John, thanks for the level of interest! Apologies to you and others who have been waiting - having 4 and 2 year old girls plus a young man due in less than a month makes for a less predictable schedule than I was hoping for over the last few days. Nonetheless, here is the awaited perspective. I've broken it down into the five sections: Intake, Plan, Execute, Fulfill, Platform.
Intake
Intake is primarily an IT scenario, though much of the capability resonates with Marketing. The ability to set up a formal request queue with not just custom fields, but cascading paramters with logic to turn this way and that was researched and developed with our IT audience in mind. The latest capabilities on the roadmap include access rights on custom forms (who isn't interested in that?) to control who can view and/or edit which information, typeahead custom fields so that you can reference lists inside Workfront rather than maintaining the list manually, and the ability to attach documents to a request - such as a business case or spec. The last area of improvement is to get clearer on our vision for how far we want the Workfront intake process to go. We do not intend to be ServiceNow with complex automation rules that can send a request anywhere and everywhere, including possibly automating the response. However, we are committed to providing a great intake experience for the types of requests that result in team based, repeatable, collaborative work. More specifically, we know that in the PMO, there are some projects that can be fast tracked since they are pre-approved and already have budget and resources while others require a more formal process of justification, prioritization, and approval. Requests for those two types of projects, and everything in between, should have the appropriate processes and stage gates in place to ensure compliance to your project approval process.
Plan
Planning is my favorite area to talk about the PMO. What is a PMO if not the most effective planning organization on the planet? Anyway, while most of the capabilities here are self-explanatory, I will cover them nonetheless. First, we have the ability to print a Gantt chart. How many project managers are required to put a Gantt chart periodically into a powerpoint? I know it happened to me regularly when I managed projects in the oil & gas industry in Texas and I suspect things have not changed.
After the Gantt print, we have our new Agile capabilities. I'm actually extremely proud to talk about this. Yes, we've added some great capabilities around team based agile, including a beautiful new burndown chart, a great workboard (yes, you can do Kanban on it as long as you don't mind having the organizational discipline to manage your WIP limit yourself), and clear KPIs; more importantly, we've made what I believe is an incredible innovation for project managers. How long have we suffered with a single visualization of a project - the Gantt chart - while those process improvement folks have dozens of lovely pictures to illustrate how great they have been doing? How many times have you enjoyed how great Gantt is at helping you understand the plan, only to fail you completely when you want to know how the project is actually going? We're project managers , not just project planners.
Our new Agile view gives you the ability to take a project and switch it to an agile view to see how the project is tracking against it's planned schedule. It's a great compliment to the Gantt chart. Go try it out - it's simply under "views" on any project listed as "Agile". Okay, enough with the marketing schtick - I'm not that good at it anyway. ;-)
The next 5 slides in the roadmap center around resource management. As a reminder in case you have not read the other thread, at our user conference, LEAP, I made the commitment to provide you with the best resource management solution on the planet and we have gotten very busy working towards that! Most PMO organizations today don't just plan projects, they are responsible for managing the resources around the business to make sure projects are staffed to support the needs of the business. It's just as hard to identify who are the right people, when they are available, and know when to hire/fire for changes in workloads over time in a PMO as it is in any business - sometimes harder since all of your resources are matrixed in! Our resource management plans will solve these challenges as well as many others.
It really starts with the swap tool - for PMO organizations that use our templates, especially with roles assigned, this is a fantastic time saver. Simply go into the swap tool, identify the person to swap in for the role, associate the role, and boom make the swap. You can even do this across multiple projects at once if your business approves projects in bulk as many do. The schedule tool will allow you to do the appropriate fine tuning once the bulk moves have been made so that folks are not overburdened. With the addition of resource contouring, if you need to front load or back load tasks, you can do that. The two primary reasons that we've seen front loading or backloading is to play tetris with someone's time to make sure they are not overburdened, or if you try to level the amount of time someone spends on a project across a month or quarter, it makes it nice to be specific about when hours should be spent. The last capability as part of this resource scheduling effort is an update to MyWork to reflect these scheduling changes to the end worker. One of our value propositions over many other project management solutions is how much we focus on engaging the end worker. This improvement to MyWork will continue that focus by connecting the schedule built to the actual worker doing the work.
On top of the resource scheduling work, there is a resource planning slide that essentially says we'll let folks who have a set of projects that must be done by certain dates work with those projects to see how they lay out and trade off resources to try to fit them together. Today, trying to plan resources can be a little challenging as it is spread across several different tools in Workfront. As most PMO organizations well know, several of our resource planning tools are built in flash and we're looking to start retiring some of the flash-based code as a part of this effort. I know you and your IT department will be overjoyed! Either way, most project managers today are managing multiple projects with a fixed set of resources and we want to make it easier to balance those resources across the projects you are responsible for.
Tracking hours can be extremely helpful in such circumstances and there are a couple of capabilities here that will help. When tracking hours, it can be tough to consolidate the hours that may be applied at the project or task level, and even to issues when one comes up. There are typically three lenses - how many hours were planned, how many were budgeted, and how many did you actually spend on the work. We're putting a canned report together that will give you quick insight into these metrics across all of the work done so you no longer have to manually pull that report together to show how effectively you are managing your projects in reality. Last in the plan section, if you do use hours, often either for billing back to another department or another business, some folks will apply rates to these hours that change over the life of a project. We're excited to be working on the ability to apply dates to rates, then help you to automate managing those rates if you have a complex rate card. This applies to tons of IT and PMO organizations that I've chatted with, and certainly seems to be becoming more common as these organizations want to run more like an independent business inside the enterprise rather than be perceived as a cost center.
Execute, Fulfill, and Platform to be documented in my next post. If I don't get to it by end of day tomorrow, we'll extend again, so don't worry John! Thanks for reading this far - as an interesting tidbit about myself I once rode a camel around the pyramids of Giza - highly recommend it if you have the time. :)