Sean King is an EPM Live partner in the UK and has been helping UK companies successfully leverage the full capabilities of EPM Live. This was an article published recently in the Project Manager Today UK magazine. Excellent job Sean! Here's to many more wins and successes!
Sean King, of eNable Consultancy Ltd., is a freelance consultant project manager/business analyst with clients in the UK spanning manufacturing, recruitment, business outsourcing, software development and IT services. Sean is often asked by clients to find and implement solutions to meet specific needs.
In the case of an EPM solution, his clients wanted a quick-to-deploy project management solution with enterprise capabilities to manage their high profile projects as well as the many projects that traversed the business which could easily be out of sight or operating in silos.
After carefully analysing many mainstream EPM solutions, EPM Live’s system seemed to be the only one that fitted the requirements of the selection process perfectly. The speed at which the solution could be deployed was a key aspect to its success with clients and it seemed to be one of the few that truly adhered to the ethos behind the SaaS Model.
Sean has successfully used EPM Live to improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of project teams that need to collaborate toward a common goal. EPM Live has allowed project managers to spend more of their time and effort using their skills and expertise rather than their leg work on the administration of a project, often the project’s biggest headache.
The beauty of EPM Live over and above the benefits of MS Project and the SharePoint application separately, says Sean, is that it’s enhanced the functionality to further improve both products capabilities.
Some clients have kept the out-of-the-box solution with few modifications to the core functionality, templates and Web Parts. Others have exploited the additional customised Web Parts, templates and functionality that EPM Live has provided and have even taken them several steps further. These include resource capacity planning templates aligned to the Agile methodology as well as custom lists for slicing and dicing data from within the project schedule by resource, due date and project.
Other examples of where has leveraged and enhanced functionality includes the daily notifications that are pushed out to the project team members’ email address, making them aware of any tasks, issues, risks or status reports that they’re assigned too. Team members, from within their own email client, can clearly see what overdue tasks, actions, issues and risks they have and click on any of them to be taken straight into the item within the Project Workspace in order to update its status. In addition, the daily notifications can be customized to include any other data that the Project Manager wants to add and distribute to the Project Team.
EPM Live’s Executive Dashboards have also been particularly useful as they allow project managers, executives and stakeholders to quickly see the status of a range of projects within a programme as well as providing intuitive ‘slice and dice’ data manipulation.
As far as limitations or suggestions for enhancement are concerned, Sean thinks that the limitations are not so much with the EPM Live solution as such but with the need to use MS Office 2007 in order to take advantage of the extended capabilities that one gets when using in conjunction with Excel, Visio or Word. However, EPM Live overcomes many of these limitations with functionality contained within the solution, mitigating any immediate need for using Office 2007 by the average user.
Sean’s advice to any organisation considering an EPM solution is to focus firstly on their internal processes. Often the solution gets blamed for failure when in fact the company’s processes failed the solution. Eighty percent of a successful EPM adoption, he says, is in examining, refining and re-engineering the working practices and processes of the people involved in project teams, then the EPM solution adds the icing to the cake.
Overall, he has and does recommend EPM Live’s solution which to date has been adopted with great success as well as surprise at how easy it is to deploy and use within a short time frame.
Source: Project Manager Today UK magazine - Sean King
If you have any wins or success stories you'd like to share please email them to me at mwilson@epmlive.com.