UniPhi partners with Project Services Associates to launch in the UK

UniPhi Managing Director Mark Heath is travelling to the UK to formally sign our first reseller agreement in the UK with Project Services Associates.

Project Services Associates (PSA) is a select group of independent project controls and project services practitioners.  All associates specialise in various project controls skills across different industry sectors covering: project planning, cost estimating, risk and value management, document control, and commercial and contract administration. The balancing of control with complex adaptive systems has been a key research piece of UniPhi since 1999. PSA brings pragmatic real world experience to the deployment of UniPhi's project management software, analysing where the fulcrum should be when balancing the total control to total chaos extremes of project management.

UniPhi looks forward to further announcements of UK clients taking up the software and being supported by the highly professional team at PSA.

Stats, stats and more stats

Got introduced to a new piece of software yesterday called HubSpot. Goes to show how hard it is to get awareness (either that or I really do live under a rock) as I'd never heard of the software and yet it looks extremely popular. It has the benchmark 10,000+ clients which seems to be the minimum for B2B software these days and has the most amazing list of marketing stats I have ever seen.

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/marketing-statistics

This page is an incredible array of stats that has made me realise just how inadequate our online marketing is and how difficult it is going to be to change this. But, this has inspired me to blog (multiple blogs per DAY do lead to sales apparently) and to review the resource mix with focus definitely now on marketing and sales staff. So if you're interested in working for us, check out the job ad page on our site soon for new positions.

Back on topic of the marketing stats, does anyone in my network actually achieve some of the KPIs referenced? I'd love to know how many staff it takes to meet these targets (e.g. over 40 landing pages and multiple blog posts per day!).

Also, any comments out there on hubspot, specifically what it does and how this helps. I've had a cursory look at the website and am yet to work it out. If I get time to review the immense array of information and form my own opinion I'll be sure to let you know.

UniPhi's YouTube channel

Another long term marketing initiative has finally been completed. We now have a  "huge" suite of 5 software demos on the UniPhi Software YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/uniphisoftware. Lots of feedback from the local network including "love the elevator music". While the production quality is a work in progress we hope these videos assist those interested to see how simple the tool is to use and the real benefits we know exist when deploying our software.

Below is a list of the six topics covered  with links to the web pages at uniphi.com.au:

UniPhi for Your Business - overview of our enter once use many philosophy targeted to project based businesses and their practice management.
Issues Management - the engine room of project management.
Risk Management - what, risk management plans actually executed, why I never!
Document Management - Not just a repository (or should that be supository) but a content generator and integrator.
Financial Management - The pain of keying in timesheet data made useful and therefore worthwhile.

Feel free to lampoon or encourage whichever takes your fancy. All feedback is greatly appreciated.

More are pending so if you like our software and want to keep abreast of updates, follow us for updates.

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.

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.

UniPhi is going global

It's been a hectic couple of weeks for us at mbh but the long hours and extensive travel has bared fruit with the acceptance of a proposal to roll out UniPhi globally with one of our largest clients. Over the next 2 years UniPhi will be used by over 2000 users in 5 continents and over 100 offices around the globe.

It has always been a buzz for me to know that while I have breakfast or eat dinner someone is using UniPhi to assist them deliver some real investment somewhere in Australia or the Middle East. Now this really will be a 24 hour proposition. Well done Murray and the software development team on a great result.

 More news on this to come

Distributed versus centralised data capture

One of the key changes in the public domain created by software has been the ability of millions of people to enter information into a centralised source. There are two examples of this; one the general updating of information through web pages aggregated through Google and the other the specific updating of social information and its aggregation through Facebook. Many organisations have identified this change and leveraged its value as a distribution channel for marketing and sales and more recently as a source of customer feedback. The central element of success is that millions of people add information that is then aggregated and re-purposed either through a web search or through a pre-designed portal.

What's interesting though is that business to business software is yet to take full advantage of this concept. Most areas where this type of architecture has been developed is in the "non-sensitive" areas of Intranets and customer relationship management systems. Anything financial is still collected and then keyed in at a central source. This puts a great constraint on the system and results in real time business information being delayed as well as their being a lack of breadth and depth in the information being presented.

UniPhi is one of the first business applications that requires the distribution of data entry for it to be a success. The concept is similar to the Facebook one, get hundreds of end users entering in their piece of the puzzle directly into a centralised system and then present this information aggregated and re-purposed into the slice relevant to the user logging in. The executive running a company with 55,000 people can know how many projects are late, on schedule and ahead of schedule across their company in the same way as an individual at Facebook could theoretically aggregate the 800 million Facebook users into those that like Star Wars and those that don't.

This distributed data entry model is the biggest productivity improver since the invention of the PC. Companies that recognise this now and implement the change programmes to take advantage of it are going to out perform their peers like never before.

UniPhi 6.0 released and Data Warehouse Out of The Box announced!

Well UniPhi 6.0 has been out now for 3 months. Check out the press release for new features. We've quickly moved on to the next round of developments. The big launch for UniPhi will be our next release which will see what I believe is the first data warehouse and BI out of the box application on the market. The unique structure of UniPhi has enabled us to develop a data warehouse process and analysis services cubes that cut the need for internal naval gazing and reflection. Most companies spend millions defining their warehouse structure and designing and building BI Tools to overlay this data with tools for end users. UniPhi provides all of this structure out of the box. Deploy UniPhi either on your own SQL and Web server boxes or subscribe to our cloud infrastructure and bingo you're ready to analyse your data and see how you're performing. Use the profit cube to analyse fees, book to burn rations, slipping projects, market segments that you're performing well in or not so well and employees who are kicking goals both for and against.

I will update with more info on this exciting development in the coming months.

To error is to be an executive

We have heard plenty lately about the bad judgment of a recently departed head honcho of David Jones. While it's easy to file as 'bad judgment' or 'ill advised' the unwanted advances of a CEO to a junior executive at a company function, it is much trickier to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to executive strategic decision making.

In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.

In a March 2010 McKinsey Quarterly entitled, 'The case for behavioral strategy', the authors, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, assert that '...cognitive biases affect the most important strategic decisions made by the smartest managers in the best companies. Mergers routinely fail to deliver the expected synergies. Strategic plans often ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time—over and over again.'

The authors' advocated remedy for the problem of 'biased' management decision making is for organisations to adopt processes that 'debias' strategic decisions.

It just so happens that UniPhi is an enterprise process that debiases strategic decisions. Once deployed and used by key stakeholders across the enterprise, executives can easily track, manage and report on the progress of key organisational initiatives. Accurate, real-time project and portfolio data is at the executive's fingertips.

UniPhi provides a more objective road map for an executive's strategic decisions, ensuring they are guided by objectively-tested facts and figures, instead of 'gut feels' and 'intuition'. In my view, UniPhi represents an invaluable tool for debiasing executive decisions and making sure strategy development is informed by reality, not 'hisimagination'. Of course, I may just be biased, but use UniPhi and then prove me wrong.

UniPhi 5.0 to be released

After 9 months of intensive development, we are about to release our biggest launch of UniPhi yet. UniPhi 5.0 is a major step forward for mbh and for the product itself. After significant and greatly appreciated feedback from our thousand strong user base, we have been able to enhance many existing features and bring in new ones. The contracts management functionality was completely overhauled with significant productivity improvements to the creation of the full suite of contract admin components (variations, progress claims, EOTs, RFIs etc. This new contract management also has the capability to manage your fee with the client as well as all other contracts on the project. Adding this to our new fee management system and existing lifecycle feature and we can now tell you how many jobs you're winning and how many you're losing; in what sector your winning and what one's you're not.With transparent real time internal KPI performance management, I can see already that many potential clients are going to be threatened by how visible their performance is.

This release would not have been possible without the dedication of our software development team. This cosmopolitan group of guys who all reside in Australia but hail from all over the world makes our Sydney office a vibrant and buzzing place to be. Although the hours are insane and juggling the business with running my kids to school, soccer practice, ballet and the like is not easy, it's great to never wake up in the morning with the words "oh no, it's only Wednesday". Thanks guys for making each day an enjoyable event!

We have scheduled a series of breakfast seminars along with our monthly webinar to present this new release across Australia and will follow it up with a roadshow across the middle east in September.

You can read more about this release and the roadshow at our website. Please come to the breakfasts if you can, we'd love to see you there.