Project Management 2.0

Situation: You have a mid-size organization in need of flexible, inexpensive PM software.

This blog is one of the few places on gantthead where we talk about specific products.  What I hope to do each time we "talk product" is to nail down who each package was really built to serve.  In that way, you can see whether the product really targets your particular industry, company size, etc. - in other words, is it a potential fit for you? We recently interviewed Cynthia West, VP at Project Insight to get the scoop on their web-based project management software offering.

The way the industry is moving toward SaaS solutions, particularly at the entry level is something everyone in project management should be aware of.  Many of the things that Cynthia has to say were pretty interesting, particularly around the fast pace of and need for flexibiilty within - the projects that Project Insight is perfect for.  I think that most companies, regardless of size have project like this that end up being managed in Excel and could be better handled wth this type of solution.

In any case, you be the judge...


Dave:      Give me three words (not phrases) to describe Project Insight. 

Cynthia:  Robust, Flexible, Customizable

Our typical customer has a project team with a mixed level of maturity. They might have a handful of project managers that are experienced or savvy, some having PMP certifications. However, the remainder of the team is either new to project management or less experienced. (I’d say the teams are well under 3.5 on the CMMI ranking scale). Project Insight has robust features like ‘intelligent scheduling’ and cross project resource allocation that more experienced PMs expect, yet the interface remains easy enough for the basic team member to get up and running rapidly. My customer at AGFA says he can get a new team member trained in under and hour.

While the solution is relatively horizontal and is used across many industries, we do seem to have ‘sweet spot’s in terms of project processes or type. These sweet spots are: IT project teams, product development teams, interactive or agency teams, and professional services.

We tend to appeal to the faster paced environments that need flexibility over rigor. So, an interactive team like imc² selected Project Insight over high end solutions that tend to be more ‘top-down’ and hierarchical in approach.

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Dave:      How would you compare Project Insight to E-project's project management offering?  How does it compare in terms of PPM/EPM functionality? In terms of price? 

Cynthia:  Wow. One could probably write a book about the different nuances between the two solutions. I prefer to stay high level with questions like this. I would say that Project Insight, eProject and MEPM are all competitors in the mid-range solution arena. It seems that eProject is pushing its solution more toward competing with high end solutions, rather than remaining a mid-market player.

Project Insight’s particular strengths against both of the alternatives noted above tend to be in our ease of use and rapid implementation. Other specific features that project teams like include: 

-Intelligent scheduling with all task types and constraints
-Cross project resource allocation with a complete view into the actual projects and tasks that might be causing over allocation
-Outlook Connector and synching tasks from Project Insight
-Outlook ‘look and feel’ of the interface, making adoption faster
-Robust permissions
-Customizable (SDK, Web Services APIs)

Then, of course, there are the ‘soft’ factors which include our team’s general responsiveness to inquiries and customer requests. Metafuse likes to be more of a partner than simply a vendor in the implementation process.

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Dave:      You've got Outlook (where people live) integration features alongside collaboration spaces internal to your software.  How does that play out in a real world situation?  Do MS users tend to use Sharepoint as a document repository or keep everything within Project Insight?  If this varies from client to client, what causes users to do it one way or the other?

Cynthia:  Even though some of our customers use Sharepoint, more than 95% do not. So, our customer base uses Project Insight’s documents repository and collaboration in lieu of Sharepoint. We do have a handful of customers that use both. Susquehanna Financial is one. They publish extra reports in Sharepoint and present Sharepoint inside of Project Insight because the team was already using Sharepoint and familiar with it.

Because Microsoft is such an office standard, we wanted to make Project Insight as Microsoft ready as possible. That is why we offer 
-Microsoft Project import and export
-Outlook Connector for Outlook integration
-Office Connector for ease of use when working with PowerPoint, Excel and Word
-Microsoft Excel export
-External integration with SharePoint and other locations on your network

The Outlook Connector is great for teams that want their team members to update tasks from Outlook Tasks and then synchronize them back to Project Insight. We find that the appeal is mostly from teams that are familiar with Outlook and do not want to introduce another application to the basic team member who is simply updating tasks.

The other feature that customers like about Outlook Connector is the ability to upload a stray email into Project Insight so they can keep all the project history and communication centralized.

Project Insight is even on the Microsoft ISV (independent software vendor) list. 

You may have noticed that we’ve adopted an ‘Outlook look and feel’ which makes our users very comfortable as it is familiar to them. This seems to make adoption go easily.

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Dave:      What percentage of your portal customers customize the application to integrate with their internal systems?  What are the drivers behind that decision?

Cynthia:  It depends on what level of customization you are asking about. We offer three levels of customization: 

1. Project Insight offers the ability to create custom fields at the project and task level from the systems administration section. This can be accomplished without any programming. These fields are created in the web forms. Custom forms may also be added from here as well. So if a team wants to add their own project request form, for example, they may. Approximately 75% of our customers create their own custom fields. This is due to the fact that customers usually have unique processes and therefore data they want to capture and report on.
2. The second level of customization is either using our Software Development Kit (SDK) or our Professional Services team to create changes in the application. If a customer has .NET programmers, then they can create their own changes to the software. If not, our Professional Services team can help out. Approximately 25% of our customers have requested formal statements of work and/or created their own customizations from our SDK. An example is Funrise, who purchased the SDK and created 200 custom fields using the SDK to track their specific product development process.
3. The third level is integration with other system. 20% of Project Insight customers have either requested our help with integration efforts or have purchased the Web Services APIs to create their own integration points. For example, R.W. Smith & Co. purchased our Web Services and hired a third party consultant to pass project costing information from Project Insight to their accounting system. With Web Services APIs this effort took only one week.

I believe that the drivers behind the decision to customize have to do with the simple fact that no single software application is a 100% fit with one’s processes. We hold that a team might find 80-90% of what they are looking for, then need to tweak the last 10-20%. This seems to be true particularly for reports. Executives seem to get used to certain formats and want their data to still be delivered in that format or design, so we do a lot of custom reports.

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Dave:      What percentage of your users are Saas vs. internally hosted?  What are the drivers behind that decision? 

Cynthia:  60% of Project Insight customers are hosted by us or SaaS model.

40% have an installed system. 

The drivers have more to do with corporate culture than anything else. We see companies like Honda, Target and JD Power & Associates selecting a hosted solution because their IT departments are overloaded. These teams need a way to collaborate and get productive in the short term. They do not have time to wait to get on IT’s schedule for an installed solution.

Other times, a company has a culture of ‘ownership’ and prefers to ‘possess’ its data. This is particularly true for our financial and insurance customers like Merrill Lynch, Rabobank, Susquehanna Financial and Arrowhead Insurance. They prefer to house and manage their own data.

We have definitely seen that the choice is more ‘culture’ based than pricing based. Some teams like Honda have up to 400 team members, making an installed more economical in the long term.