iPlanWare Project Management Blog

As I have mentioned in a previous post, most software vendors either take a SaaS or an on premises approach to software deployment. Very rarely do they offer both and I have never understood the sense in this.

Here is another commentator exploring this further by looking at iPlanWare, SurarCRM and Wavemaker in particular.

The often given reason is that trying to coexist the two approaches causes issues with software releases, marketing etc.

We have been offering TeamWorks as a SaaS and on premises solution since 2001 and have regularly shipped 3-4 big releases each year since.

Get your processes right and you can offer both - and secure a huge competitive advantage as well.

My advice to a start up thinking about going pure SaaS is don’t - you will be cutting out a huge segment of the market. At least 30% of the organisations we engage with would not consider a SaaS solution. More to the point, the ones who would not consider a SaaS solution are typically larger organisations with bigger budgets.

At least another 20% will consider SaaS, but the sale will be a lot tougher due to legal issues, contracts and the customer not being familiar with the procurement / buying process for SaaS.

I agree, some software products only make sense as a SaaS solution. But for most business applications that is not the case.

So there you have it - pure SaaS can mean 50% lost sales.

Yes things will change, SaaS and cloud will become the norm - but we are a little way from that yet.

admin Business of software, SaaS

The March 2010 release of TeamWorks PPM introduces an alternative way for organisations to schedule resources. Most PPM tools use a Gantt or task based tool for scheduling. While this is great for work that needs a timeline based schedule, it is just not flexible enough for resource centric scheduling. For example scheduling tech support staff onto break fix, engineers onto jobs or consultants onto client engagements.

Unless your PPM tools represents all the work your organisation is doing, its resource / capacity forecasts will not be accurate. The Resource Planner in TeamWorks 3.4 plugs this gap and means that team leads and managers can quickly schedule people onto work that doesn’t naturally fit a Gantt / timeline based way of working.

TeamWorks Resource Planner

In addition to the resource planner, R3.4 introduces a project binder concept which provides a single area to review a project’s finances, schedule and budgets.

Other smaller enhancements include support for change requests, improved dashboard filtering, a host of resource management extracts and new options for status reporting.

You can download the release notes here.

admin TeamWorks

The next release of TeamWorks PPM includes some very exiting tools to help organisations with their capacity planning and forecasting.

A major problem when undertaking capacity planning is being able to capture the resource demands for projects that are still in the pipeline.  Typically you won’t have full visibility of who is doing the work or the exact work to be done. So trying to describe your resource needs using a project plan is a non starter. Read more…

Ian Harrison Resource Management, TeamWorks

A useful tool for organisations that wish to speed their implementation of TeamWorks PPM is the TeamWorks Accelerator.

Even though most organisations are up and running within a matter of days (typically less than 30 days even for large implementations), we wanted to make the process even quicker and transfer more of the knowledge of our professional service team.

So the TeamWorks Accelerator tool kit was devised. The TeamWorks Accelerator consists of two elements:

• Pre shipped data lookups for a typical PMO / IT organisation. Organisations can choose to install this at implementation time then adjust the data to their specific needs.

• Guidance documentation describing the considerations and decisions to be made for each functional area of the product. Essentially an A to Z of implementing TeamWorks PPM.

The TeamWorks Accelerator documentation is available for new customers by contacting our support centre.

Ian Harrison TeamWorks