Newsletter FY2012 Q2

EPM Partners Becomes an Australian Agent for UMT Project Financial Server

New York-based UMT Consulting Group, perhaps best known for its Portfolio Manager product - upon which Microsoft based its 2007 product Project Portfolio Server, launched Project Financial Server in June 2010.

Project Financial Server 2010 is an enterprise Project and Portfolio Financial Management software that enables financial budgeting, planning, selection, tracking and benefits realisation. Designed specifically for Microsoft Project Server 2010, this product offers a seamless and familiar user experience.

Project Financial Server 2010 is built on the same SharePoint platform as Microsoft Project Server 2010. Together with Microsoft Project Server 2010, UMT’s Project Financial Server 2010 supports all project and portfolio processes and enables organisations to become smarter, more agile, and better-aligned.

The product addresses delivers insight and ease-of-use to executives, operations managers, PMO, project managers and team members. It enables organisations to streamline their project financial planning, forecasting and tracking processes by offering intelligent workflows that are data-driven, user-configured and scenario-specific, to address the needs of today’s multi-faceted organisation.

As an agent for UMT Project Financial Server, EPM Partners will represent UMT’s product in Australia.

To learn more please contact info@epmpartners.com.au

Victoria University Brings Portfolio Management Capabilities to its EPM Toolset and Processes with Project Server 2010

Victoria University (VU) is a multi-sector institution (higher education and TAFE) with excellence in teaching, training, research and scholarship. It has more than 50,000 students enrolled at a number of local campuses (and at international sites) undertaking courses, research and other engagement activities.

VU was committed to start up a Portfolio Office (PO) in 2011 which now has responsibility for the management of a collection of business initiatives aligned with the organisation’s strategy, and consolidated this into a single view for overall value and risk optimisation.

The decision was made to move away from an existing Microsoft 2007 EPM system and to build a brand new Project Server 2010-based EPM platform. The stand-out driver for the upgrade was the great interest in the portfolio selection and optimisation capabilities of the new product – functionality previously available in the separate Microsoft Portfolio Server product.

VU engaged EPM Partners to design, configure and deploy the Microsoft EPM solution using EPM Partners’ fixed-scope-for-fixed-price "Enterprise EPM-in-a-Box" engagement model.

EPM partners worked closely with VU throughout the project which included a rigorous user acceptance testing stage during which issues were formally raised, tracked and closed to ensure that the solution would fully meet requirements once placed into production.

The introduction of Project Server 2010’s workflow capabilities allowed VU to embed its own Project Management methodology into the toolset, and strengthen it governance over projects as they progressed through their project lifecycle stages. This included some formal stage gates where nominated users were directly involved with the approval process within the system. This provided them easier access to more accurate and complete data than ever before.

“The process captured our requirements and has translated them into a solution that encompasses the PMO’s project methodology” says Simon Zaviska, Lead Project Manager at VU’s PMO. “We look forward to having a tool that will assist with the facilitation of the end-to-end project lifecycle and are delighted with the solution we now have in place”, he adds. In addition, Sam Khoury, PMO Associate Director states: “The 2010 Project Server platform offers great improvement over 2007, and now gives us a platform to improve our project, program, and portfolio management capabilities. Over time we will elaborate our use of this toolset”.

Dan Stopher, EPM Partners’ project manager for the engagement says “The Victoria University PMO team were committed to the project from the start, they responded punctually to all our requests and maintained the support of key stakeholders throughout. They were a pleasure to work with”.

A support arrangement with EPM Partners has recently been established to assist with the smooth on-going operation of the solution.

New Team Member

Aaron Tamblyn, Senior Consultant VIC

EPM Partners has significantly strengthened its Victoria team with the recruitment of Aaron Tamblyn.

A senior consultant, Aaron joins EPM Partners from Dimension Data where he has been leading and delivering EPM and SharePoint engagements. Aaron brings to EPM Partners a wealth of experience in successfully implementing project management and knowledge management solutions to businesses across many industries.

With a strong base of Microsoft consulting experience gained over the past 15 years, Aaron has designed and delivered an extensive range of project management solutions. These span departmental project collaboration through to high-profile, multi-party portfolio and program management solutions.

Aaron is a passionate advocate of Project Management and Knowledge Management, helping clients to design and implement elegant solutions which transform the way people work.

After hours, Aaron enjoys windsurfing, yachting and getting away at the weekends with his family.

Microsoft Project Conference 2012 will be held in Phoenix, Arizona on March 19 - 22, 2012

Project Conference is an occasional (the last one was in Sept 2009) Microsoft-led event to share Project and Portfolio Management best practices and to provide a forum for customers, partners, industry-leading experts and the Microsoft Project team to learn about their successes with the Microsoft Project family of products.

EPM Partners will have a couple of representatives at the event in March. Your correspondent will report on what they learn in the Q1 2012 edition of the EPM Partners Newsletter. For more information go to: http://www.msprojectconference.com/.

Tips & Tricks: Benefits of the Project Workspace List Viewer Web Part

The Project Workspace List Viewer Web Part (PWLV) is part of the Microsoft Project Server 2010 Solution Starter pack and is one that most consultants can’t do without. It provides us with the ability to display Project Site lists from within a Project Detail Page.

The key benefits of this web part include:

• The ability to create a ‘One stop shop’ for Project Managers
  The project manager doesn’t have to keep opening the project site to modify project artefacts, then swap back to the project information and schedule in Project Centre. It can all be accessed via the same interface

• The ability to hide/display important artefacts relevant to the workflow stage
  You may store document templates in the document libraries ready for the PM to use, however with the PWLV you can display these documents by linking the library to a Project Detail page that is displayed at certain points of the workflow!

• The ability to display any type of information
  There is no limit to the amount of custom information that you can display for project managers. All you need to do is create the content on the Project Site template.

Examples of how you can use the PWLV include:

• Displaying the Risks and Issues lists
• Displaying the Deliverables list
• Displaying project document libraries
• Displaying team discussion board
• Displaying custom lists designed for:
• Change Requests
• Actions
• Decisions
• Dependencies
• Financial Information
• Report Libraries
• Status Updates
• Document templates
• Requirements log
• Test Cases
• Post Implementation Services
• Wiki Pages
• And so on....

1.  To understand its potential, begin by downloading the solution starters and deploy the PWLV to your Project Server 2010 environment.

2.  Create your Project Site lists and content that you wish to display (recommend deploying via Project Site templates)

3.  It all begins with Project Detail Pages, another great new feature of Project Server 2010 as they allow us to now organise our Project Custom fields in a better presentation than ever before:

Providing the Project Manager with all of their project information and artefacts at their fingertips is important. To do this, we can create Project Detail Pages to display key project information, status update information and project contacts by adding the Project Fields web part to project detail pages.

4.  However we can also display key project artefacts from the Project site once we have deployed the PWLV solution starter by adding this web part:

5.  Once it is added to a project detail page, select to Edit Web Part from the web part drop down

6.  Provide the name of the list that you wish to display from the Project Site, you must enter the name exactly how it appears on the site:

You can also rename the web part so that it is relevant to the list you are displaying, e.g. Project Risks
7.  Select OK on the Edit Web part dialog, and Stop Editing on the SharePoint ribbon

Make sure you also name your Project Detail Page something relevant to the list you are displaying
8.  Then you just need to add the Project Detail pages to the relevant Workflow Stages and Enterprise Project
     Types as required

Then bingo! Any project that has this detail page and a project site will be able to see the list data from their Project Detail Pages.
Be creative and enjoy this new feature, I bet you won’t deploy Project Server without it!