There has been a lot of buzz around the concept of ‘cloud computing’ lately, and you may have seen Microsoft’s ‘to the cloud’ global advertising campaign. But even after all this buzz, I still find the concept hasn’t been fully explained for the average ‘non techie’. Starting out at IPM Global as a ‘non techie’ myself, I will do my best to explain it as I have come to understand it, and in completely ‘non techie’ terms.
The Click Factor – Making Project Management Software Easy to Use
Way back when I first started writing for this blog, I wrote my very first post on how end user buy in is the key to the success of many software implementations. Whilst that post focussed more on the usability of IPM because it can be used within Outlook, I wanted to use this post to illustrate some other user friendly features.
Making project mistakes is only ok so long as you learn from them!
There has been a lot of talk in the project management blogosphere lately focussing on project failure and how it can actually lead to success. However, one of the key points I have taken away from all these blogs is that failure only contributes to future success if you learn from the mistakes you made the first time. Failure is obviously no good if you continue to make the same mistakes over and over, without any change to your practices in light of what the failure is showing you.
The Workflow Series – Converting Site Diary Change Requests to IPM Change Requests
Throughout The Workflow Series, we have shown you many ways you can use workflows to automate and customise your use of IPM. As we are continually adjusting and changing IPM in our development process, new ways to use workflows are appearing all the time and one such way is the conversion of Site Diary information into official Change Requests.
What else is new for Project Managers in IPM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011?
So far I’ve covered a few of the new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 that are going to make it a lot easier to manage your projects within IPM. With customisable dashboards to show you snapshots of information about your project in the one screen, to conditional formatting to change the appearance of certain items in a list so they stand out, the new version of IPM definitely looks exciting for project managers. So I thought, why not treat you with a few more new features?
If you don’t attack the risks, the risks will attack you – project management tools to help attack risks head on
We all know projects carry some degree of risk, but the important thing is to try to manage and mitigate the risk so that it doesn’t evolve into an issue on your project. Too many times, companies have either not conducted a risk assessment, or have ignored risk assessments and not properly addressed and dealt with the risk, and the risk has come back to bite them tenfold.
The Workflow series – Converting a Change Request to a Subcontract Change Order
In the previous post, we looked at how workflows can assist you in taking the information from an issue and creating a change request or RFI . This post will look at one of the next steps in this process, which you may need if the change required has an effect on one of the subcontracts.
If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong – how MS Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards can help
I found the great quote for my headline from a collection of project management sayings from Steven Seay’s ProjectSteps blog. I thought it was quite quirky and relevant not only to project management in general but also to today’s discussion on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards.
The Workflows Series – Creating RFIs and Change Requests from an Issue
This is the fourth post in the Workflow series, which we hope has been helpful so far in showing you a few examples of how workflows can help automate some key areas of IPM you use every day.
How project managers can benefit from conditional formatting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
Here at IPM Global we’re gearing up for the global on-premise release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, earmarked for February 28th. In preparation, I’ve been doing some exploring to discover all the cool new features of CRM 2011 that are going to make your lives a lot easier as project managers and IPM users.