Saturday, July 27, 2013

New website for the new company

We launched our new website yesterday. Check it out and let me know what you think. It's still a work in progress and hopefully as a friend of mine once said, we won't let our shop front wait so long for a new coat of paint.

I must confess it took a lot longer than I expected. This is one of the interesting things about project management, as time management is the only unique management principle in project management, missing a deadline for most project managers means a failed project. Dr Kaye Remington's new book on complexity in project management focuses on this time management function but from a completely different perspective. It's called Kairos: Harnessing time and emergence in complex projects and as usual, is a cracking book full of excellent insights into what is success. It can be bought on Amazon as an e-book here.

I've long held the belief that a deadline is rarely the most important aspect of a project and that it is assessing this deadline with the emergence of value that is most important. The difference with Kaye is that she puts rigour around her suppositions and supports them with some great research. However, it is my belief that a project manager must always weigh up delay of linear time with the time value of money. This is where one recognises that a delayed product release (say for example a new company website) could have more value than an on-time release where the value proposition for the site has yet to emerge. It is very helpful to have a strong financial understanding of how to assess and value benefits as they emerge when implementing this balancing act.

We have compromised  with our new website release in a similar way. The value proposition is still to be finalised but it has started to emerge and I'm pretty happy with this launch so long as it's a first release and we keep developing the site until its full value is achieved. If left as is then the project would be a failure on both missing a deadline basis and missing the value in the idea.

So hopefully I will be blogging soon about a web update that will move use one step closer to value from the web and our overall business goals being achieved.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

UniPhi the company, global unite, UniPhi 9.0 and more

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's been a while between updates. There's plenty to update too.

UniPhi has been spun out of mbh to become its own company. The three pillars of mbh: management consulting, training and software still make sense but the skills to run each are best managed separately so there are now two businesses under a group called Bruegel Investments. mbh is focused on the training and UniPhi provides software solutions and consulting advice for managing the 3 Ps; Portfolios, programs and projects.

The last post January last year mentioned UniPhi going global. Thanks to the sale to AECOM, UniPhi is now being used in over 120 locations around the world. This 45,000 user roll out has been and still is a fascinating project. UniPhi is the heart of a global knowledge base on construction cost data that is now driving decision making and cost planning around the globe. It is a honour and a pleasure to be involved with such a quality fortune 500 company that is involved in some of the great infrastructure and construction projects globally.

It is a buzz to all in the team that there are users of UniPhi's software 24 hours a day. From our first release back in 2005, it is very satisfying to have reached this global goal.

We've had three releases since the last update in January 2012, with UniPhi 9 being released  in June 2013. The most important feature that has been enhanced over the past 18 months is our Data Warehouse In a Box. This product solves the big problem of enterprise databases; that of extracting the information that has been captured in the way an end user wants. This analytical portal provides the business with the ability to aggregate, cut and dice their financial information captured in UniPhi's enterprise version any which way they wish.

Exciting new developments for the UniPhi suite of products is in the mobile space. We've hired new Android and iOS developers (welcome Vino and Godfrey) to develop our new UniPhi on-site product to be released in August and to enhance our global unite roll out with AECOM. I'll dedicate the next post to the new on-site products.

In other recruitment news, we welcome our new production manager +Graham Eldridge to the fold. Graham's experiences running both enterprise and IT project management offices will assist us in the roll out of our enterprise version. Finally we welcome +Gunawan Herman  who joins our software development team. Gunawan's first assignment is to complete our foreign language feature due for release in UniPhi 10 this October. While only on board for two weeks he has impressed our system architect; +Murray Stiles with his focus and attention to detail. The recruitment process has been both exciting and exhaustive and we're very happy with the quality of our expanding team.