Tag Archives: software

Software User Feedback: Seeing outside of the technical writer’s cube

by
jsw_fish_2013

Jay Wisnosky – Technical Writer

Rock Island Arsenal is on the Mississippi River between the cities of Rock Island, IL and Davenport, IA.  It was first established as a government site in 1816, served as a Civil War prison camp to over 12,000 Confederate prisoners, and now provides manufacturing, logistics and base support for the Armed Forces.

From 15 January through 18 January 2013, Rock Island Arsenal was the training location for ProModel’s Decision Support Tool – Sourcing Module (DST-SM), with the focus trainees being a group from the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC). AMC is the primary provider of materiel to the United States Army. DST-SM is a web-based software application developed by ProModel and designed to assist AMC and other logisticians in the Army to plan the best possible decisions for materiel distribution across the world. As the technical documentation specialist for DST-SM, it is a collaboration with which I am very proud to be associated, so I welcomed the opportunity to attend these training sessions.

It’s not every day that I get the opportunity to interact with the customers of one of our products. If you are a technical writer, you know that much of the interaction and feedback from customers comes filtered through your company’s support team, consultants or other subject matter experts. It sometimes takes a journalist’s tenacity, a quality assurance analyst’s patience, and a politician’s handshake to get information about the technical details of your product. The end result is typically a user manual, which if done well, is quietly referenced and met with very little acclaim.

So on the first day of training at Rock Island Arsenal, I sat as a quiet observer in the back of the training room with notepad in hand, ready for class to begin. By 8:30 a.m., a blend of enlisted soldier and civilian trainees had taken their places behind secure computer monitors. The DST-SM trainer introduced the guests, a mixture of contractors and ProModel employees, to the classroom.

When he introduced me, I felt a rush of fear and pride swell in my chest. He stated my name and title and then added a note, informing the class that I was the author of the previous bound copy of the user manual that was distributed to many of them with the summer release of DST-SM. He added that with this new release the user manual was now online as a new feature and view-able at any given moment from the Help option in the main menu. I felt their staring eyes turn in my direction for a moment, before the trainer continued to his first segment of the session.

Whatever fear of scrutiny I had slowly disappeared as I watched several students reference the online help throughout the course of the training session.  In addition, the trainees regularly turned to me to ask questions about a certain function or screen. Their questions ranged from process-related questions to inquiries about the tool’s usability and performance. Though I couldn’t explain to them how to perform their job, I felt confident helping the trainees navigate the application.  I saw new users of the tool gain confidence and experienced users pick up on the new features with relative ease.

Perhaps one the most beneficial aspects to being a technical writer in the presence of users during a training session was hearing their suggestions, concerns and obstacles. I took this unique chance to interact with the AMC trainees as a golden opportunity to absorb as much as I possibly could about the usability of DST-SM, as well as the effectiveness of my help documentation. Often, a major oversight in developing, testing, and documenting any application is how close we grow to our own process and application. However, through the fresh eyes of a new user, using the tool in a manner familiar to their specific job, you get to see where gaps in the documentation exist and where room for usability can improve. So as we were helping them do their jobs, they were helping us do ours. As the morning progressed, I saw the many hours of hard work by DST-SM developers, product managers, program directors, and testers, finally coming to fruition.

I considered the experience both gratifying and inspiring. The AMC trainees used the help in accordance with the trainer’s instructions and in conjunction with the practical exercises at the end of each session.

The inspiring part is about moving forward with an added perspective and incentive. There’s no doubt having that kind of experience will lend to a stronger, more useful product on the page and in the application. Observing how investments in money, time, and effort are manifest in real world scenarios outside the walls of my cubicle is something that every technical writer imagines, but rarely gets a chance to witness.

Strengthening the Innovation Value Chain

by
Orange Cathy

Cathy Liggett – Sales Director, PPM Solutions

Our Customers can connect strategic planning with market and business opportunity definitions. 

When Innovation Teams fail to deliver on their promises, the most frequent explanation is that the strategy was wrong. But the strategy by itself is not often the cause. Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well. Either the team isn’t capable of making them happen, or the leaders of the organization misjudge the challenges their teams face in the market place, or both.

The right portfolio and capacity planning tool will allow strategic planners to examine multiple scenarios and predict the probability of success within a set of given budgets, constraints and thresholds. Typically, strategic planners throw these guidelines over the fence to those responsible for identifying and defining market and business opportunities within their portfolio. If the strategic planning team shares the executable model developed while creating the strategy with the portfolio management team, the strategic vision can become “our” vision instead of “their” vision.

The benefits of empowerment are realized as Portfolio Managers redistribute and balance the opportunity portfolio. Opportunities can be selected based on the budgets, thresholds, and constraints of the strategic model. Ways for opportunities to compensate for one another can be identified while maintaining strategic alignment. The unified team (Strategic Planners and Portfolio Managers)―with its synergy of effort―offers greater knowledge than if the Portfolio Managers of opportunity definition and the Capacity Planners of strategic planning work separately. The shared, executable model is key to a common vision, and required to truly join capacity planning and portfolio management.

ProModel customers build executable models driven by a discrete event simulator to determine potentials, define competency requirements, and establish portfolio budgets. They use this same model for portfolio management to balance opportunities, and minimize risk. This connection helps establish a common language between strategy and opportunity planning.

Our Customers can align product roadmaps to these market opportunities.

Power is the rate at which work is accomplished. Roadmaps control that rate. We like to think of it as the throttle of execution. This is where the day-to-day activities of the project meet strategy. Yes, it’s true that the roadmap should be seen as a portfolio. The Roadmapping Team must balance opportunity with capability while maintaining strategic alignment.

A shared, executable model helps our customers bridge the gap between the potential and realized returns of the enterprise roadmap, while optimizing the execution rates of the individual projects on that roadmap. Of course risk and reward are balanced, but perhaps the greatest advantage the executable model brings to roadmapping is change impact analysis. For this task, automated reports just can’t address the bursty nature of enterprise change. The averages and estimates of traditional Gantt charts, and strategic plans don’t address the issues of resource availability or future capability needed for roadmapping.

Our Customer’s day-to-day decisions required in Market Sensing, Problem, Feature, Requirement, and Launch definition receive direction and focus from these roadmaps.

A common executable model, used for strategic planning, capacity planning, portfolio management, and roadmapping helps build a common language, focus, and almost frictionless execution. The model helps everyone on the Innovation Team understand where the constraints came from. The final result is empowerment to the front lines, where decisions are being made. The model, which is connected to the roadmap, opportunities, and strategy can now be used for “What if” analysis.

The day-to-day decisions of members on the Innovation Team can be strengthened by the executable model. This executable model is used to gain insight into trends and forces that impact our decisions. By studying the behavior of the model, good decisions can be made without formal analysis. The goal is to empower their Innovation Team with reliable instincts, formulated with facts and modeled experiences, so that when the time comes, good decisions can be made in a timely manner.

Members of the Innovation Team gathering market evidence, analyzing the evidence to define problem statements, constructing innovative feature definitions, specifying market requirements, or planning the launch, use the executable model to conduct what if analyses, and change impact analysis to be sure the maximum competitive advantage is delivered within the current business constraints.

This three-tier coordination between Strategy, Opportunities, Roadmaps, day-to-day  market sensing, problem, feature, requirement, and launch definition can be accomplished through the right type of capacity planning and portfolio management capabilities.

Simulation Game is Game Changer

by
Charley%20Harrell

Dr. Charles Harrell
ProModel Director and Founder,
Professor of Engineering and Technology – BYU

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) has emerged to become one of the most crucial ways of achieving strategic advantage in a business organization. In order to be competitive, business leaders recognize that they must be able to effectively plan and manage their project or product portfolio in a way that best achieves the financial goals of the organization. The question I would ask is: How well are university MBA programs responding to industry needs and preparing graduates who can effectively do PPM?

In the U.S. alone there are currently 214 graduate business or MBA programs offering either courses or emphases in PPM. But this number doesn’t necessarily reflect how many MBA programs do an adequate job of teaching PPM. Many programs treat PPM as just an extension of project management (PM), or they are content to treat it at a high, conceptual level rather than at an actual working level.

PPM is Not Just PM on Steroids

Traditionally, MBA programs have tended to focus on the management of projects, not the management of project portfolios. However, as universities have increasingly become aware of the fact that most organizations manage multiple projects rather than individual projects, PM courses have expanded to ostensibly address the issues associated with multiple projects. Unfortunately, in many of these instances the real issues associated with managing multiple projects are trivialized as though they are little different from those connected with managing a single project. One MBA program advertises that they provide an entire series of four courses on PM, yet only in the last course is the subtopic of “multiple projects” even raised. The mindset seems to be: if you can plan and manage one project, you can plan and manage multiple projects.

This practice of tacking PPM onto PM, as though it is simply a matter of planning and managing a bunch of individual projects, grossly underestimates the complexity of the decisions associated with competing projects vying for the limited resources of an organization, not to mention the strategic level of thinking that is required to make such decisions.

PPM is more than learning how to manage multiple projects. It is learning how to look at the entire portfolio of projects holistically with the goal of maximizing overall ROI. PPM blends strategy and decision making to allocate resources across competing opportunities for maximum value creation. These decisions are based on risk assessment and financial management and therefore go beyond the simple scheduling and cost estimating activities associated with PM. What this all means is that a good project manager isn’t necessarily a good portfolio manager.

PPM, a Learn-by-Doing Skill

Once an MBA program gets over the habit of treating PPM as simply an advanced exercise in PM, the next challenge is to treat PPM as a skill rather than simply a topic of discussion. Unfortunately, in many MBA programs PPM is addressed as simply one of many topics covered in a business strategy course where students are barely given enough exposure to it to know what it is.

Even where an entire course is dedicated to the topic of PPM, it is often treated at a high level with little attention given to the actual nuts and bolts of how it is done. It goes without saying that one can learn a great deal about PPM without really learning how to do PPM. I recently read one PPM course description in an MBA program that stated: “This course provides the basic concepts of portfolio management and differentiates portfolio management from project management, program management and the PMO. The course content defines the steps necessary to develop a project portfolio, including selecting portfolio components and applying financial and resource constraints. Portfolios have different risks than individual projects and programs, therefore an explanation of portfolio risk management is included.”

Such a course, if taught as advertised, could hardly give students a working knowledge of how to do PPM. While perhaps useful to someone interested in obtaining only a cursory knowledge of PPM, it is of little practical use to someone anticipating filling any kind of leadership role in PPM.

To develop a real working knowledge of PPM, students need to develop a sense of how project selection, prioritization and timing affect financial performance. They also need to get a good grasp of the way resource allocation over time and across multiple projects affects both cost and revenues. Gaining insight into the impact of uncertainty and risk on timing and financial performance is also vital. Especially useful is the ability to generate accurate statistical estimates of performance based on uncertainty. Such capabilities are best developed through actual experience in working with project portfolios.

EPS for MBA Programs

ProModel has developed a PPM simulation exercise using its powerful Enterprise Project Portfolio (EPS) product that is designed to take students through a realistic project portfolio planning scenario. It gives students an experience of what it is actually like to make portfolio planning decisions and helps improve their strategic thinking skills. Since this EPS module is hosted in the cloud, no software needs to be downloaded and students can work through the exercise at their own pace, usually only taking a couple hours to complete.

The EPS module provides both training and assessment so that students receive immediate feedback on the consequence of their decisions and are allowed to iteratively improve their decision making skills. Students come away with confidence in their ability to effectively plan a project portfolio.

ProModel is excited to be working with several MBA programs to pilot this EPS module. Preliminary results are promising, and it is definitely proving to be a bold move for professors to stretch beyond their comfort zone of classroom lecturing. Giving students this hands-on experience in PPM is sure to make them better business leaders. It is more than a simulation game; it is a game changer.

Please Visit the ProModel Academic Page:

http://www.promodel.com/academic/

 

ProModel Services

by

Improving enterprise performance with a ProModel Solution is a multifaceted experience.  Whether you’re using our award winning simulation products on your own or working with some of our talented professionals in consulting, technical support, and training, ProModel’s goal is to help you make better decisions faster!  Take a look at this video to get a better idea of what ProModel Services mean to our customers.

For more information please visit our service page:

http://www.promodel.com/services/

In 2013 ProModel Celebrates 25 Years of Serving Customers!

by
Keith Vadas

Keith Vadas – ProModel President & CEO

The ProModel family would like to wish everyone a very joyous holiday season and a prosperous 2013!  We thank you for all your support and business in 2012.  As always, our goal is to help you meet or exceed your performance goals.  We hope that our people and solutions were able to assist you in that endeavor this past year.

2013 marks the 25th Anniversary of ProModel Corporation.  That’s a quarter century of providing solutions that improve performance for companies and organizations all around the world! It’s hard to believe how time flies, but it’s easy to see how ProModel has grown from a small company based on a single innovative simulation software product to an organization with a global presence and diverse solutions servicing virtually every industry from Government and Manufacturing to Healthcare and Academia.  It’s all due to the talented and dedicated professionals, both in the ProModel family and especially within our loyal customer base – so Thank You.

ProModel opened its doors in Orem Utah in 1988 thanks to Dr. Charles Harrell’s vision to provide an easy to use and affordable simulation toolset for non-programmers that could run on standard PC’s.  It has grown for 25 years because of strong customer support and feedback as well as innovative predictive analytic solutions.

We now provide an array of Rich Internet Application solutions like the ARFORGEN Synchronization Tool (AST) that helps the Army do all force planning for missions around the world, Decision Support Tool (DST) that helps Army Materiel Command source equipment for the troops  ensuring their readiness for the missions, The Navy Synchronization Tools (NST) help the Navy  optimize  F18  fleets and Enterprise Portfolio Simulator (EPS) which helps organizations optimize project portfolios with limited resources.

We also continue to improve upon our flagship ProModel, MedModel and ServiceModel suites as well as Process Simulator, our Visio Plug-In, based primarily on your feedback.

In 2013 and beyond we look to continue developing innovative collaborative predictive analytic solutions to help our customers make better decisions faster.  One example of this is Patient Flow Analysis, an application specific healthcare solution designed to make it easier and faster to solve hospital wide patient flow issues.   Keep an eye of for this solution in early 2013.

Here at ProModel we have plenty of good memories and valuable experiences to look back upon over the last 25 years, but we’d also like to hear about your experiences with ProModel.  What were some of the key decisions you were able to confidently make because of a ProModel solution?  Tell us about some of the most memorable and successful projects you’ve worked on with ProModel.

Thanks again, Happy Holidays, and we’ll see you next year!

Keith Vadas

President & CEO

ProModel Corporation