Managing Projects with SharePoint (Recorded Webcasts)

• Date Held: 19th November 2008
• Presented by:  Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

There has been an increasing trend in project portfolio management towards ensuring success by making sure only the right projects get kicked-off in the first place. This means placing a greater emphasis on the requests for projects and managing this pipeline.

On November 12th, BrightWork’s CEO, Eamonn McGuinness will present and demonstrate how SharePoint can be augmented to help businesses align project requests to business goals, flag high risk projects and issues, and generally compare requests for projects in a way that facilitates the selection of the most appropriate projects.  This is a great starting point for many organizations wanting to manage their project pipeline more efficiently.

• Date Held: November 18th, 2008
• Presented by:  Matthew Roberts, Practice Team Lead, Microsoft Application Development Practice, EMC Consulting

“In these tighter financial times we see many organizations focusing on cost savings through more effective project and portfolio management.  At EMC we believe that SharePoint is a great platform to utilize - to quickly and flexibly setup a Project Management Office (PMO).  We have also found that customers need implementations to follow a framework-based services approach, as time to implementation (and thus cost savings) is super critical these days.” 

Matt Russell, Global SharePoint Lead, EMC Consulting.

Webcast Objectives

Join us for this 30 minute webcast to:

1. understand the realities of Project Management today
2. learn about the EMC “PMO in a SharePoint Box” service offering
3. get a quick demo of the solution
4. have your questions answered

• Date Held: October 8th, 2008
• Presented by: Donnell Coomes – Senior Consultant, Enterprise Project Management at Group Health Cooperative

How does a large non-profit organization stay in control of their project work?  How do senior executives and project sponsors quickly and easily see the status of the various projects in progress - in a way that doesn't make them hunt and peck for information?  On October 8th, Group Health Cooperative, a not-for-profit health care provider serving over 56,000 members, will present and demonstrate how they deployed a project management solution on SharePoint, that allows their PMO to easily track their projects’ progress, issues and risks.  Now that’s a healthy system worth seeing!
Webcast Objectives

Watch this webcast where Donnell talked through and demoed:

• The project management challenges they faced at Group Health Cooperative
• The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
• The deployment steps involved in the pmPoint implementation

Please click here to download the presentation slides:

Please click here to download the download the Q&A Write-Up

A recording of the presentation is available at aspeevents.webex.com. Choose to View Event Recordings from the upper right-hand menu. Due to the length of the seminar, we strongly recommend that you allow the file to buffer before beginning the playback. Look for more recordings to come in the near future!

• Date Held: October 9th, 2008
• Presented by: Sven Roth, Head of Unit Information Worker, UP-GREAT AG and Éamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

SharePoint is an awesome collaborative platform but it was not designed out of the box with all the functionality needed to manage one or more projects.  However it was designed as a collaborative platform to be extended with business applications.  This webcast will explain and demonstrate the extensions that can be built to the base SharePoint platform when managing one or more projects.  This webcast will also include a case study at City of Lucerne.

Webcast Objectives

Watch this webcast where Sven talked through (in German) and demoed:

• The project management challenges they faced at Lucerne 
• The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
• The deployment steps involved in the SharePoint pmPoint implementation

BrightWork’s first German partner, UP-GREAT in Switzerland, completed a successful deployment of BrightWork pmPoint in German in the IT department at the Cantonal Administration at Lucerne.   Lucerne needed to aggregate information in project offices so the various departmental managers had one consolidated view of all their projects and status reports. They also wanted to aggregate information over site collections for top management reporting (green, yellow, red) and work with project hierarchies and project room templates.

• Date Held: Sept 25th, 2008     
• Presented by:  Aditya Mohan – Director of Sure Step, Microsoft Dynamics and Éamonn McGuinness – CEO, BrightWork    

To successfully implement critical business software, a comprehensive and proven methodology is a key success factor.  The latest release of Sure Step from Microsoft is such a methodology.

pmPoint for Sure Step is a SharePoint based project management plug-in, available exclusively to Microsoft Partners, that supports and enhances this latest version of the Sure Step methodology.
Webcast Objectives:

• Walk through, demo and explain the 6 phases, the 5 project types, the templates and guidance in the latest release of the Sure Step methodology
• Introduce the key features and benefits of the SharePoint solution (pmPoint for Sure Step)
• Answer your open questions and give references to more materials

Footnote – The Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Methodology is a resource that will guide you and your team through field-tested best practices, proven project management principles and user-friendly tools, which enable the implementation, optimization and upgrade of Microsoft Dynamics business solutions (i.e. Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV and SL).  Because it provides a fully integrated project management discipline, the Sure Step Methodology is different from other methodologies available today, ensuring that you’re able to embed proven project management processes within the project.

• Date Held: Sept 16th, 2008
• Presented by: Dora Martinez, Director of Project Management for Sheppard Mullin
  

Ever wondered how an international law firm can keep on top of all their hundreds of projects at the same time?  Or how they would know the status of every project at a weekly meeting?  Join us on September 16th and see how Sheppard Mullin, an international law firm with over 500 attorneys, has deployed a project management solution on SharePoint that helps them skip ineffective reporting procedures and allow for more efficient project management across the enterprise.

Sheppard Mullin manages over 120 new IT projects every year.  They needed an effective project management solution that would bring all of their IT Projects together on a collaborative platform.  BrightWork’s pmPoint solution gave Sheppard Mullin a straight forward and cost effective solution to managing multiple projects.  pmPoint also allowed all of their project information to be centralized, resulting in greater reporting, structure, visibility and achievement.

Join this case study webcast to hear Dora talk through and demo:

1. The actual project management challenges they faced at Sheppard Mullin
2. The project management solution they put in place with SharePoint and BrightWork pmPoint
3. The deployment steps involved. 

• Date Held: August 27th, 2008 
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

In keeping with its approach to enable customers to easily manage projects of different shapes and sizes in the one SharePoint environment, BrightWork has just released the latest versions of pmPoint and Reporter, the company’s flagship products for project management and enterprise reporting on SharePoint 2007.

This latest release includes new and improved project and cross-project management templates that bake in the best practices uncovered while working with BrightWork customers. Project reporting has been made even easier across multiple SharePoint lists, sites and site collections – a huge issue for teams who are increasingly using SharePoint to store work information.

• Date Held: Thursday July 17th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork                

SharePoint is capable of handling many different business workloads. A classic example is of course a web site built on SharePoint. While this is great use of SharePoint, consider that an organization typically only has one web site, albeit with many users of course. Consider however the business workload of project and program management, where organizations have hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of projects, involving both internal and external parties. Consider also that today many of these projects are run on email, Microsoft Excel and shared network drives. Collaborative project and program management is a business workload very suited to SharePoint.

• Date Held: Thursday June 26th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

SharePoint is an awesome collaborative platform but it was not designed out of the box with all the functionality needed to manage one or more projects.  However it was designed as a collaborative platform to be extended with business applications.  The webcast will explain and demonstrate the extensions that are needed to the base SharePoint platform when managing one or more projects.

• Date Held: Wednesday June 18th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork              

SharePoint is a very large product with much functionality and therefore it is hard to successfully use SharePoint to manage one or more projects if you do not know all the functionality that is freely available.  This webcast will explain and demonstrate the out of the box functionality for Project Management that comes native with SharePoint.

• Date Held: Tuesday June 10th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork  

It is hard to successfully use SharePoint to manage one or more projects if the project management process is not clearly defined and understood.  This webcast will help you design a process for your organization to manage one or more projects that can be mapped to and implemented in SharePoint.  The webcast will include a demo of the mapping from the project management process to SharePoint.

• Date Held: May 15th, 2008
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

SharePoint is an amazing platform for collaboration and sharing information, however it can be frustrating trying to manage one or more projects on the SharePoint platform.  What is the secret?! This webcast will:

• Give you a technique to help define a project management approach for your projects and programs
• Explain what SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) gives you out of the box for managing projects
• Show how you can manage one or more projects with great ease by extending SharePoint

The questions answered in the webcast include:

1. How can I define the processes needed?
   Organizations today have projects of all shapes and sizes, so no one-size project management approach will fit all project types.  This webcast will give you a technique that you will be able to use to determine the processes that are suitable for managing the various project types, as well as the processes necessary to manage across programs or portfolios.  Having the process understood and somewhat defined is an essential prerequisite to automating the project management process on SharePoint! 
2. What do I get with SharePoint to manage projects?
   SharePoint comes in three flavors.  There is Windows SharePoint Services v3 and there is also Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (Standard and Enterprise).  Each of these three flavors of SharePoint can be configured easily without programming or can be enhanced considerably with SharePoint Designer and some programming skills.  The webcast will show what project management facilities you get with each of these flavors.
3. How can I extend SharePoint to manage projects?
   By extending SharePoint with extra features needed to manage projects you get a great platform for the three main roles involved in managing projects – the Project Manager, the Team Member and the Program / Portfolio Manager.  This webcast will demonstrate role based extensions for managing one or more projects successfully on SharePoint.

• Date Held: October 26th, 2006
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork

There are many advances in each of the products in the 2007 Microsoft Office system that make it an awesome platform on which to build applications and products. Enhancements in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Portal Server, and Office Project Server in particular have made this a compelling platform for faster application development. This webcast explains these changes and details how they can be used with examples.

View the Recording | Download the Presentation

• Date Held: April 17th, 2007
• Presented by: Eamonn McGuinness, CEO, BrightWork      

With the advent of SharePoint 2007 as a stronger platform to build collaborative applications, more and more information will find itself stored in SharePoint with an obvious growing need for reporting. This webcast will explain and show the out-of-box reporting capabilities that come native with SharePoint 2007. This webcast will also explain what reporting capabilities are not available in SharePoint 2007 and will present BrightWork Reporter capabilities that can fill these gaps, i.e. support for cross-site and cross-list reporting, pre-built reports, flexible report building, easy report sharing via scheduled email, dynamic reporting links with Excel, and rich data analysis with Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services.

View the Recording