companies have institutionalized over the past century. Organizations like Management Innovation Lab help to create “tomorrow’s best practices” today. I’ll be happy to add my 2 cents.

Letting Users Take the Lead in Choosing their Tools Can Benefit the Whole Business

Andrew Filev — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Why is it so hard to make users adopt the new software introduced by IT departments?

One of the reasons is that sometimes the choice of software is made levels above the actual users. In these cases software is adopted without taking users’ opinion into consideration. Often users have no budgets and little decision power, and that is why all software vendors’ marketing efforts are targeted at top management and heads of IT departments, who make the final choice of software. Many experts agree that this fact is convenient for the IT departments, because they get as much control as possible over users’ operations. Top management sometimes may not know the specific character of their employees’ work. That’s why the managers’ choice for software may become an additional barrier for effective collaboration, instead of being a helpful solution. As a result, people can be forced to adapt to the imposed tool that does not answer their requirements and can be hard to master. They may have to spend weeks or even months on training. Still, after all the training efforts, the IT-introduced solution might turn out to be ineffective for successful team work. Information can often be hard to find, as it is kept in disconnected files. Sometimes lack of built-in collaboration vehicles in an IT imposed solution can slow down the whole business.

Change in enterprise management software adoption

All these factors are making the top-management of many companies change their views on the IT department’s role in the adoption of a new business solution. Now there is a strong tendency of transformation in enterprise software adoption due to growing user sophistication. Social networks, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies people use at home help them find similar tools for more effective work in the office. People find new ways to work together and collaborate without any help from IT departments. These ways are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and they turn out to be more efficient. Why? An Enterprise 2.0 online collaboration platform can make team-work frictionless, as it is more flexible. Second-generation software is designed with user needs in mind. Team members can customize their collaborative space and make it specific to their own needs. The new-generation software is easy to use. Simplicity has become a key driver of technology adoption, especially in the last 10 years, as advanced technologies have developed simpler user interfaces. For example, blogging can be called a revolution of simplicity. To blog, all you need to do is write a title and, some content, and then click publish. It is that simple to share your ideas with the rest of the team and get their feedback in the comments. Collaboration software can do even more for business productivity. It may be the key for streamlining the work process and may help companies avoid unnecessary paper work and phone calls. Everything is kept in one place – a collaborative space that can be accessed by all the team members.

Many companies today realize these benefits and take advantage of them by letting their employees choose the software, which will correspond to the end-users’ needs. As an example we can take SightLines Consulting – a consulting company where employees had lots of complaints on complexity of their CRM software. The application was chosen by the top-management. The tool was stable, but end-users kept saying that the application is inflexible and hard to use. The sales people - the end-users of the software – tend to spend most of their working time out of the office, on the road. The major inconvenience was that the application was impossible to access any other way than through their internal network. However, “sales people are motivated to produce” says SightLines Consulting president Thomas Foydel. This means, that they are motivated to find ways and tools to be more productive. The end-users turned to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. When they found a solution that adds actual value to their everyday job, they adopted it. The result was doubling the speed of sales team work and improved customer satisfaction. The whole business became more successful. The top executives at SightLines Consulting are now sure that they made the right decision by letting the sales team choose their tools.

Enterprise 2.0 software brings new ways of collaboration and is adopted according to different standards. It’s easy to use, effective and flexible. This software is brought to the enterprise the bottom-up way, and very often is suggested by end-users themselves. It’s no surprise that the second-generation software adoption and usage are more thorough than those of traditional software.

Peter Coffee, a recognized software-as-a-service advocate, said that the software that end-users had before might have been stable, mature and predictable, but “it was not transforming people's ideas of how they do business”. I would add that it was not giving them enough space for implementation of their ideas. IT-departments should not ignore this fact. Changing IT-staff altitude towards the new-generation technologies will benefit the whole organization.

IT departments need to learn to evaluate the new opportunities.

In particular, IT needs additional competency in evaluating and administering service agreements. Enterprise 2.0 is not just software. It represents another way of managing IT. This means that IT departments should now shift their focus toward managing Enterprise 2.0 vendor relationships, as operational responsibility over the actual hardware and software moves to vendors.

Some CIOs have already begun to move in this direction. For example, Alastair Behenna, CIO of Harvey Nash, says that their IT staff is looking into emerging technologies and trying to stay in the loop. “We have a lab where our team—from the help desk to the Web folks—is encouraged to spend as much as 10 percent of its time figuring out if there is commercial benefit to something [new] and doing a proof of concept if so,” - Behenna confirms.

Of cause transformation of the software adoption process will be different in various companies. Some enterprises will still preserve the old ways of choosing software without taking the end-users’ opinion into consideration. Others have already realized the benefits of letting their employees take the lead in selecting their tools and making teams more productive. Examples of companies like Shell, Harvey Nash and many others, prove that allowing end-users choose the software according to their needs can make the whole business performance better.

Top-down and Bottom-up Project Management: Leveraging the Advantages of the Two Approaches

Andrew Filev — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Top-down approach to project management

Today, many projects are still managed according to the top-down approach. The essence of this approach is that all the directions come from the top. The top management establishes project objectives and provides guidelines, information, plans and fund processes. The manager clearly communicates his expectations to each person who has a role to play in the project. According to advocates of this approach, the managers should be as specific as possible when communicating expectations, since ambiguity opens the door for potential failure. This approach strictly follows a formal process.

The top-down approach is applied in many organizations. Let’s have a look at the New York Times, a leader in the newspaper industry. According to ajr.com (American Journalism Review) several years ago, The Times’ executive management felt that they were doing the opposite of what was needed to create a vibrant workplace and a successful enterprise. They centralized power and implemented overall control among masthead editors. The latter introduced the same management pattern in the projects they were responsible for. Project decisions were influenced by the emotions and opinions of only one person – the project manager. What was the result? People felt that they weren't listened to, that their voices didn't count. There was no effective collaboration between the journalists. They were not morally motivated to do their jobs. The managing executives then realized that the management style should be changed by giving more freedom to the teams. It took a lot of time to introduce a bottom-up approach to management. However, it was worth the time and effort, as the collaboration is now enhanced and teams work more productively.

The problems caused by a top-down approach can be observed in many organizations with a traditional management style. Experience shows that this approach can reduce productivity and cause bottlenecks or so-called lockdowns. “Lockdown” gives a project manager as much control as possible over his team. This inflexibility can cause unnecessary pain and slow down the project completion.

Bottom-up approach to project management

All the above mentioned factors can lead projects to failure, and that is why many organizations have turned to a bottom-up management style or at least some of its elements. The New York Times is a good example. Bottom-up management proactively seeks the input of the team in the project executing process. Employees are invited to participate in every step of the process, and the team as a whole agrees on a course of action. This approach allows managers to communicate goals and value, e.g. through milestone planning. Then team members have to develop personal to-do lists with the steps necessary to reach the milestones on their own. It is up to them to choose the methods and ways to perform their tasks. The advantage of this approach is that it empowers team members to think more creatively. They feel involved into the project development and know that their initiatives are appreciated. The team members’ motivation to work and make the project a success is increased. Individual members of the team can provide project solutions that are driven more by practical requirements than abstract notions. The planning process flows significantly faster, as it is facilitated by a number of people. The to-do lists of all the team members are collected into the detailed general project plan. Schedules, budgets and results are transparent. Issues are made clear by the project manager to avoid as many surprises as possible. Bottom-up project management is also a way of coping with the increasing gap between the information necessary to manage knowledge workers and the ability of managers to acquire and apply this information.

However, despite all of the advantages, the bottom-up approach is not the perfect solution, as sometimes it lacks clarity and control. Many experts agree that a bottom-up style alone will not make your projects flourish. A wise project manager will take the best practices from the two approaches and try to create a hybrid method.

Taking the best from the two

Would it be possible to effectively introduce the best bottom-up practices to an organization by utilizing traditional tools? Traditional project management software was mostly designed with the top-down approach in mind and are not meant for the bottom-up management. This software is complex and hard to master. This software is focused on the project manager and place him or her in the center or the project. Team members very often do not have access to the project plan and cannot make contributions. The employees send their updates to the project manager in disconnected files via e-mail. The project manager then collects all the data and puts the information manually into the project plan. Then he or she communicates the changes to the upper management. The misalignment between the bottom-up best principles and the old tools causes a situation where the project manager's talents often are buried by the routine work. The amount of mechanical control/synchronization work sometimes does not leave time for leadership.
The old methods of how people share and receive information have been radically transformed in the recent times. Now there are more means for the successful implementation of the bottom-up management best practices. These means are Enterprise 2.0 technologies – wikis, blogs, and collaboration tools. They come into organizations and change the original way of executing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from the individual employees.

Thus, the part the project manager plays in the project changes. Project Management 2.0 software helps him or her create complete delegation. It means that people become less dependent on the manager as a to-do generator. Rather than a taskmaster, he or she turns into a project leader who facilitates the team communications, provides a creative working environment and guides the team. He or she becomes a visionary who can leverage the team strengths and weaknesses and adjust project development to the external changes. Individual team members still have the freedom and responsibility to find their way to the next milestone.

The second-generation tools allow you to merge the advantages of the two initial management approaches. These tools let project managers combine control and collaboration, clarity of project goals and visibility of internal organizational processes.

Thousands of companies now confirm that bottom-up project management, implemented with the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, improved their business performance. Among them are Bell Canada, Sun and Yahoo. They created corporate blogs to streamline project communications. Even giants, such as IBM, realize the benefits of allowing contributors to have a more active hand in how collaborative work is organized.

My conclusion will be that democratizing project management is never an end in itself. The primary goal is always to find ways to make project management and project collaboration more efficient. New technologies applied to projects offer us the ability to make projects more successful and teams more productive. The projects are delivered much more rapidly, and this is to everyone’s benefit.

Definition of Project Management 2.0

Andrew Filev — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I use the term Project management 2.0 to describe an evolution of project management practices inspired by Enterprise 2.0 tools. Traditional project management software implies project manager acting as a proxy in all project related communications, thus reducing productivity of project manager and the rest of the project team. New tools bring collaboration into the planning process, making the team much more productive and changing not only the technology, but process as well.

Collective intelligence is not the only change agent in this process. Collaboration opens way to another successful practice, inherited from Enterprise 2.0 – emerging structures. Together these powerful principles determine key differences between Project Management 2.0 and traditional project management:

Bottom-up planning is utilized much more often and much more efficiently
Tools help to communicate and reduce unnecessary burden
Instead of using one work-breakdown structure that is designed before the project is started, multiple structures might be applied and they can evolve on the way.

Overall use of these techniques help to increase productivity in many teams, especially in the cases, when either project plans need to change often, or team members are not located in one office building, or project manager is involved in several project teams simultaneously.

There are spplications that bring Project management 2.0 practices to enterprises. Some of these project management tools, besides collaboration, may offer functions like reports, Gantt charts and overdue notifications. These features follow the progress of projects and increase project work productivity.

Why do companies choose Software as a Service?

Andrew Filev — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

In 2005, IDC announced in its report that on-demand software will represent more than 3.8% of all spending, or $10.7 billion by 2009. In 2006, on-demand software was announced to be the future of software development by many of the authoritative media, such as Forbes, the New York Times, EWeek, and BusinessWeek. Today, business magazines announce that on-demand software customers are becoming more comfortable with the model and that, according to recent research, nearly 36% of large and small companies are considering bringing software-as-a-service technologies into their organizations. About 80 percent of those considering it say they plan to adopt it within the next 12 months. Additionally, 90% of enterprises that are using on-demand software have already stated that they plan to expand their use.

Today, we have a great number of examples of software delivered as a service. The applications range from project management to CRM services.

Factors influencing the enterprise

Why is software delivered as a service adopted by more and more companies all over the world? There are certain external and internal factors which influence the software development and the development of other industries.

Here are 2 major external factors:

Fast-paced development of the telecommunication industry transforms and expands the former boundaries of software development. Telecommunications are affordable and available from almost any computer. Information workers enjoy high-speed connections to the Internet at home and at work. Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the Internet, using fast broadband connections and fueling the growth of social networking and business software applications. Penetration of broadband services is seen as a key for developing businesses all over the world. Fast Internet enables companies to use software applications for storing, editing and exchanging information online and accessing it anytime they need it.
Outsourcing development opened new opportunities for businesses. Business strategists started to pay more and more attention to outsourcing of non-core operations since the 1980s. In the early 2000s, IT outsourcing became a very important cost-cutting measure for thousands of companies. Today, it is increasingly viewed as a strategic planning and outcomes optimizing tool. A recent survey of American and European executives conducted by Accenture shows that 25% of respondents report first-day improvements in business processes with an outsourcing model. The benefits of outsourcing are incontestable: instead of building their own infrastructure and supporting it, companies outsource it to a third party and focus on the core of their businesses. They save on money, time and effort. As a form of outsourcing, on-demand software penetrates deeper into the way businesses are built nowadays.

Major benefits for the enterprise

There are also very significant reasons why many business owners and CEOs choose to adopt a new online service, rather than use on-premise software. These are the internal factors. Let’s have a look at on-demand tools from a CEO’s point of view, and we’ll see the advantages for the business growth immediately.

As opposed to on-premise software, software as a service has 4 basic advantages;

1. It is cost-effective for small and large companies. On-demand software offers lower prices and lower total cost of ownership (up to 50% and more for project management software implementation, for example). Business owners get a faster return on investment. Companies "pay as they go," so hosted solutions often carry little or no upfront cost. The savings can be really huge. For example, in 2005, the town of Stratford estimated that upgrading and merging its two in-house Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environments — one placed at town hall (250 users) and the other at the police station (100 users) — as well as the underlying 10-year-old server, would run $180,000 to $250,000. Instead, the town authorities decided to sign a contract with InfoStreet, an on-demand service provider, to host the Exchange e-mail servers. The representatives of the town authorities do not disclose the exact terms of the contract, but they do say that they paid 20 times less than they would have paid for Microsoft to replace their Exchange environment.

2. Software as a service implies a short-term commitment, which results in dramatic financial risk reduction for businesses. By acquiring traditional software, companies pay significant amounts of money (over $100,000 for CRM solutions) and still face the high risk that the software may not fulfill the business requirements. In this case, there is no refund option. Instead, a company can start implementing software as a service by purchasing 3 or 4 accounts. The users will test the application’s features and determine whether the software complies with the corporate needs. Then the organization can gradually involve more users and acquire more accounts. Otherwise, the company can make a decision to move to another software provider that offers better service conditions. A good example would be Superior Industries, a company producing conveying equipment. They had turned to an on-demand solution when their top management realized that they could save up to 90% of their expenditures on CRM software. Later the executives of the company reviewed the return on investment they were receiving from their CRM service, provided by Salesforce.com, and decided to reevaluate their approach. Their switch to SugarCRM resulted in even greater savings, up to $70 000.

3. SaaS reduces the burden on IT staff. Moving to software as a service means reducing the IT headcount, cutting the cost of hiring and training IT support and reducing IT operating costs. Internal IT personnel don't have to purchase and support the server infrastructure necessary to install and maintain the software in-house. The onus of maintaining a labor-intensive patch and upgrade process is taken by the software providers. With traditional licensed software, companies typically have to wait months for the next release of an application, which internal IT staff will then have to test and deploy. Very often, these installations are time-consuming and do not run smoothly. On the contrary, using software as a service means that a company will receive all the software patches automatically and usually much more promptly. Moreover, by using the SaaS model, enterprises ensure that subsidiaries in all locations are using the correct application software version.

4. On-demand software usage usually means instant deployment. Traditional application implementation cycles inside companies can take years, consume massive resources and yield unsatisfactory results. With on-demand software, a company can start using the service the moment the provider activates the company’s accounts, which usually happens minutes after the payment is made.

So taking into consideration all these advantages, it’s not surprising that more and more companies choose to adopt on-demand software and that analysts believe that this model of software delivery is the future of the software industry. McKinsey Quarterly named software as a service a disruptive force and called for traditional software vendors to focus on integrating on-demand software into their product lines.

More and more, companies introduce their on-demand alternatives to traditional on-premise software. One of the best examples would be the project management field, where next-generation, Web-based applications have already displaced MS Project from its leading position, as they offer greater opportunities for easy and productive collaboration.

Today, the IT landscape is changing, opening new competitive advantages for early adopting customers. What we observe is, while some companies are struggling with the pain and cost of installation, others are wisely spending their time and money on their core business and become market leaders by leveraging all the benefits of the new technologies

Scrum in marketing: making enterprises adaptive

Andrew Filev — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:00:00 GMT

New methods in project management

Nowadays to be successful, a company has to be fast to adapt. Driven by business priorities, managers use progressive methods of product development aimed to cure the mistakes of traditional approaches. Some of these methods acquired the name of agile project management. These methods originated in R&D departments and now are introduced in marketing as well. Markets change quickly, forcing you to reposition your product. When you introduce an innovative product, it’s not clear how you should promote it and what the customers really need. Very often when innovative products are born, manufacturers and customers may not know how or why the products will be used, so it’s not evident what specific features of a product will or will not be valued. Playing in such markets entails a process of mutual discovery by customers and vendors – and this just takes time. According Clayton M. Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” research has shown that the vast majority of successful new companies abandoned their original business strategies after trying to implement their initial plans and learning what would and would not work in the market. This shows how important it is for a company to quickly evolve its strategy and tactics.

Scrum as a marketing project management methodology

Marketing is often executed in project-based manner. That is why a lot of generic project management principles perfectly apply to marketing and why marketing should also be optimized, similar to project management techniques. Agile approaches to marketing may help to overcome problems experienced by marketing executives. One of these approaches is Scrum, which has originally been developed as an agile software development method for project management. Now Scrum is successfully employed by hundreds of different companies, such as Yahoo.com, Wildcard Systems, H&M, and John Deere, in many different fields, with outstanding results.

Scrum adopts an empirical approach, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or successfully defined in a predictable and planned manner. The focus of Scrum is on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements. This method is praised for making the team more productive, reducing risks and maximizing the business value of a developed product and minimizing the period of the development time. Scrum is based on defining sprints - time periods (usually 2 to 4 weeks) during which the prioritized work (sprint backlog) should be done. During a sprint, the team gets together for daily meetings where team members discuss what they have already done, what they are going to do till the next meeting and what prevents them of doing something that they planned to do. In other words, Scrum meetings are supposed to keep teams on track and help members get their work done. At the end of each sprint, there is a brief sprint retrospective at which all team members reflect about the past sprint. According to Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum meeting method (along with Jeff Sutherland), the purpose of a daily Scrum is to keep teams focused "on their objectives and to help them avoid being thrown off track by less important concerns." Now Scrum is often viewed as an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. Indeed, short and regular meetings can be as important for small marketing teams as they are for production teams. Members of a marketing group may be working on a variety of projects, but they're all working toward the same goal – marketing the company and its products or services. Therefore, every member of a team has to know what the others are working on and what direction the whole team is moving in.

Collaborative project management software for Scrum in marketing

The Scrum approach to marketing becomes even more efficient when empowered by Enterprise 2.0 technologies. New- generation software, especially tools meant for project management, bring collaboration to marketing and can make it more productive. These applications (I will call them Project Management 2.0 software) let team members easily share information on the projects and tasks they are involved in and help every team member see the whole picture of the company’s marketing strategy. Project management 2.0 software makes collaboration and management more transparent, letting everyone know who is accountable for what and by when.

Scrum in marketing makes the possible problems visible at early stages and allows coping with them quicker and with minimal losses. One of the major Scrum principles is “no problems are swept under the carpet.” Every team member is encouraged to describe the difficulties he is experiencing, as this might influence the work of the whole group.

Discussing problems early also helps to reduce financial risk. With the beginning of every sprint period, the business owner can change any of the marketing project parameters without penalty, including increasing investments to enlarge consumers’ quantity, reducing investments until unknowns are mitigated, or financing other initiatives.

A new approach to marketing requires flexible planning, which is possible with the help of collaboration software. In the ever-changing business environment, short-term marketing plans based on sprints can be much more effective. Marketing managers get an opportunity to switch from one promotion method to another, if the first one proved to be unsuccessful during the sprint period. It also becomes easier to clarify due dates of every small, but important task, to each member of a team. For example if a team is getting ready for a fair, it should be clear about who is responsible for preparing handouts, who will make a presentation about a product and who will design the company showcase. With Project Management 2.0 software, like Wrike for example, it becomes possible for everyone on the team to contribute to the plans, edit and update them. New-generation software brings stakeholders and partners into the collaboration process. Their input and feedback will help shape the marketing agenda along the way.

The clients can be involved, too. In fact, the principal aim of every marketing team is understanding customers’ needs and helping clients achieve their goals. In today’s enterprises, achieving the heightened customer loyalty – what brand marketers refer to as “emotional lock-in” – is especially challenging when an organization is dealing with tens of thousands or even millions of customers. Empowered by the new-generation software, Scrum lets you involve your clients in the marketing process and take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. Collective intelligence helps to improve the quality of products and services and make them fully satisfy the consumer’s needs. Scrum lets you promote your product not for a client, but together with your client. Customers can be involved in various ways. For example, they can literally participate in the development process by sending their feedback and contributing to the plans.

So, as we can see, innovative management methods brought to marketing make a company more agile and let it respond quicker to the needs of the emerging markets. It makes a company even more successful when empowered with Enterprise 2.0 tools that bring collaboration into organizations. They help improve communication and turn it from one-way (from a company to its customers) to two-way (from a company to its customers and back), helping to improve products and services. Scrum helps a company make its marketing policy nimble and lets it promote its products with lower costs, avoiding unnecessary money and resource spending and helping to reveal possible mistakes in the initial planning. The result is maximization a company’s benefit.