Gaining Project Wisdom and Sagacity from PS+ and Project Online

This blog series explains how PS+ helps people be effective as shown by Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The fifth habit, to Seek first to understand, then be understood, speaks to the power of patient wisdom and judicious sagacity. Wisdom comes from experience, knowledge, and good judgment, while sagacity demonstrates shrewdness and keen mental discernment. Users of PS+ and Project Online, no matter the role, deliver very productive results with little effort or training because of the deep wells of project management experience built-in to a solution designed to assist everyone’s mental discernment.

Both wisdom and sagacity require information to begin with since one cannot be wise about nothing. But having data isn’t enough. To be wise and sagacious, one must also use data to make shrewd decisions showing sound judgment.

Some ways Project Online and PS+ help decision-makers with such judgment include:

• Portfolio Analysis: Use either costs or resources to optimize a constrained group of work to accomplish goals that are important to your company! Model different project portfolios to see which configuration provides the best results and when you might need to plan to hire more resources…
• WorkViewer: PS+ provides pre-configured generic resources you can use straight out of the box (OOTB) to understand the workload demands of your portfolio. Immediately see where projects have resource bottlenecks and chokepoints, and see which project managers are demanding the most resources!
• Risk Matrix: Understand at a glance which projects threaten your portfolio the most!
• Financial Manager: get a handle on project spending by understanding with ease where every penny goes whether for direct, project costs or for Capital Expenditures!

It’s not often that a product makes everyone in an enterprise wiser, and PS+ does it transparently. Seek first to understand, then be understood by signing up for a risk-free PS+ subscription today so you and your team can share decision-making data now!

PS+ does not stand for “Post Scriptum”

This blog series explains how PS+ helps people be effective as shown by Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  Being effective requires vision of the ultimate goal so one may decisively act (or NOT) based upon how those actions might impact that goal’s accomplishment; Covey calls this the second habit, to Begin with the End in Mind.  If you don’t know where you want to go, then a map won’t help.  Effective people choose to use PS+ because it makes using a project management information system easy AND productive.  Easy is important because people will choose the path of least resistance when asked to adopt new technologies.

PS+ was built by people who were frustrated that the best-in-class project management solution, Microsoft Project Online, was not the easiest to use out of the box.  The outcome is a product that improves the results that every role wants from a PMIS, out of the box, with no need for training.  PS+ apps benefit people who look for the output of the data they and others enter to track project progress.

Some ways to see this in PS+ include:

• PS+ Navigator – right from the very beginning, on the PS+ home page, PS+ makes it easy to use Microsoft Project Online with a pop-up menu to jump immediately where you want to go to manage your project!
• PS+ Reporting – Any authorized role can find out what they want to know about their projects, immediately out of the box! The PS+ Highlight Report helps Project Managers present what Executives most want to know.  The PS+ Issues Report collates across projects so you can see if anything happening in one project may impact another!
• PS+ Project Types templates – Each of the PS+ OOTB project types uses a WBS appropriate for that project type. Why create new schedules with blank tasks unless that’s what you want?  PS+ standard project types include PMI, agile, Prince2, SharePoint task list, and blank.
• PS+ Project Sites – the quicklaunch bar gets configured according to the project type when created (e.g. PS+ PMI project types quickbars link to Change Requests while Agile project quickbars link to the Product Backlog). You and your team can collaborate immediately OOTB!