Niku has broadened its product offering moving beyond PSA to Services Relationship Management (SRM). SRM provides technologies that build key services relationships both inside and outside the enterprise. SRM is defined by the three major categories within it: PSA, Project Management and Services Sourcing. Want to know more about taking PSA to the next level? I'm here to answer your questions. Saving Changes...
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Joe WynneRetired from BankingCharlotte, NC Area, United States
Tim,
About the Services Sourcing component: What features have your customers found especially useful? Saving Changes...
Anonymous
On the vendor and buyer side, companies enjoy NikuSource's two-way matching algorithm. They find that this tool allows suitable, qualified clients to find exactly the type of firms they're searching for. Also, our system saves our clients time and money searching for a firm- it can all be done with a few clicks of the mouse.
Both sides also feel NikuSource is extremely easy to use and when a problem does arise, support is provided, in a timely matter.
Buyers like the fact that a search for firms outside of their area is easily achieved by simply stating the city they're interested in.
One vendor stated "Well designed, good navigation and excellent layout of information." Saving Changes...
Joe WynneRetired from BankingCharlotte, NC Area, United States
Ok, great Tim.
Now, can you help me understand the relationship between your Portfolio Manager and the typical combination of MS Project,MS Office, and other software used by Project Managers? What new functionality might the Portfolio Manager provide that PMs may currently lack?
What is having an integrated solution like on a day-to-day basis? Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Joe,
Niku Portfolio Manager offers managers accelerated, and empowered decision-making to plan strategies and meet current deadlines. Portfolio Manager 5.2 includes a selection of new and enhanced features, including support for Windows 2000 and Microsoft Project 2000. With the new version, Portfolio Manager delivers more comprehensive and efficient project management involving scheduling, setting milestones, resource allocation, time tracking, reporting, and communication.
New Functionality At-a-Glance
+Niku Portfolio Manager affords managers with a panoramic, enterprise-wide view of staffing and resources to improve resource management. The product now enables users to define and organize roles into a role and skill hierarchy, quickly view summary information with a drill-down option, build teams more efficiently, and view more data in a variety of ways.
+The product distributes high-level portfolio information to executives and managers, and real-time project details to all team members at varied locations. With the 5.2 release, Niku Portfolio Manager enables users to view milestone details, copy the URL of a specific node and paste it to a browser page, and choose the node that appears when the product is launched. The updated reports function also allows users to develop more customized reports for their specific needs.
+Niku Portfolio Manager provides team members with the ability to receive assignments, estimate project time, and record and submit completed timesheets. It now allows users to automatically populate a timesheet with tasks and time entries from a previous timesheet, enter more precise time units, sort entries and utilize shortcuts.
+The solution achieves planning and estimating by incorporating work breakdown structure, dependencies, deliverables and source estimates. The upgraded version provides enhanced performance times and integration with other Portfolio Manager applications.
+Niku Workbench: used for project scheduling and control, now enables users to cut, copy, and paste tasks, resources and assignments between projects and other Microsoft Windows applications. It also offers easily transferred assignments; more accurate project completion measurements; enhanced viewing and printing with more color options. The views in Niku Workbench offer quick sorting of projects, resources and users; selection of multiple rows and columns; more user-friendly dialog boxes; and improved viewing capabilities and filters
With Niku Portfolio Manager 5.2, Microsoft Project Support also offers enhanced performance, multiple project support, a series of pre-checks for import and export to Microsoft Project. Saving Changes...
One of the ways Niku PM improves project management is through the provision of "structural" discipline. By that I mean that use of standard, meaningful WBS levels and fields like "deliverable" provide considerable assistance in building logical project plans. This is something I have always (going back about 15 years) liked about PM's predecessor (Project Workbench) and disliked about MS:P.
Let's take the deliverable data element. I have seen "tasks" in MS:P like "Begin planning." What does this mean? How do I know when I have finished it? The availability of the deliverable data element put me in a position to require it. "Begin Planning" became "Build Draft Plan" with a draft plan as the deliverable. Even a task like "Conduct Customer Presentation" should result in an "Updated Customer" deliverable.
Having dynamic levels of WBS allows people to wax poetic and build Byzantine plans. I don't believe there is only one doctrine but provide an example of one here.
Level 0 - Project. Level 1 - Phase - the risk unit. The budget unit, the "go/no go" unit. Level 2 - Activity - the major deliverable unit. Level 3 - Task - the scheduling unit (which should also result in some deliverable; even if it is temporary or an intermediate product). Another way that PM helped me was through the Task Category Code. We split it up into 2 bytes for Customer, 2 bytes for System, 2 bytes for Nature of Work (maintenance, enhancement, new dev, continuous ops, etc.) Once assigned (at the phase level is all that is required) to "Minor Enhancement" and "Maintenance" projects which run from 1 Jan to 31 Dec, I was in a position to produce a report back to my customers on what IT was doing for them. For minor enhancements, we could even allow technicians to handle "drive-by" requests and then add the task in under the correct Phase and Activity (which would be set up by customer or customer/application or region/customer, etc.). This in turn, allowed me to report to the executive level to the effect that, "You all know about the major projects, here is what else we did for you last month." Adding a standard "burn rate," allowed me to provide the value of what they got. Saving Changes...
