ResourceFirst Release 9 – Preview Session

Transcript:

Thank you all for attending today. My name is Phil from PDWare, and I’m here with my colleague Barook. We’d like to welcome you to the first in a planned series of Release 9 demos. We have a mixed audience today, some people who are new to PDWare and some who have known us for a long time. For those who are new, let’s talk about a couple of quick things. 

First of all, Resource First is cloud software designed to help you build and maintain high-value and achievable portfolios. To do this, we have four big principles: one, we use resource planning as the foundation of all portfolio management; two, we take an intelligent approach to project intake that helps you rank your initiatives by strategic importance; three, we use an approach to portfolio optimization that considers supply, demand, strategic importance, and budgetary targets; and finally, we use open integration with all kinds of different management systems to eliminate duplicate entry and let you focus on analysis, not just sticking numbers and text into the system.

These four items are approaches that we’ve been taking for a long time, in fact, almost 20 years. But as we got into Release 9, we thought about how we can improve the overall user experience. We knew what we wanted to do, but we also wanted to make it a better overall experience for the users, no matter what your role is in using the system. So, we have three major themes with respect to Release 9: collaborative productivity, process flexibility, and business integration, and that integration theme is always there, of course. Let’s take each one of these real quickly before we get into the demo.

Under collaborative productivity, some of the things you can expect are a new look and feel, a faster, almost snappier response to some of the big functionalities in the system, a new home-based message system which we will demo today, some live dashboards in addition to the traditional reporting dashboards that people have come to know and love, consolidated waterline analysis where we brought some of the big functions in the system together in better screens, streamlined resource requesting, improved team planning, and some pivot reports right inside the application. I think all of these will be very useful in terms of using the system and having a better overall experience.

In addition, we want to make the system more flexible so that it works with your business process. To do this, we created some new viewing options where you’ll notice that there are more options to see things in both grids and form format, some new filter libraries, the ability to put comments inside cells, restorable baselines, and a couple of other items here that all will help you to take this tool and configure it to your process without doing major customization.

Then finally, business integration, and again, this is just an expansion of a theme that we’ve always had. We’ve introduced new native Excel import/exports so you can go right into Excel format, not just CSV, better integration with Microsoft Project for individual projects, and then, of course, we can also do larger integrations there. JIRA import continues to be an area of emphasis as more and more people are taking on iterative and agile projects. Some new audit and restore functionality inside the application, not just from an administrative standpoint, and then expanded API capabilities for better integrations and an entirely remodeled admin area, which I don’t know how much we’re going to show of that today but over the next bunch of sessions we’ll definitely get into that.

So I’m sure you’re looking forward to the demo. One thing I want to point out is that this first version of Release 9 is actually just the beginning. Release 9 is actually a platform for all kinds of future enhancements, and we have a long list of items that have come from some of you and then also from the marketplace in terms of where this application is going to go. A couple of preview items you can look forward to, and of course, there’s a much longer list, something called optimized scenario analysis which will make scenario planning even more valuable during your annual planning process as well as gate processes and monthly processes, prescriptive messaging. One question that keeps coming up with us is what are we doing about AI, and we’re definitely working with our partner Microsoft in this direction. There’s a couple of things that you’ll see somewhat down the road, some recommended actions as well as diagnostics, and then we’re also upgrading some of the reporting. Our relationship with Click has never been stronger, and we’re to add some of their new functionality which includes some of the items you’ve been asking for, most of which have to do with distribution of that reporting information out to other people in the organization, whether through PowerPoint, PDF, or other types of processes.

Anyway, that’s our introduction today. One thing I want to say is that we have a chat area, and so if you have questions that come up, please ask them. We’ll try to hit them all at the end.