Freelance or Interim PMO & Project Manager

Apr42016 by adminNo Comments

SharePoint Co-authoring: It’s a date

Ever been cursed with this pop-up? On a Friday afternoon, right before close of business, when you need to get your TPS Report submitted to upper management, this can be the most horrifying message a computer can send you. (Well, maybe just after the newly designed blue screen of death.) And, oh joy, Word gives you three options: 1) save a local copy of what’s likely an outdated file, 2) get a notification when the person gets back (after the weekend, amirite!?), or 3) give up all hope and press ‘Cancel’. I can’t think of a better example of a lose-lose-lose situation. So, why does this warning come up? Well, if you store a file—Word doc, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, etc.—in a shared drive or on older (or non-updated) versions of SharePoint, the…

Feb82016 by adminNo Comments

Simple service request process

Projects

In smaller projects, a process needs to be established for gathering Service Requests and assigning them to team members based on client priorities. Here's a process that can be used for each request. It stands to reason that smaller projects don't need the same level of project management discipline as larger projects. With a small project, it's easy to define the work, easy to manage the activities, and there usually isn't much work associated with managing risk, quality, communication, scope, etc. In many organizations, a simple service request process is used to manage these small projects. This service request process starts off by defining the work to be done on a simple one- or two-page form — aptly enough called a "Service Request" form. The process for assigning the work…

Jan212016 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft SharePoint vs Google Docssites

Google Apps for work, Home Page, SharePoint

I recently fielded a question from a potential client who wanted to know if Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs with Google Sites was a better fit for their organization's document management and collaboration needs. Although this question is pretty straight-forward, the explanation can get a bit complicated. The short answer is Google Docs/Sites is great tool if you do not have an enterprise collaboration platform at your disposal, and you need to to get a document sharing site up quickly. However, Google Docs/Sites falls way short in providing the breadth and depth of features that Microsoft SharePoint offers. SharePoint is a true enterprise platform with capabilities that extend beyond document management and collaboration (e.g. Search, Workflow, and KPI Dashboards. If you have a dozen or more computer users in your…

Jan142016 by adminNo Comments

Three Steps to Issues Management

Home Page, Projects

Issues are large problems that are impeding the progress of the project. Issue Management is the process of identifying and resolving issues within a project. By quickly and efficiently managing issues, you can: Limit the effects of unforeseen events on the project Reduce the time spent administering project issues Greatly improve your chances of project success You can complete the issue management process by taking three simple steps: Step 1: Identify the Issue Any member of the project team may identify a new project issue. An is completed to describe the issue and its impact on the project. The actions required to resolve the issue are also identified. At this point the Project Manager also needs to determine who needs to be involved in resolving the issue. Step 2: Investigate…

Jan132016 by adminNo Comments

How to Plan in an Agile Environment

Home Page, Projects

Have you ever heard something like: “Agile development expects that we can operate quickly, efficiently and effectively without necessarily having an overall strategic plan”? If so, forget it! Why? Try to build a house from the roof and see what happens! Detailed planning is as essential to the effectiveness of Agile as it is to Waterfall. The difference between the two approaches lies in timing. Planning is ongoing in Agile, and its incremental approach allows projects to adapt rapidly to changes. Planning is predictive in Waterfall and the client knows exactly what to expect. Predictive vs Adaptive Projects Predictive projects are the ones in which the needs are not likely to change (at least we wish that they don’t change) and where the work being done can be “somewhat” identified…

Dec232015 by adminNo Comments

MoSCoW Prioritisation

Home Page, Projects

10. MoSCoW Prioritisation 10.1 Introduction In an Atern project where time has been fixed, understanding the relative importance of things is vital to making progress and keeping to deadlines. Prioritisation can be applied to requirements, tasks, products, use cases, user stories, acceptance criteria and tests. MoSCoW is a technique for helping to understand priorities. The letters stand for: Must Have Should Have Could Have Won’t Have this time The reason we use MoSCoW in Atern is that the problem with simply saying that requirements are of High, Medium or Low importance is that the definitions of these priorities are missing. Using MoSCoW means that priorities are specific. The specific use of Must, Should, Could or Won’t Have implies the result of failing to deliver that requirement. 10.2 The MoSCoW Rules…

Nov302015 by adminNo Comments

Single Sign On – OneLogin

Home Page, O365, Uncategorized

Adoption Drivers With a goal of becoming a billion dollar in revenue company by 2017, DISYS continues to grow rapidly and expand globally. After implementing several cloud-based enterprise applications such as SalesForce, Ofﬁce 365 and BMC Remedyforce, the company was looking for an identity management solution that was scalable and could accommodate the addition of new systems. “There was one that SalesForce offered, and some other pretty crude upload/download methods that were not automatic,” said Hachwi, the IT infrastructure manager responsible for desktop, network and voice services, as well as systems architecture. Hachwi’s team looked to Netﬂix for guidance. “We're trying to really mirror how Netﬂix enterprise IT operates and push new applications and infrastructure to the cloud,” said Hachwi. “We don't want to maintain a large internal infrastructure with…

Nov272015 by adminNo Comments

6 CRM predictions for 2016

CRM, Home Page, Strategy

So what will be the big trends in CRM in 2016? Here are six predictions. CRM software will become even more social. “In 2016, we'll see a lot more CRM providers adding new social media features, whether that be tracking customer interactions or suggesting new contacts,” says Marc Prosser, cofounder, Fit Small Business. “Nimble is out ahead on this, but expect others to add these features while their team (and others) devise new ways CRM can take advantage of social media.” Mobile CRM will become a must-have. In 2016, “we'll see CRM go mobile in a big way,” says Prosser. “So far, most mobile CRM apps have focused on providing a basic phone-ready version of the desktop version, usually without the full set of features.” Over the next 12 months,…

Nov262015 by adminNo Comments

True Cloud Architecture or just Cloud Hosted – Cirrus True Cloud

Home Page, Strategy

To take a single instance of a product, host it in a data centre and connect this up to your site or wide area network (WAN) you have simply changed the location of where your infrastructure sits. Yes a Telecity data centre in London will be far more secure than your own server room but the operating principles and single points of failure remain. For most services that are not business critical or what are called “high availability” services, this works and is enough. For services that would have a serious business impact were they to go down for an afternoon as we saw yesterday – you need to look at True Cloud. True Cloud is where you have multiple instances of your product in different locations, and services can…

Nov232015 by adminNo Comments

Retail Big Data

Uncategorized

Bernard Marr Best-Selling Author, Keynote Speaker and Leading Business and Data Expert FollowUnfollowFollowingLoading Big Data and Shopping: How Analytics is Changing Retail Nov 23, 2015 1,571 views 388 Likes 18 Comments Share on LinkedIn Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Drones zooming through the skies to deliver us packages that we haven’t even ordered yet – a (somewhat clichéd, already) vision of how technology, Big Data and analytics will impact the retail landscape in the near future. But flights of fantasy aside, the way we buy and sell is evolving rapidly. Both online and offline, retailers which are embracing a data-first strategy towards understanding their customers, matching them to products and parting them from their cash are reaping dividends. Although we are not quite (yet) at the stage where drone…

Nov232015 by adminNo Comments

Cloud Applications – Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

CRM, Home Page, Strategy

Very interesting reminder.... I’m just completing a project where all the telephony for the client I am working for has moved to a cloud service provider – every part of the service from ACD, SIP Proxy, SBC and the associated reporting tools and user management all reside there. It has been a very interesting project from both a technical and planning perspective, one of the biggest learns that I have taken away from it is the knowledge that even though a platform might sit in the cloud it is very important to consider the service that is being provided and what you, as the client needs to have in place to make it an overall success. Of course it’s possible to have Cloud Storage as a Service or Telephony as…

Nov232015 by adminNo Comments

ITIL IT Service Management in 5 Minutes

Home Page, ITIL, Strategy

Organizations all over the world, from NASA to Disney, utilize ITIL to help improve their IT processes. But what is ITIL Service Management? Here’s what you need to know, and how you can use ITIL to benefit your own IT organization. What Does ITIL Stand For? ITIL is an acronym that stands for “IT Infrastructure Library”. It was originally developed in the UK as a series of books. These books explained procedures and best practices for the IT industry to follow. The goal was to standardize the management of IT, so everything wasn’t doing their own thing, but had a common set of IT standards to follow. How Does it Work? ITIL Service Management acts as a guideline for service delivery in the IT world. If you are committed to conducting…

Nov222015 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft Dynamics, the real ERP alternative to SAP

CRM, Home Page, Projects, Strategy

Last Thursday 19th of November, Microsoft gave at last more details about its new Microsoft Dynamics Ax and since them we can start giving more details about this new revolutionary ERP platform. Cloud based (but later alter mid 2016, also On-Premise), modern HTML5 interface based on Office 365 look and feel, Power BI, Real Time Analytics with On Memory Database Technology, Office 365 & CRM Integration, Machine Learning and much more. This new version present a huge leap in technology but maintaining the proven functionality that have helped thousand of companies along the world to optimise their processes and continue operating in a more challenging and more interconnected economic world. The objective of this post is to focus how Microsoft Dynamics compares to SAP. The other big player on the ERP…

Nov132015 by adminNo Comments

Data insight becomes a key competitive weapon in 2016

Home Page, Uncategorized

Less than 30 percent of enterprise architects connect analytics to business outcomes well. Look for more firms to double down on insights in 2016. Three of four enterprise architects strive to make their firms data driven. But well-meaning technology managers only deal with part of the problem: How to use technology to glean deeper, faster insight from more data -- and more cheaply. But consider that only 29% of architects say their firms are good at connecting analytics results to business outcome. This is a huge gap! And the problem is the 'data driven' mentality that never fights its way out of technology and to what firms care about -- outcomes. In 2016, customer-obsessed leaders will leapfrog their competition, and we will see a shift as firms seek to grow…

Nov132015 by admin3 Comments

CRM activity Records

CRM, Home Page

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has different Activity entities, showing actions from the CRM users. ActivityPointer records are automatically created when an Activity record is created, enabling developer to retrieve different Activity types with one request. Activities are the actions users do in CRM, often tracking the interaction between users and customers. CRM has lots of different activities PhoneCall Task Letter Email Appointment Fax Custom Activities Tracking the activity of users/customers, records the time spent on CRM records. For cases, you can see activities associated with the case. Tracking activities allows different people to work a record with a full knowledge of the status of the case. Activity facts Activity is an entity in CRM, you can look at it in the custom solution The activity entity is non-editable. Activity schema name is…

Nov122015 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft to open UK datacentre

CRM, Home Page, O365, SharePoint, Strategy

After a year of constant and often surprising announcements from Microsoft, the key news this time is that they are to open a UK data centre next year, hosting Azure and Office 365. The new UK-based datacentre is said to be opening from late 2016, though it sounds like the MoD will begin using it sooner than that. O365 and Azuze UK data centre coming 2016 At his keynote speech at the Future Decoded event in London yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella stated that customers in the UK would at last be able to store data within the country, allaying fears (even I not actual legal impediments) around governance and data protection. In addition to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, the UK datacentre will support Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online sometime afterwards. Microsoft…

Nov112015 by adminNo Comments

How to Make Microsoft Office Desktop Software Work Seamlessly With Google Drive

Google Apps for work, Home Page

Last December, we shared how Google was making its productivity suite, Google Apps for Work, work “friendlier” with Microsoft Office files. Earlier this week, Google announced what seems a surprising next step in its Microsoft Office embrace: a new plugin for Google Chrome (Windows version only) that enables Google Drive to work seamlessly with Microsoft Office software. Using the new Google Drive Chrome plug-in, people using Office for Windows are able to open their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they are done. The move supports Google’s focus on making Google Drive more competitive to Cloud storage leaders like DropBox at the price of weakening its head-to-head competition with Microsoft Office. How it works If you’re working on a Word document, Excel spreadsheet or…

Nov92015 by adminNo Comments

Data Loader Service: How to Use (Part 2 of 2)

CRM, Home Page

Data Loader Service: How to Use (Part 2 of 2) crmblog crmblog Microsoft MSFT 220,102 Points 4 3 4 Recent Achievements Blog Commentator III Blog Commentator II Blogs All-Star View Profile 13 Oct 2015 9:46 AM Comments 1 This blog post is the second in a two-part post about the Data Loader Service. The first post can be found here. This post details a quick walk-through of how to use the service and various features. Configuring Data Loader Service There are 2 steps that need to be completed before this service can be used. Step 1: Deploy the Data Loader runtime for a specific CRM organization Data Loader for every CRM organization needs to deploy a new runtime module to ensure data isolation across organizations and to stay closer to…

Nov92015 by adminNo Comments

Data Loader Service: Preview Feature for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (Part 1 of 2)

CRM, Home Page, Uncategorized

Data Loader Service: Preview Feature for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (Part 1 of 2) crmblog crmblog Microsoft MSFT 220,102 Points 4 3 4 Recent Achievements Blog Commentator III Blog Commentator II Blogs All-Star View Profile 8 Oct 2015 11:11 AM Comments 11 Customers are facing challenges with data migration scenario, where each customer/partner has to write custom code or use 3rd party tools to import large volume of data. To help alleviate this pain point, Microsoft Dynamics team has developed a cloud Data Loader service for Dynamics CRM Online. The key benefit of this service is the ability to move your data between flat files and CRM Online, and cut down on implementation costs. We’re pleased to announce preview of this service that will empower organizations to better manage their…

Nov92015 by adminNo Comments

Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365

Google Apps for work, Home Page, O365

Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365. It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent.…