Author: Darrin Lange

Darrin Lange, PMP, is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on two decades of diverse project management experience in IT. Darrin has held leadership roles in public safety software companies, Desktop-as-a-Service providers, and consulting firms, bringing a positive impact to the organizations where he has worked. In his current role he's responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the "get things done" approach and enjoys helping teams formulate and achieve their goals. Learn more about Advaiya at http://www.advaiya.com/.

Differences Between a Healthy Project and a Healthy Schedule

Event Description: Project metrics (SPI, CPI, BAC, etc) have frequently been talked about to measure the health of a project. The assumption everyone makes about these metrics are your schedule is well thought out and fully planned. What metrics are available for health schedules? During this session we will talk about the schedule health metrics and how you can quickly spot unhealthy project plans using OData and Power BI. Presenter Info: Darrin Lange, PMP, is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on two decades of diverse project management experience in IT. Darrin has held leadership roles in public safety software companies, Desktop-as-a-Service providers, and consulting firms, bringing a positive impact to the organizations where he has worked. In his current role he’s responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the “get things done” approach and enjoys helping teams formulate and achieve their goals. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

Gaining Project Insights About Project Extensions

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs):This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Whether you are looking for quick productivity innovations, more advanced reports or surfacing role-based information, Project Online extensions may be the answer. During this session we will explore using extensions to Project Online. We will show you how to quickly maximize productivity for Executives, Project Managers and team members, customize Project Center and Project team sites as well as database extensions to enhance project reports. Presenter Info: Darrin Lange, PMP, is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on two decades of diverse project management experience in IT. Darrin has held leadership roles in public safety software companies, Desktop-as-a-Service providers, and consulting firms, bringing a positive impact to the organizations where he has worked. In his current role he’s responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the “get things done” approach and enjoys helping teams formulate and achieve their goals. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

Managing Actual Hours in Project Pro and Project Online

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: During this session we will explore the various options for tracking action hours on a project. This includes whether you are using Project Pro with and without Project Online. At the end of this session, you will be able to make decisions about how your organization should roll out the recording of action time against projects. Speaker Info: Darrin Lange, PMP, is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on two decades of diverse project management experience in IT. Darrin has held leadership roles in public safety software companies, Desktop-as-a-Service providers, and consulting firms, bringing a positive impact to the organizations where he has worked. In his current role he’s responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the “get things done” approach and enjoys helping teams formulate and achieve their goals. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

Project Online/Server Adoption Strategy

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Strategic category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Gaining adoption once an enterprise aggregates all their projects into a portfolio can be challenging. Project Pro and Project Online/Server are really good out of the box however, your enterprise adoption strategy for Project Pro and Project Online/Server requires just a little bit more. In this session we will cover adoption strategies around shifting to a new tool, updating best practices and policies, training the team, surfacing new insights all while creating excitement for all of your users. Download the Presentation Deck here: Project Online Adoption Presentation Presenter Info: Darrin Lange, PMP, is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on two decades of diverse project management experience in IT. Darrin has held leadership roles in public safety software companies, Desktop-as-a-Service providers, and consulting firms, bringing a positive impact to the organizations where he has worked. In his current role he’s responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the “get things done” approach and enjoys helping teams formulate and achieve their goals. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

4 Steps to Tune Your Project Adoption Strategy for Success

Achieving a successful deployment of Microsoft Project Online or Project Server requires a well-tuned focus on driving adoption and making sure everyone understands the benefits of working with the new solution. You need to understand the business challenges to be addressed by the new system and ensure your organization is prepared to recognize and reap the benefits. We recommend following these four steps to tune your project adoption strategy for success: Establishing a vision and creating business scenarios; Prioritizing features and creating an adoption plan; Assigning resources and deploying the adoption plan; and Measuring success and sharing results. Let’s examine each stage in more detail. To learn more about how to optimize your Microsoft Project deployment, check out the MPUG webinar, “Project Online/Server Adoption Strategy,” available on-demand. Establish a Vision and Create Business Scenarios Your business vision should list the targeted objectives and serve as the roadmap for your team as you progress through planning and deployment. The vision is also intended to help with securing buy-in throughout the organization. When setting the vision, be sure to involve your stakeholders. This, of course, means you have to understand who they are. Establish a shareholder “registry” with a set of generic roles and then build it in with individuals within the organization. You may have to choose several individuals from multiple departments depending on the size of your organization. Don’t be afraid to identify more stakeholders than you think you will need. Setting the vision statement requires asking several questions during a vision workshop and then deriving the vision from the answers to these questions. Here are a few: What are our current portfolio management and collaboration challenges? Why are we making this organizational change at this time? How does a change support our overarching vision and strategy? How does a change in how we work change the organization? What does success look like? How will a more open way of working help the organization? How will a more open way of working help the employees? Aggregate the answers to these and other questions and summarize your vision as a roughly paragraph-long narrative. Identifying the business scenarios will help your organization tie the targeted department or individual goals to the organizational initiatives. In addition, your business scenarios will help ensure a smooth adoption and help you to measure success and realize results. You may need to run several workshops, inviting those stakeholders who will be driving and supporting the change, and ask several questions: What are some of the challenges related to portfolio management, project management and collaboration? Which areas would you like to see change? What management and collaboration methods do you prefer? What is the current process for managing a project? What is the current process for collaboration? What are some factors to help move the scenario forward? From the responses to these questions, you can create your business scenarios, touching on how current challenges affect stakeholders and departments. Prioritize Features and Create an Adoption Plan When deploying Project within your organization, you will need to determine the high impact features and gauge the capacity of your organization to adopt the changes coming. Depending on your organization’s maturity and the impact of the deployment, you may determine that the list of features addressing the various business scenarios should be deployed all at once or within phases. That’s where the prioritizing comes in. You’ll want to understand which features are most important so you know which phases to deploy them in. Determining the solution for each business scenario challenge is the next step. This may require describing the solution before identifying the solution. To do this, put the solution in terms of the user or user story: As a <role>, I want to <action>, so I can <benefit>. From the list of user stories you can identify the relevant features within your solution. In addition, identify those features that could pose hurdles or build resistance to the adoption plan. Create a solution to the high-friction features that reduce resistance either through automation or sheer value. Prioritize your features based on their level of complexity, impact and value to the organization. You can do this using a scoring system (1-5 or H/M/L) or by way of stakeholder requirements (Need, Want, OK). While establishing your solution and prioritization, you may also want to identify the success criteria to measure the impact of your deployment. We like to establish success criteria using the SMART mnemonic: Specific Measureable Attainable Relevant Timely Think about how you will collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Consider measurements that you can showcase to your executives, such as satisfaction, employee engagement, adoption velocity or other metrics. Be prepared to collect quotes and success stories using Yammer or Groups. Make sure, before the initiative is fully undertaken that you’ve based-lined measurements so you have something to monitor progress against. We advise the use of OneNote with a section for your success criteria, including the description, source, metrics and goal. A prime ingredient for a successful adoption plan is to create a champion or “ninja” program. The program will be filled with those peers who are passionate about Project Online and can evangelize to the organization to learn more about the solution. This will also take some of the stress off the core project team and help you discover new opportunities to innovate. It also provides a source of feedback. Start with those who are enthusiastic and willing to commit a little time and effort to oversee a special Yammer group. By providing them with a little extra training and support, they’ll be able to run their own brown bag sessions. Establish a regular rhythm with your champions to foster engagement to learn more about what’s working and what’s not. Don’t forget to provide them with recognition and praise. You can do this through special privileges or digital badges for use in their email signature line. The adoption plan should also contain a mix of activities to maximize impact and encourage adoption. Activities might include enterprise announcements or newsletters, engagement events and training. Announcements and newsletters are great for creating buzz within the organization. Engagement events are a good place to create a party like atmosphere where you can further motivate user behavior with contests, giveaways and recognition. Training is essential to ensure that employees know how to use Project Online or Project Server to get their work done. Assign Resources and Deploy the Adoption Plan It’s time to put it all together and kick your planning into action. Assign the key resources and begin to act on your adoption plan. Continue to bring awareness of rollout activities to the organization through posters, booklets, countdown/announcement emails and tips and tricks email. Start these at least four to eight weeks before launch and keep them short and sweet. Have clear call-to-action links for more information. Don’t be afraid to address commonly asked questions or enable two-way communications using Yammer or Groups. Four weeks before launch schedule the engagement events and community activities. Invite your champions to small, open sessions to show off their favorite feature and answer questions. Conduct lunch-and-learn sessions on a regular rhythm and encourage attendance with incentives. Training and support will continue beyond launch. Help the users understand why the organization is using the new solution and show how they will ultimately benefit. Incorporate a learning center full of training guides, videos, tips and tricks. Don’t forget to engage your champions in helping users learn the innovative benefits of Project Online or Project Server to get their work done. Measure Success and Share Results The final step of your deployment is to collect measures, learn lessons, share results and find opportunities for new innovation. Measure progress against your benchmarks and keep user feedback and success stories in a team site. Use surveys to collect quantitative and qualitative data from users. To make the most out of your survey, circulate a survey shortly before deployment as your baseline. Shortly after the deployment issue another survey to gain insights about user experiences and make adjustments to your plan. Ten to 12 weeks after deployment, send a final survey to assess user satisfaction. Send out quarterly surveys to measure adoption. Driving adoption is a continuous cycle and doesn’t end after deployment. Continue to add business value by iterating with new learnings. Provide additional training on best practices and conduct business scenario and solution workshops with additional departments. Your business is in constant motion and your job is to seek out new ways to improve business processes and empower people. A solid approach to Project adoption will help you meet your goals. Image Source

Deep-dive project team collaboration with SharePoint team sites

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs):This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Whether you are using Waterfall, Agile, Lean or anything in between, team collaboration has to be a priority. To their detriment, project teams will frequently rely only on emails for all their collaboration. For effective communication, project teams need a portal for collaboration. SharePoint provides a common workspace for the project team to share documents, so that every member within the project team has all the necessary information about the project. SharePoint also provides default issues and risks list to log all factors that may affect the project, and thus enables team to take necessary action to prevent or reduce their impact. During this session we will explore the integration between Project and SharePoint team sites and how to modify the team site, making it the center of your team’s collaboration. Don’t simply hope or even demand collaboration, learn how to make collaboration easy and useful. Empower your team to collaborate with SharePoint team sites. Presenter Info: Darrin Lange Darrin is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on around two decades of diverse project management experience in the Information Technology industry. He has worked in leadership roles across diverse companies from Public Safety software companies to DaaS providers and Consulting. He has helped to shape department and company strategies and brought a positive impact to the organizations he has worked with. In his current role, he is responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the ‘get things done’ approach and enjoys helping the team formulate and achieve their goals. Darrin has earned his Business Administration Degree from University of Montana and holds a PMP certification from PMI. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

6 Essential Elements for Your Project Team Site

Project collaboration and communication are vital to the success of a project. We have all heard it said, but, what does it really mean? Proper subjects on emails? Setting up a thoughtful agenda for meetings? Creating a proper level of specificity in your work breakdown structure? Following PMI’s best practices when setting up a WBS? Conducting daily meetings with the team? Tracking all of the action items? Creating a Yammer group? The truth is that all of this could be the right amount of collaboration and communication. It depends on the team. To coalesce all of the tools, statistics, collaboration and communication into a single location, use a project team site, also known as a project portal. When making choices about setting up your project team site, you will also want to consider document management, issue and risk management, deliverable management, discussion boards, chat integration and project reports. Darrin Lange will present a deeper exploration of the integration between Project and SharePoint team sites in his upcoming MPUG webinar, “Deep-dive project team collaboration with SharePoint team sites,” taking place July 26 at noon Eastern time. Let’s explore how SharePoint and Project Server support project team sites and how you can modify and explore SharePoint Project team sites to suit the needs of your project and your project team. Document management: Starting with document management, you’ll more than likely have many artifacts for a project. The best place to store them is in a document library. Having one location that team members access documents and keep them updated ensures a single version of truth. With version history enabled, team members can always access previous versions without any confusion about which version is the latest. For virtual teams, another fantastic feature is document co-authoring. This allows multiple team members to work on a common document at the same time. Many people find this to be particularly helpful during brainstorming sessions in addition to other project meetings with your virtual teams. Issues and risks management: Project Online and Project Server, by default, are configured with issues and risks management. Project managers, in consultation with other stakeholders, can log all project-related issues and risks directly into their respective registries. In addition, project or enterprise specific attributes can be included in the registry. These attributes may include priority, impacts, owner, mitigation plans, etc. along with widget, page, layer or other associated information. The logged issues and risks can also be linked to other items such as tasks or deliverables. These lists can then be used during project meetings or risk/issue committee meetings and made accessible to all team members via a browser and login. Deliverables management: Enabling deliverables management within the portal can also greatly improve the collaboration and communication within the project. Deliverables created in Microsoft Project Professional are directly synced with the deliverables list of the project site. Stakeholders and sponsors can then quickly view and track the deliverable without opening the project plan. Discussion boards and newsfeeds: More important for virtual teams, these SharePoint web parts can be leveraged for active collaboration among team members. Team members or project managers can discuss any topic or track questions or concerns on the project forum, thereby allowing other team members to respond with their insights or answers. This keeps all the team members engaged while at the same time recording all of the communication that led to the topic’s final disposition for future reference. Chat: With a familiar look and feel, Yammer is actively being adopted by organizations to enable deeper collaboration and communication. By adding the Yammer web part to your Project team site or portal, you increase visibility to the project’s Yammer topics and discussions. Yammer can make your outside team members feel less dispersed and more engaged. Project reports: Having the ability to show reports directly on the project team site or portal will help to keep the project stakeholders and sponsors up to date with actual costs, variances from baseline, status of critical tasks, delayed tasks, etc. With Project Online and Project Server, you can create and configure project reports that drill down on project metrics and provide insights at a glance. Reports with graphs and charts can deliver insights to the stakeholders that will help them be more proactive and communicate more effectively. Once you have settled on a Project team site or portal to use, Project Online and Project Server allow you to save the team site as a template. If needed, you can even use different team site templates for each of your enterprise project types. With the success of a project lying squarely on your shoulders and with collaboration and communication being such a big part of that success, don’t dismiss the power of a well-planned project team site or portal. By using Project Online and Project Server along with SharePoint to create a fantastic team site, you’ll facilitate collaboration and communication and bring success to your projects. Image Source  

Critical Path: Using MS Project to determine where projects lie in relation to the Critical Path

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Resources, resource managers and PMO managers expect you to know at all times whether a task in “on the critical path”. Why is this critical path so important? In this session we are going to discuss PND/AON and how to determine whether a task is on the critical path. We will also explore early and late start, early and late finish and float. Finally we will discuss how to view all of this in MS Project and answer the question, “why is critical path so important.” Presenter Info: Darrin Lange Darrin is Director of Operations and Project Management at Advaiya and draws on around two decades of diverse project management experience in the Information Technology industry. He has worked in leadership roles across diverse companies from Public Safety software companies to DaaS providers and Consulting. He has helped to shape department and company strategies and brought a positive impact to the organizations he has worked with. In his current role, he is responsible for forming and facilitating cohesive teams, client interfacing, and liaising with stakeholders. He is a believer and practitioner of the ‘get things done’ approach and enjoys helping the team formulate and achieve their goals. Darrin has earned his Business Administration Degree from University of Montana and holds a PMP certification from PMI. Have you watched this webinar recording? Tell MPUG viewers what you think! [WPCR_INSERT]

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