Are You Just Too Darn Busy?
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"Take a number!" How many times have you heard that from one of your PM buddies? We've always been part of an incredibly busy profession. Now there's a new survey conducted by ProjectManagement.com in partnership with WorkFront,(formerly ATTask) that tells us we are busier than ever. In this survey 55% of Project Managers reported a significant increase in their workload in 2014. Among other things, the survey shows:
So what do you think this means? Are we just not selecting and integrating our tools well? Do we just have more to do in general? Have you noticed more demand for reporting lately? |
Posted on: March 13, 2015 12:11 PM
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A New Online Benchmarking Tool
| Situation: You want better assess project risk. ITProjectMetrics.com is a rather crude looking online tool - but the people who put it together may have really hit on something. The site gathers project information (both demographics and performance data) from people like you, then lets you know how different factors might affect project success. At this point the sample size is too small (86 projects), but we could all help change that if we were so inclined. Everyone wants benchmarks and everyone wants to better understand risk from every angle. These sorts of things help you define success and make sure you don't stumble over common obstacles that should have been avoided. You only enter project data on completed efforts. Here's what the current breakout looks like:
Here are a few examples of the data you'll get back from the site:    |
Posted on: October 18, 2008 01:46 PM
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Large-Scale, Lightweight Reporting
Situation: You need a robust reporting solution, but don't want a full-blown data warehouse. The whole business intelligence thing can be fairly daunting. Implementations can be costly and complicated when sometimes you just need "more reports, faster". JReport is one of the software tools that can help get you there. We recently spoke with Whit Mathis, VP of Sales at Jinfonet, who gave us some insight into when this sort of tool might be right for you.Q. What are three things that people often forget when creating reports? -The type of architecture required and flexibility of the reporting application. It is very easy for reporting requirements to become complex and JReport reduces that complexity with simple, straight forward architecture (less hardware), yet is flexible enough to meet demanding reporting requirements. Large BI vendors can require complex configurations for installation and on the other side Open Source vendors often do not have the flexibility to meet enterprise BI requirements. - Considering future reporting needs and how they will change/adapt to those new requirements. JReport is very extensible and can meet embedded BI requirements now and those to come. - Some users will want to create their own reports easily or chose their own data to view. JReport offers Adhoc capabilities which empowers the end-user to view the data they determine relevant. Q. What makes JReport different from its competition? - Completely Java based with robust functionality. A major credit card processing company wanted to integrate their existing Java architecture that is used for their mission critical applications with a robust reporting platform. JReport offered a fully compliant java solution along with all the features they needed to support 1000's of users. Our ISV customers, which represent many top tier technical companies, use JReport since they can have a very small resource footprint in their applications, yet offer value add features to their end users. With the ability to white label our application, this creates a competitive advantage for the solutions which embed JReport. Q. What skills and knowledge enable a user to effectively use your report designer? -JReport provides IDE that makes using the report designer very straightforward. Customers that understand data relationships and how reports should look will easily be able to create highly usable business data. JReport also provides professional services to those who need assistance with this or would like jump start. Q. Which types of reporting are perfect for your software? Which are not? - We’re good for extremely lightweight, powerful reporting - We’re good for departments who need a solution that can adapt to specific reporting need or an enterprise that does not need to be integrated with a Data warehouse. - We’re good for challenging performance and scalability requirements. - We’re good for business users that need real time access to data but do not want to learn complex reporting platforms -We’re not perfect for big, overarching BI + data warehouse architectures or small, one-off reporting fixes -We are not good for very simple reporting with small user base - We are not good for anyone stuck on excel spreadsheets for reporting because they won’t utilize the capabilities that a robust reporting solution like JReport delivers. |
Posted on: March 01, 2008 12:47 PM
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