The IPM Blog

I found an article this morning about how social media is evolving in organisations to become more than just a marketing tool. Social media is now becoming a part of many departments in big organisations from HR right through to project management. And even smaller companies are jumping on board. So that got me thinking, what are some of the ways you could use social media to manage your projects?

The important thing to remember about social media is it is not confined to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Blogs, wikis, online pinboards and team websites all fall under the social media umbrella. Organisations are even creating their own in house social media platforms, or adopting software with integrated social media tools to help incorporate this growing trend into their everyday operations.

So how can social media help you manage your projects? Here are four ways:

1. Communication
As Gen Y and Gen Z’s enter the workforce, we are beginning to not only see a trend of multi-generational project teams, but also less reliance on email. As the article I mentioned above shows, many of the younger people entering the workforce don’t like email and prefer a more team oriented communication. As such, some companies such as IBM are adopting Facebook and Twitter style communication platforms, where team members can share project information quickly and collaboratively. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, you can find and follow other users in the What’s New section, which gives you a chat-like feature to share comments and insights with team members about projects. This reduces a huge amount of internal email communication in favour of succinct responses.

2. Collaboration
Similarly to helping with communication, products like SharePoint that can be integrated with your project management software allow for the creation of team wikis and websites, where all team members can contribute and store appropriate project information for other team members to access and edit. This really fosters a collaborative approach to managing your project, no matter how far spread your project team members are around the world. The project also ultimately benefits, with ideas and solutions continually evolving as team members contribute their expertise.

3. Keeping up to date with contacts
Another tool that can be integrated with some project management software products such as IPM is the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector enables you to look at your Outlook contacts’ activity in social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Viadeo and Xing. This way, you can stay up to date with contacts as the project progresses, build up your network for the future and keep up to date with new projects that may be coming up.

4. Keeping track of lessons learned
This way of using social media has been mentioned on the PMI Voices on Project Management blog as a way of keeping track of lessons learned and project review. Using some of the tools above, internal social media pages can be set up to capture comments for lessons learned. As Bernadine Douglas says, this allows you to reach stakeholders in their habitat, which could result in more candid and useful comments for future projects.

Whilst it has traditionally been viewed as a consumer product or a marketing tool, social media can also have very effective applications in other areas, in particular project management. Can you think of any other way social media can help manage your projects? Feel free to post a comment below.

We are very pleased to announce that IPM Global’s project management suite has been named in Constructech Magazine’s Top Products for 2012. The winners were announced on March 1st and the full list can be found on theConstructech Magazine website.

So what does it mean to be named a Top Product? Well according to Constructech, the competition highlights some of the best products tailored for the construction and homebuilding markets. The top products are judged by the Constructech Magazine’s editorial team, who are looking for strong, stable and efficient technologies that are useful and unique to the construction industry. They also take into account the customer growth rate of each product over the past five years when making a decision.

IPM Global was named in the New Products category, for software that has been on the market for two years or less. One of the key features of IPM the judges liked was the way it uses the Microsoft interface to create a familiar and comfortable experience for the user. Mike Carrozzo, the chief editor of Constructech Magazine sums it up well when he says, “Our Top Products winners provide solid solutions in areas from mobility to BIM, and so much more. We truly believe these to be some of the best offerings found in the construction marketplace.”

A big thank you must go to Constructech Magazine for taking the time to review our product. Feel free to review IPM yourself by checking out some of the functionality and user benefits. You can also contact us to arrange a free demo if you'd like to see the software in action.

I’m very pleased to let you know we have recently developed a brand new addition to the IPM Suite called the IPM Mail Manager. As an additional product, the mail manager can extend the capabilities of IPM’s current RFI and RFQ functions, so it works well for both project managers and estimators.

So how does this neat little tool work? Basically, you link an email account to IPM (either your own email or a generic team email address multiple people can use) and when you create a new RFI or RFQ, indicate you want to use the mail manager. The mail manager will add a specially formatted area to your outgoing email, where the person receiving the RFI or RFQ can add their response and email it back to you. The mail manager then takes the information from the return email and automatically updates the appropriate area of IPM.

This means that when you receive an answer to an RFI or a quote from a vendor, that information is automatically updated in IPM for all the appropriate team members to see. Not only does this save time re entering data from emails, it also means the information is available to everyone, even if the team member who receives the email is absent from work, or briefly out of the office.

We are currently running the Beta version of the mail manager, so if you’re a current IPM customer and would like to be involved with putting it through its paces, please contact us or leave a comment below. Feel free to contact us too if you’d like more information on the whole IPM suite.

At the end of last year, I came across a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, which was released in May. Looking closely at the findings, they are impressive. So I thought what better way to kick off the New Year than to highlight just how much benefit using a CRM system for your project management needs can give you. If you’re already using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 with IPM, then rest assured, you’ve made a solid investment. And if you’re not, then perhaps you may have just come across a belated New Year’s resolution?
 
The study found that a 2000-employee composite organisation with an initial CRM deployment of 50 users would see a “three-year, risk-adjusted ROI of 243 percent”. That sure is a solid ROI. But what I found even more interesting in the study’s findings was the increased productivity of 5% due to CRM’s ease of use and interoperability with Microsoft Outlook. There is also a productivity saving of 16 man-hours per month associated with using Microsoft Dynamics CRM due its better reporting tools, data consolidation, reporting automation and dashboard capabilities.
 
I have mentioned many times before on our blog the benefits project managers can gain from using project management software such as IPM, combined with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. But now there is independent, quantifiable proof that using Microsoft Dynamics CRM increases productivity. And even though these benefits are based on the CRM system, IPM users have access to all the same functionality when managing their projects with IPM. What’s more, IPM is built around this functionality, so the CRM features that increase productivity are key to the way IPM works, meaning they also increase productivity for IPM users. Interoperability with Microsoft Outlook in particular is one of the main reasons project managers find using IPM so easy, as they are already familiar with the Outlook environment.
 
You can check out the Forrester study on the economic impact of CRM here, and if you would like any further information about how to increase your productivity and ROI with IPM, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
 

One of the qualities you will undoubtedly find in every good project manager is an ability to stay organised. With a constant stream of communication about RFIs, contracts and budget and schedule changes, it takes a very organised project manager to stay on top of everything.

But dealing with the huge number of incoming and outgoing emails that are generated by a project every day can test even the most organised project manager. Previously, the answer to this has been to manually sort and file information and communications into separate email folders. But due to the proliferation of email communication these days, the sheer amount of communication means manually filing is just not feasible.

Many project management software products have tried to come up with a solution to this by introducing automatic email filing. But what many products claim to be ‘automatic’ filing is far from it, and often has huge limitations.

That’s why Microsoft Dynamics CRM has developed an automatic email tracking function that is truly automatic, whereby a tracking code is assigned to the subject line of each email. This way all incoming and outgoing emails with the same tracking code are grouped together and stored in the database. And with IPM’s ability to utilise all the features of Dynamics CRM, the email tracking feature is also incredibly useful for project managers, and is unlike anything else currently available to project managers. Here’s why:

1. Email filing is not automatic in other project management software applications. Some other applications do have email filing, but this often means you have to forward the email to a central job email address, so the process is not automatic.

2. Other applications can only file all emails under the Job. Just think of how many emails you may send and receive on one Job, and how difficult it would be to sort through them all to find the one you are looking for.

3. With IPM email tracking, each transaction has a unique code. This means you can click on an RFI for example, and see all the communication related only to that RFI.

So by utilising the tools and features available in CRM, IPM can make the process of email tracking for companies in the construction industry easy and automatic.

To find out more about IPM’s automatic email tracking, please contact us.

One thing that software providers have often been guilty of is making the claim that their particular software can solve any problem encountered on a project. Yes, technology has come a long way and has revolutionised the way our world works, but how far can technology really go to solve our project management problems?

Although it would be nice to think technology is the end to all our problems, we know that’s just not true. There are some things that simply work better in the human mind, so every software solution has to have a human aspect to it. And with software, like many things in life, you only get out what you put in. There are some fantastic features in project management software applications these days, but they depend on one very important thing. The user. At the end of the day, technology is only as good as what the end user can do with it.

So where does that leave people like us, developers and designers of project management software? Our role is simple. We have to design the best software possible. That doesn’t mean something that is a sophisticated solution to every single problem ever encountered on a project. It simply means we have to create something that can work with the project team, adapt to the way they work, align itself with existing processes and, above all, not create more problems than it solves.

We have taken all this into account with our development of IPM, and we really feel we’ve struck a balance between technology that can assist a project team and help do things better, without becoming the main focus or requiring hours of training. Because at the end of the day, good technology is not about what has all the bells and whistles, but more about what can fit into the real human context of a project team.

One of the things that can really unravel a project is a lack of communication between the people working on a particular job. Jobs can have literally hundreds of people working on them from project managers, the project team, architects, right down to all the various subcontractors and their own employees. Ensuring smooth communication between all these people can seem like a massive task, but it doesn’t have to be.

In order to ensure the project runs smoothly, it’s important to ensure the communication procedure is set right from the start. Nothing infuriates project teams more than being given the answer to an RFI days after it came in, working off old plans that have since been updated two or three times and not having the most up to date version of the schedule. Through these simple breakdowns in communication, time and money are wasted and staff confidence can slowly be eroded.

But there are also so many advances in technology these days that can assist project teams in maintaining open and effective channels of communication. For a start, software with a central database, where all employees log into the same system and can see the most up to date project documents is an incredibly valuable asset for a project team. Project team members then have no reason to not have the most up to date information.

But what about subcontractors who may not necessarily have access to the software? Well, there are also ways to ensure the good communication can extend to subcontractors and also right through to site level. Workflows can be set up to automatically send emails to alert relevant subcontractors that an updated plan has been added to the database, or a change has been made to the schedule. This way everyone stays in the loop and can work efficiently with the most up to date information.

If you would like a free demo of IPM, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

When most people hear the term social media, they immediately think of teenagers using applications like Twitter and Facebook to let their friends know how cool the party on the weekend was, or who is in a relationship with who.

But although this may have been how social media started out, it is becoming so much more than that, and something that has become ingrained in both our personal and professional lives. Erik Qualman’s Social Media Revolution 2011 shows just what a huge impact social media is having on us, and that it really is something to sit up and take notice of.

As technology tends to do, social media has evolved as we have found more and more ways to utilise this tool. Social media is not just about Facebook and Twitter anymore, as there are many other tools out there that are helping people communicate and collaborate more effectively. So instead of thinking of social media as a trivial way for teenagers to pass time, we need to start seeing it as groups of people communicating and collaborating with each other and contributing content to further develop ideas.

If we think of social media in these terms, it has huge impacts for project management, as communication is one of the most integral parts of the project management process. The nature of project management itself is also changing, becoming more about team collaboration and idea sharing rather than a top down command-and-control approach. With a team collaboration approach, just think of the benefits a social media mindset could have on a project team.

At IPM Global we already have some of the principles of social media in our software. Web based project management systems such as IPM mean everyone in the team can log in and check the progress of the project each day, and contribute to status updates, timelines and task lists. Being built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM framework means IPM users have access to all the features of Microsoft Outlook integration, including the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector enables users to click on individual Outlook contacts to see their activity in social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Viadeo and Xing. Users can also send contact requests to connect on these social media sites, all without leaving the IPM environment.

 IPM is also able to integrate with collaboration tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint, which allows for the creation of team wikis, workflows and team websites. One of our clients, Murphy Pipe and Civil even plans to implement an organisation wide collaboration tool through IPM using this kind of integration in order for their teams to better communicate and collaborate.

As IPM is a fluid and constantly evolving platform, it can easily adapt to new trends and advancements in both technology and project management practices. Being able to adapt to the changes in the way social media is now perceived means we can keep our clients at the forefront of the exciting new development that is social project management.

What are your thoughts? Have you found any good social media applications to use in managing your projects?

Project management software is a considerable investment and one that takes much research, evaluation and comparisons of different offerings to get right. So to help you choose the best software for your organisational needs, here are seven things to look for when making the all important decision of which project management software to go with:

1. Job Costing
The software should be able to handle your job costing needs, including giving you instant access to actual project costs and the ability to alert users to potential cost overruns before they send the project too far off budget. Good project management software will also be able to produce cost projections easily and regularly.

2. Document Control
One of the main advantages of project management software is that all your job information is stored in a central database accessible to everyone who is working on the project. Therefore, an easily accessible database with the ability to store all the information relating to the project is a must. Documents stored in the database must also be easily tracked and retrievable in the event of a dispute, claim or change of scope.

3. Reporting
Good project management software should come with built in comprehensive reporting facilities that can be easily customised to suit your organisation’s specific needs. Reports should be able to be generated quickly and easily with up to the minute information to give you the most accurate view of your project. A bonus is also the ability to report on all aspects of the project, not just document control but also costs as well.

4. Ability to Customise
With the nature of project management, no two organisation’s processes are the same and that’s why it’s important to be able to customise the software to suit your organisation. Small configurations to the software that do not need external consultants and are free for users to do themselves are so important when it comes to any kind of software. Customisable forms, field labels and dashboards all help make project management software easy to use and relevant to your users, as well as user-defined workflows to streamline and automate your processes.

5. Integration
In order to keep everyone in your organisation on the same page and reduce duplicate data entry, project management software should be able to integrate with your ERP system. Good project management software will have seamless integration with a number of ERP systems that allows smooth transfer of information between the two applications. Integration between other applications is also a plus, such as email integration with Outlook.

6. Web based/SaaS option
With advancements in cloud computing and hosting software online, many project management software applications are moving towards this new technology. Although it may not suit every organisation, good project management software provides the option to buy an online version of the software. This gives you the opportunity to assess which is the best option for your business needs and the ability to choose to use the software either on premise or online.

7. Scheduling
This may seem obvious, but some project management software applications do not provide the ability to schedule work on the project. Gantt charts are an easy way to see at a glance the project schedule, and if these are integrated with other areas of the software to automatically update should something change elsewhere on the project, it’s even better.

If you are in the market for a new project management software solution, feel free to contact us for a free demo of IPM and all of the above features.

We’re very pleased to announce the publication on the Microsoft website of our latest IPM case study. We’ve recently been working with one of our newer clients, Tracey Brunstrom and Hammond, to share with you their experience of IPM and how it has helped them provide independent project management services across Australia and Singapore.

The case study highlights TBH’s need to standardise documentation for all their offices across Australia and Singapore, and how IPM’s report functionality is helping them achieve this. We also look at the checks and balances inherent in IPM’s automatic email filing facility, and how IPM’s central database has enabled TBH supervisors to keep track of project progress without having to visit the local office.

The full TBH project management software case study can be found on the Microsoft website, and we hope it’s useful for you to see IPM in action in a real world project management scenario. If you have any further questions about this particular case, or how IPM may be able to help solve any of your project management problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.