Managing Projects with SharePoint (Recorded Webcasts)

Date Held: June 25th 2009

The Dilemma!

• The customers we meet are at pains to tell us that they do not have the time or the budget to train people in formal project management – but yet they need project management discipline.  They want an approach so simple that it is obvious. 

A Simple Solution

• Over the years we have been helping customers develop such a simple approach.  More recently we have been working on a process that can be described and always decomposed into three steps.  Why three steps every time?  Why not?  Three is an easy number to work with.  It is a bit quirky and fun.  It is easier to remember and manage.  It forces us all to be concise rather than long-winded.

This Webcast:

• Will present a simple 1-2-3 process that can be used for project management
• Show how this simple 1-2-3 process can be implemented on the SharePoint platform

Date Held: June 18th 2009

The Dilemma!

Business Applications like ERP and CRM solutions are critical to drive customer productivity and efficiencies in organizations.  However, the fear of long drawn implementations and the perceived risks associated with them have often discouraged customers from making the right investment in solutions or partners to help implement.  They want an approach so simple that it is obvious. The approach also needs to facilitate open collaboration with all project team members including the customer.

A Simple Solution:

In these times of increased fiscal scrutiny and rapid return on investment to stay competitive in the market, Rapid project type in Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step provides guidance to partners on implementing Microsoft Dynamics solutions in 20 activities or less.  Join us for this webinar to learn more about this simple approach; and how you can implement, within reduced timeframes, without the perceived overhead of project management and with more consistency – all within fixed customer budgets. 

This webcast will present both a simple process and an example of how such a process can be implemented in collaborative SharePoint project sites.

Presenters:

Aditya Mohan, Director Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step and Éamonn McGuinness, BrightWork

Date Held: June 17th, 2009
Presenter: Bob Kreha, PMP, Principal, Fifth Discipline, LLC.

The Challenge

Traditional, heavy-handed project management techniques that work well in construction and other industries don’t lend themselves well to the more collaborative world of technology and business process improvement projects, where multiple stakeholders, vendors and virtual workers often comprise the project team.

A New Approach

Collaborative technologies like SharePoint are changing the way people work together to accomplish organizational goals. Through an innovative product called pmPoint and a more team-oriented approach to your program and project management methodologies, organizations that we work with are finding there’s a kinder, gentler way to plan and execute projects successfully, while keeping all your stakeholders informed at the same time.

This Webcast:

• Will present a novel approach to quickly adopting a collaborative project strategy.
• Show how simple this approach can be implemented on the SharePoint platform.

Date Held: June 10th 2009

SharePoint is a revolutionary platform for collaboration and information sharing.  However, it can be challenging trying to manage one or more projects in SharePoint if you do not know all of the functionality that is available right out-of-the-box.

This webcast will explain and demonstrate the 4 main feature sets you get with base SharePoint to manage projects.

Date Held: June 4th 2009

Cloud computing infrastructures are winning over decision makers in companies of all sizes across the globe.  They realize the power cloud computing technology offers, including significant savings in administrative costs.

pmPoint Online frees companies from software and its hidden costs, high failure rates, and prolonged implementations. All while providing a complete SharePoint project management solution that meets the varying project management needs of businesses of every size, everywhere.

By taking SharePoint project management into the cloud, pmPoint Online offers a pay-as-you-go model so users can forget about buying servers and software. It’s all rolled up into a predictable monthly subscription, so you only pay for what you actually use.  Better still, deployment and adoption is lightening fast and upgrades are painless.

Join us for a live presentation and demonstration of pmPoint Online.

Date: May 20th, 2009

SharePoint is an awesome tool to keep project teams connected, but it requires additional capabilities if it is to be used to track and manage multiple projects.  Extending the base SharePoint platform with project management templates provides a pragmatic project management application that is rapid-to-deploy, enables broad adoption, and is highly customizable to fit local processes/approaches.

Join this webcast on May 20th to see a live demonstration of pmPoint’s SharePoint based project management templates that include the newly released ‘Project Office Portfolio’ and ‘Projects Tracker’.

After the webcast, all participants will receive a recording of the demo session, the associated slide-show presentation, and access to a free trial of Project Office Portfolio and Projects Tracker in pmPoint.

Date: May 12th, 2009

All organizations need to track and manage work items that exist outside the formal structures of projects, such as Activities, Tasks, Help Desk Items, Trouble Tickets, Issues, Defects, etc.  Leveraging the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint and the new ‘Work Tracker’ and ‘Work Manager’ templates of pmPoint provides an affordable and highly adoptable solution for practical work management. With these templates work can optionally be housed in a SharePoint environment with the organizations projects, thus enabling an organization to manage all types of work and projects in the one SharePoint environment.

Join BrightWork to see a live demonstration of how SharePoint is extended with out-of-the-box templates from pmPoint to capture, investigate and report on individual work items and work item lists.

Date Held: April 29th, 2009

SharePoint is a revolutionary platform for collaboration and information sharing.  However, it can be challenging trying to manage one or more projects in SharePoint if you do not know all of the functionality that is available right out-of-the-box.

This webcast will explain and demonstrate the top 12 features you get with base SharePoint to manage projects. 

Date Held: April 23rd 2009

Version 7.0 of pmPoint drives forward BrightWork’s mission to deliver real-world applications for project management on the Microsoft SharePoint platform.  Featuring SharePoint project management templates, resource tracking capabilities, advanced cross projects reporting, KPIs, charting, and much more, version 7.0 represents the most significant release of pmPoint since its introduction in 2001.

On April 14th, 2009, join BrightWork to see a live demonstration of Version 7.0, and see how organizations such as Federal Express, Novartis, Nucor Corporation, and Microsoft rely on pmPoint to manage their projects and programs of different shapes and sizes.

After the webcast, all participants will receive a recording of the demo session, the associated slide-show presentation and access to a free trial of version 7.0.

Date Held: February 26th, 2009
Presented By: Aditya Mohan, Director Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step and Éamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork

Have you ever been frustrated because your team, vendors and ISVs are not on the same page during pre-sales cycles?

Have you ever wished that you could close more deals with the same resources – faster?
Would you like to be more assured that you are setting and meeting, even exceeding, customer expectations more consistently?

How about reaching the nirvana of ‘enabling a customer for life’?

What if you could do all that and increase efficiency and profitability?

This Webcast will Show You How:

1. using Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step during the sales process can enable you to plan and execute a roadmap for success for your prospects and customers.
2. you can use this same Sure Step in a SharePoint environment to stay connected with the customer before, during and after the project.

Date Held: January 14th, 2009
Presented By: Éamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork and Rolf Larsen, CEO of NetConnect 

BrightWork has announced pmPoint as a hosted on demand service!

Powered by NetConnect’s SaaS platform TeamPortal.com, pmPoint Online delivers a complete project management solution on SharePoint as a subscription service, and will be available in two editions: The ‘Project Manager’ and the ‘Program Management Office’.  The Project Manager edition extends SharePoint to provide the functionality needed to consistently manage single projects while the Program Management Office edition enables the capabilities on SharePoint for comprehensive multi-project lifecycle management. 

With these configurations, customers can choose the edition they need based on the degree of project management process and structure they require.  Getting started is as simple as clicking on a subscribe button!  The price varies from US$49/€38 to US$5/€4 per user per month depending on the edition selected, the number of users and the hosting period.

Any organization that wants to learn more about pmPoint Online can watch a webcast recording which was held on Wednesday, January 14th , where Eamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork and Rolf Larsen, CEO of NetConnect did a live presentation and demonstration.

• Date Held: 9th December 2008
• Presented by:  Eamonn McGuinness, BrightWork

This webcast will show how you can combine the best of Microsoft technologies with the ease and flexibility of pmPoint to manage projects and programs of all shapes and sizes for organizations of all shapes and sizes! 

Watch this webcast to learn how you can leverage your current technology investments by adding pre-built project management templates and features to deliver a low cost and complete project management system that is rapid-to-deploy and enables broad adoption.

• Date Held: 3rd December 2008
• Presented by:  Richard Bruvik, Senior Systems Consultant, Columbus IT

Columbus found the way to the New World.  Columbus IT found a way to help companies become more efficient and more profitable.  But how does an organization with over 1,100 employees and over 5,000 implementations in 101 countries, efficiently collaborate and manage their many projects?  On December 3rd, join Richard Bruvik, Senior Systems Consultant in Columbus IT, and hear how they explored project management technology and discovered pmPoint from BrightWork - an innovative way to use SharePoint to manage different projects across countries.

Watch webcast where Richard talks through and demos:

• The project management challenges they faced at Columbus IT
• The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
• The deployment steps involved in the pmPoint implementation

• Date Held: 19th November 2008
• Presented by:  Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

There has been an increasing trend in project portfolio management towards ensuring success by making sure only the right projects get kicked-off in the first place. This means placing a greater emphasis on the requests for projects and managing this pipeline.

On November 12th, BrightWork’s CEO, Eamonn McGuinness will present and demonstrate how SharePoint can be augmented to help businesses align project requests to business goals, flag high risk projects and issues, and generally compare requests for projects in a way that facilitates the selection of the most appropriate projects.  This is a great starting point for many organizations wanting to manage their project pipeline more efficiently.

• Date Held: November 18th, 2008
• Presented by:  Matthew Roberts, Practice Team Lead, Microsoft Application Development Practice, EMC Consulting

“In these tighter financial times we see many organizations focusing on cost savings through more effective project and portfolio management.  At EMC we believe that SharePoint is a great platform to utilize - to quickly and flexibly setup a Project Management Office (PMO).  We have also found that customers need implementations to follow a framework-based services approach, as time to implementation (and thus cost savings) is super critical these days.” 

Matt Russell, Global SharePoint Lead, EMC Consulting.

Webcast Objectives

Join us for this 30 minute webcast to:

1. understand the realities of Project Management today
2. learn about the EMC “PMO in a SharePoint Box” service offering
3. get a quick demo of the solution
4. have your questions answered

• Date Held: October 8th, 2008
• Presented by: Donnell Coomes – Senior Consultant, Enterprise Project Management at Group Health Cooperative

How does a large non-profit organization stay in control of their project work?  How do senior executives and project sponsors quickly and easily see the status of the various projects in progress - in a way that doesn't make them hunt and peck for information?  On October 8th, Group Health Cooperative, a not-for-profit health care provider serving over 56,000 members, will present and demonstrate how they deployed a project management solution on SharePoint, that allows their PMO to easily track their projects’ progress, issues and risks.  Now that’s a healthy system worth seeing!
Webcast Objectives

Watch this webcast where Donnell talked through and demoed:

• The project management challenges they faced at Group Health Cooperative
• The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
• The deployment steps involved in the pmPoint implementation

Please click here to download the presentation slides:

Please click here to download the download the Q&A Write-Up

A recording of the presentation is available at aspeevents.webex.com. Choose to View Event Recordings from the upper right-hand menu. Due to the length of the seminar, we strongly recommend that you allow the file to buffer before beginning the playback. Look for more recordings to come in the near future!

• Date Held: October 9th, 2008
• Presented by: Sven Roth, Head of Unit Information Worker, UP-GREAT AG and Éamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

SharePoint is an awesome collaborative platform but it was not designed out of the box with all the functionality needed to manage one or more projects.  However it was designed as a collaborative platform to be extended with business applications.  This webcast will explain and demonstrate the extensions that can be built to the base SharePoint platform when managing one or more projects.  This webcast will also include a case study at City of Lucerne.

Webcast Objectives

Watch this webcast where Sven talked through (in German) and demoed:

• The project management challenges they faced at Lucerne 
• The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
• The deployment steps involved in the SharePoint pmPoint implementation

BrightWork’s first German partner, UP-GREAT in Switzerland, completed a successful deployment of BrightWork pmPoint in German in the IT department at the Cantonal Administration at Lucerne.   Lucerne needed to aggregate information in project offices so the various departmental managers had one consolidated view of all their projects and status reports. They also wanted to aggregate information over site collections for top management reporting (green, yellow, red) and work with project hierarchies and project room templates.

• Date Held: Sept 25th, 2008     
• Presented by:  Aditya Mohan – Director of Sure Step, Microsoft Dynamics and Éamonn McGuinness – CEO, BrightWork    

To successfully implement critical business software, a comprehensive and proven methodology is a key success factor.  The latest release of Sure Step from Microsoft is such a methodology.

pmPoint for Sure Step is a SharePoint based project management plug-in, available exclusively to Microsoft Partners, that supports and enhances this latest version of the Sure Step methodology.
Webcast Objectives:

• Walk through, demo and explain the 6 phases, the 5 project types, the templates and guidance in the latest release of the Sure Step methodology
• Introduce the key features and benefits of the SharePoint solution (pmPoint for Sure Step)
• Answer your open questions and give references to more materials

Footnote – The Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Methodology is a resource that will guide you and your team through field-tested best practices, proven project management principles and user-friendly tools, which enable the implementation, optimization and upgrade of Microsoft Dynamics business solutions (i.e. Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV and SL).  Because it provides a fully integrated project management discipline, the Sure Step Methodology is different from other methodologies available today, ensuring that you’re able to embed proven project management processes within the project.

• Date Held: Sept 16th, 2008
• Presented by: Dora Martinez, Director of Project Management for Sheppard Mullin
  

Ever wondered how an international law firm can keep on top of all their hundreds of projects at the same time?  Or how they would know the status of every project at a weekly meeting?  Join us on September 16th and see how Sheppard Mullin, an international law firm with over 500 attorneys, has deployed a project management solution on SharePoint that helps them skip ineffective reporting procedures and allow for more efficient project management across the enterprise.

Sheppard Mullin manages over 120 new IT projects every year.  They needed an effective project management solution that would bring all of their IT Projects together on a collaborative platform.  BrightWork’s pmPoint solution gave Sheppard Mullin a straight forward and cost effective solution to managing multiple projects.  pmPoint also allowed all of their project information to be centralized, resulting in greater reporting, structure, visibility and achievement.

Join this case study webcast to hear Dora talk through and demo:

1. The actual project management challenges they faced at Sheppard Mullin
2. The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
3. The deployment steps involved. 

• Date Held: August 27th, 2008 
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

In keeping with its approach to enable customers to easily manage projects of different shapes and sizes in the one SharePoint environment, BrightWork has just released the latest versions of pmPoint and Reporter, the company’s flagship products for project management and enterprise reporting on SharePoint 2007.

This latest release includes new and improved project and cross-project management templates that bake in the best practices uncovered while working with BrightWork customers. Project reporting has been made even easier across multiple SharePoint lists, sites and site collections – a huge issue for teams who are increasingly using SharePoint to store work information.

• Date Held: Thursday July 17th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork                

SharePoint is capable of handling many different business workloads. A classic example is of course a web site built on SharePoint. While this is great use of SharePoint, consider that an organization typically only has one web site, albeit with many users of course. Consider however the business workload of project and program management, where organizations have hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of projects, involving both internal and external parties. Consider also that today many of these projects are run on email, Microsoft Excel and shared network drives. Collaborative project and program management is a business workload very suited to SharePoint.

• Date Held: Thursday June 26th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

SharePoint is an awesome collaborative platform but it was not designed out of the box with all the functionality needed to manage one or more projects.  However it was designed as a collaborative platform to be extended with business applications.  The webcast will explain and demonstrate the extensions that are needed to the base SharePoint platform when managing one or more projects.

• Date Held: Wednesday June 18th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork              

SharePoint is a very large product with much functionality and therefore it is hard to successfully use SharePoint to manage one or more projects if you do not know all the functionality that is freely available.  This webcast will explain and demonstrate the out of the box functionality for Project Management that comes native with SharePoint.

• Date Held: Tuesday June 10th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork  

It is hard to successfully use SharePoint to manage one or more projects if the project management process is not clearly defined and understood.  This webcast will help you design a process for your organization to manage one or more projects that can be mapped to and implemented in SharePoint.  The webcast will include a demo of the mapping from the project management process to SharePoint.

• Date Held: May 15th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

SharePoint is an amazing platform for collaboration and sharing information, however it can be frustrating trying to manage one or more projects on the SharePoint platform.  What is the secret?! This webcast will:

• Give you a technique to help define a project management approach for your projects and programs
• Explain what SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) gives you out of the box for managing projects
• Show how you can manage one or more projects with great ease by extending SharePoint

The questions answered in the webcast include:

1. How can I define the processes needed?
   Organizations today have projects of all shapes and sizes, so no one-size project management approach will fit all project types.  This webcast will give you a technique that you will be able to use to determine the processes that are suitable for managing the various project types, as well as the processes necessary to manage across programs or portfolios.  Having the process understood and somewhat defined is an essential prerequisite to automating the project management process on SharePoint! 
2. What do I get with SharePoint to manage projects?
   SharePoint comes in three flavors.  There is Windows SharePoint Services v3 and there is also Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (Standard and Enterprise).  Each of these three flavors of SharePoint can be configured easily without programming or can be enhanced considerably with SharePoint Designer and some programming skills.  The webcast will show what project management facilities you get with each of these flavors.
3. How can I extend SharePoint to manage projects?
   By extending SharePoint with extra features needed to manage projects you get a great platform for the three main roles involved in managing projects – the Project Manager, the Team Member and the Program / Portfolio Manager.  This webcast will demonstrate role based extensions for managing one or more projects successfully on SharePoint.

• Date Held: October 26th, 2006
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

There are many advances in each of the products in the 2007 Microsoft Office system that make it an awesome platform on which to build applications and products. Enhancements in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Portal Server, and Office Project Server in particular have made this a compelling platform for faster application development. This webcast explains these changes and details how they can be used with examples.

View the Recording | Download the Presentation

• Date Held: April 17th, 2007
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

With the advent of SharePoint 2007 as a stronger platform to build collaborative applications, more and more information will find itself stored in SharePoint with an obvious growing need for reporting. This webcast will explain and show the out-of-box reporting capabilities that come native with SharePoint 2007. This webcast will also explain what reporting capabilities are not available in SharePoint 2007 and will present BrightWork Reporter capabilities that can fill these gaps, i.e. support for cross-site and cross-list reporting, pre-built reports, flexible report building, easy report sharing via scheduled email, dynamic reporting links with Excel, and rich data analysis with Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services.

View the Recording