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What is EPM? Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is a common term that refers to the efficient management of existing Projects and the selection process for managing the demand of future projects called a Portfolio.

At a time when organisations are working with diminishing budgets, an EPM solution can help organisations choose the right projects, reduce costs, drive efficiencies whilst promoting business growth.

SMS has an established and dedicated EPM Practice skilled in working with Project and Portfolio Management tools such as; Microsoft Project (Standard and Professional) Microsoft Project Server, Clarity, Primavera, HP PPM and more. Our consultants work with organisations requirements on the readiness, architectural design, business analysis, installation and implementation, training and support of Project and Portfolio Management solutions.

The current blog categories, entitled ‘EPM’ and ‘MS Project’  are dedicated to the Microsoft technologies, written by our Microsoft Project Management consultants.

Microsoft Solutions
Over the coming months, we will be posting a number of articles and tutorials on Microsoft Project 2010, one of the most commonly used Project tracking tools, as well as Microsoft Project Server, a leader in the market for Project and Portfolio Management.

Blog updates will be posted on both our Facebook and Twitter accounts so please make sure to like or follow us respectively.

For more information on our EPM capability including our range of services visit our website www.smsmt.com/epm. To view our free online Microsoft Project Server 2010 demo visit www.smsmt.com/epm_demo. In the meantime if you have any questions feel free to email us at epm@smsmt.com

Posted February 6th, 2012 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog Enterprise Project Management (EPM) MS Project

by Cindy Edmonds

As a Project Manager I have managed the delivery of projects in Agile environments since 2006 for organisations that vary in sector, size and culture. I have delivered Agile projects for the national broadcaster in the UK, for digital media agencies and for the largest telco in Australia. While there is no ‘one size fits all’ prescription of which techniques to apply, there are definitely some pitfalls that are common across all Agile-flavoured techniques and may be managed if identified early.

My Top 5 Tips to avoid these common pitfalls are: Read the rest of this post

Posted January 23rd, 2012 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog The Project Leader

Successful delivery of projects often requires a balanced combination of critical factors, including careful planning, effective executive sponsorship and support, proactive stakeholder management, good communication channels, adequate funding, a reliable team and, of course, practical experience.

The last of these elements (experience), only comes with time and on-the-job learning.

Personally I have worked with SMS for over a decade and a half, and in that time I have witnessed first hand the breadth and experience that SMS Management & Technology bring to client engagements. The team of professionals that work for SMS are among the most experienced project, program and portfolio practitioners in the region.

Through this blog, I will bring you perspectives of project delivery through the experience of a company squarely focused on implementation and benefits realisation.

Much of the content will consist of contributions from my colleagues with the support of the extended SMS team. So expect a broad range of informative and practical project leadership insights.

I invite you to subscribe to this blog and to also forward any comments or feedback on the posts.

Edwin Borg-Manché
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/edwinbm
Twitter: @leadingprojects

Posted January 23rd, 2012 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog The Project Leader

By Paul Cooper aka @longboardfella

My sister’s dog Banjo reminded me of some great life lessons this summer.  Banjo approaches his life with all the enthusiasm expected of a golden Labrador…and we were recently teaching him some new tricks (e.g. to hold 2 balls in his mouth and then to also retrieve a stick from the billabong at the same time – for a lab with a big mouth that didn’t prove too hard!) After we had lots of laughs about what he had learned from us, it got me thinking what I could learn from him and how that might be of relevance to the consulting work we do at SMS. Here are some observations and thoughts:

  Read the rest of this post

Posted January 11th, 2012 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog

by @longboardfella

I was reading a book on a plane the other day that had been on my shelves for a few years:  It was “Parallel Thinking” by Edward De Bono. As usual, Edward tries to get the reader to think more creatively than our usual education system has taught us.  He calls our approach to learning (I am paraphrasing a little) the legacy of the Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He praises their contribution to our reasoning system in the West, then condemns them for their legacy of success resulting in our narrow adversarial approach to thinking – the approach called Critical Thinking is where we tend to look linearly at problems and choose either/or yes/no actions and to try to boil things down to the “truth” by arguing narrowly.

If you want a current example, just look at the narrow “yes it’s happening”, “no it’s not” kind of argument we are seeing about climate change and you will get the picture of how this approach plays out (particularly for lawyers who professionally take this approach as the way to seek out the truth. And guess what? A significant majority of politicians are lawyers… as De Bono himself points out.)

In contrast, De Bono encourages us to free up our creative juices, to seek truths other than yes/no… and this is the essence of his earlier “Six Thinking Hats” approach to problem solving which I have always loved – and employed many times.  It ensures we put on the critical thinking “black hat” as only ONE of the six thinking hats we can use to look at a problem.

Also in this book, Parallel Thinking, De Bono makes a throwaway comment where he reflects on the impact of TV and Radio with his view that we are moving from a time where the written word was king to one where we are back in the age of oral history.

He put this view in 1993, which was before the explosion of the Internet and I believe his words are even more true in the YouTube era: if it’s not findable on YouTube, then many of the digital generation simply regard it as non-existent, or unimportant (because if it WAS important, someone would have YouTubed it…)

So what can we extrapolate from this?  Well, for one thing, it says to me that in our organisations we must continue to make sure we are supporting the communication channels that people most want to use, or find most effective. So if your organisation is not providing a video channel (e.g. webinars for staff), and intranets that can search both text and visual libraries (the latter is not easy but can be done) then perhaps have a think about it… you may be missing an important channel of communications with your people.  And the same is true of your customers.

But given that we know that oral communication is not always appropriate e.g. it is “too intense” to enable reflective thinking (and we see this evident today in the very simplistic arguments and sound bites of “debate” on the mainstream TV media).  To help a bit, we at SMS we have put together a guide for choosing the best communications channel for a given purpose – it maps out what channels work best for different situations including whether emotion is involved. It’s our hope that using the different channels of communications more effectively might also help us move away from our black and white thinking… see my presentation on the topic here.

Let us know via some feedback if you find the communications channel information of any interest and use. We aim to make it a good guide so your comments will help. Send us a YouTube link if you care to!

Posted December 12th, 2011 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog Consulting 3.0

By SMS Blue Sky Challenge Winner Darko Zoroja

Tuesday, 13 October 2011 marked the launch of //BUILD/, Microsoft’s new yearly conference and the replacement for the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). As the captain of the winning team in the Blue Sky challenge, I was sent by SMS to beautiful Anaheim, California to attend this highly anticipated event. Read the rest of this post

Posted November 24th, 2011 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog

SMS Management & Technology (SMS) recently hosted an internal competition in the interest of promoting creativity and giving staff the chance to use of the latest Microsoft technology. Entitled the ‘SMS Blue Sky Challenge (powered by Microsoft Azure), the competition focused on the theme of putting ideas to action, and gave SMSers the tools and incentive to build prototype mobile applications designed to address compelling business challenges.

Prizes on offer included (for the winning team captain) a trip to the Microsoft //BUILD/ Conference in North America and Windows Phone 7 handsets for the remaining two entrants. The runners up won Microsoft X-Box Kinect bundles and all successful entrants received Gold Class movie tickets.

SMS received 16 entries to the competition and 13 ultimately made their way to the final assessment stages.

We had some great ideas put forward. Ideas included a timesheet entry app, a “locate SMSer” app, a “central meeting point” app and a “coffee culture” app, amongst others.

The winning teams idea was to automate the process for a Client to request assistance from SMS through what they called the Client to Consultant’ (or C2C) app.

‘The interactive way of picking the right consultant for your project and resourcing requirements’

C2C is an integrated system that provides a consolidated view of SMS’s consultants, their capabilities and availability. It is designed to provide a streamlined overview of SMS Consultant information to address the needs of SMS Consultants, Management and Existing/Potential Clients. This is achieved through providing aggregated views of existing consultant information at differing levels of granularity.

We were overwhelmed by the quality of the entries submitted, and the effort that the teams went to in order to deliver their concepts.

Stay tuned for our next blog entry to hear about winning captain Darko Zoroja’s trip to the Microsoft //BUILD/ Conference.

Posted November 17th, 2011 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog

Martin Kearns, National Capability Lead for Agile services at SMS Management & Technology (SMS), was recently picked by online blog Agile42 to be their ‘Awesome Coach of the week’.

With over 18 years of industry experience, Martin is a pioneer in the field of Scrum, being one of the first three Scrum Coaches to be certified in the world. Martin’s forte is in the coaching of individuals and organisations to improve their application of the Agile process and to build high performance teams.

Martin is heavily involved in the promotion of Scrum, agile and associated techniques and processes within the industry in Australia and internationally. He has written and presented papers on the application of Scrum and agile at Scrum Alliance conferences across the world.

At SMS, Martin is leading the development of an enterprise agile capability to support the business strategies of a diverse set of clients. Having been involved in the forefront of agile implementations for a number of years, SMS is equipped with the right tools to enable organisations to build a roadmap to where they want to be, based on sound pragmatic experience.

You can view the full article here.

You can also view the SMS whitepaper on our Agile Business Process Management (BPM) solutions here.

Posted September 14th, 2011 / Leave a comment
categories: Blog