#loadspring academy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

LoadSpring to Be Featured on 21st Century Business Television series August 7, 2013

Click Here for Airing Schedule

Boca Raton, FL (TBD) --- Multi-Media Productions (USA), Inc. is pleased to announce that LoadSpring will be airing on 21st Century Business on CNBC (as paid programming.).

LoadSpring’s complete Project Management Solutions Platform helps their clients make easier, smarter business decisions and gives them the power to act on them. LoadSpring speeds up the decision-making process and moves customers towards organizational PM maturity by eliminating barriers like software selection, deployment, implementation, capital investment and internal support issues. Application hosting through their unique SpringBoard™ portal provides secure access to total software solutions—any time and anywhere.

SpringBoard – LoadSpring’s state-of-the-art web platform offers:

Deployment of enterprise-level software in days – not weeks

Provides a single portal for organizations complete PM suite of applications including: estimating, BIM, scheduling, and data sharing software

Enterprise-level security

Fast global application upgrades and version changes

Administration and executive reporting functionality

Support and service 24/7/365

Identity Management for effortless corporate-wide ID control

Disaster recovery options to meet all corporate standards

LoadSpring Academy for online easy to access and measure training

Implementation services with Best Practice configurations

Because LoadSpring deploys and implements complete solutions sooner than ever imagined, their clients see results (and cost savings) that much faster.

LoadSpring application hosting gives their client’s total software access and control – anytime and anywhere. With just a few keystrokes, companies share the most up-to-date reports and project data possible. It all resides on reliable, secure networks – not internal systems. The result?  Easier, more robust delivery of information, security, service and support.

JL Haber, Vice President of Programming at Multi Media Productions, added, “As the leader in their industry, LoadSpring is a natural fit for our show. We are excited to have them as a guest on our program.”

For more information go to: www.loadspring.com.

About 21st Century Business

21st Century Business is an award winning television series produced by Multi-Media Productions. The show features companies providing business viewers an in depth opportunity to find solutions within many industries globally.

21st Century Business airs on CNBC and the Fox Business Network to over 100 million viewers nationwide as well as internationally via DirecTV and Dish Network. The show can also be viewed through video on demand via www.21cbtv.com. The series is also available at more than 27 prestigious college universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, Howard University, Dartmouth College and Georgetown University.

For specific market-by-market air dates and times, please e-mail [email protected]. For more information, please visit www.21cbtv.com.

About LoadSpring Solutions

Imagine training delivery flexible enough to bring your users (meaning specifically the people in your company, not somebody else’s) the exact learning content they require to accomplish their objectives. And yet methodical enough to be able to successively deliver such a customized training program in the same way to as many groups of your users as needed.

Option 1

Options.  Imagine that. That’s what LoadSpring does. Training the way your organization expects and needs it. Part of it is in our comprehensive catalog of around 2 to 11 minute modules that can be grouped together in any way you like for a wide range of audiences all through our LoadSpring Academy.  What kind of variety is on offer? Over 60 modules are currently available online. They cover specific product functionality like the Contract Management Control Center, navigating and editing reports in BI (Business Intelligence) Publisher, and scheduling and advanced project scheduling in P6. They also help users get started with their project management software by establishing some of the basics like how to work with projects, activities and an enterprise project structure. 

Better still, for customers using the SpringBoard cloud portal from LoadSpring, access to the LoadSpring Academy with these training modules is immediate and free of charge. Users can log on to benefit from student tracking, quizzes to testing their assimilation of the training material and quiz reporting. Individual and team training sessions with trainers also let users see exactly what the trainer is seeing as specific product interfaces and activities are discussed.

Option 2

Additionally, on-site training in your organization is available. Customized one on one, focused workshops, and “train the trainer”, for example are all available on site.  That means the training can be tailored to what is most effective and best practices for your users, while maximizing the return on the time they spend learning.

Option 3

But that’s not all. While getting customers’ organizations up to speed quickly and efficiently on product functionality is already a huge plus in terms of productivity, LoadSpring also takes training a step further. The objective is not only to make sure that your users are doing things right with your project management software solutions, but also that your enterprise is doing the right things.

For that reason, the QuickStart and QuickBuild services from LoadSpring also include training and mentoring for your systems administrators for P6. With a remotely delivered, accelerated implementation using this approach, LoadSpring can help companies to adopt and benefit from project management software faster than ever. The remote mentoring in particular, one of the most highly concentrated and targeted forms of training, helps ensure that your deployment of P6 continues to be aligned with the strategic business requirements of your company into the future too.

We build and have available training and delivery methods for our customers that best meet the needs of your organization. If you like thorough and traditional, we have that. Or if fast and easy is more your speed, then LoadSpring Academy is your choice.

The golden rule is that business requirements must be defined before choosing a software solution. This is simple to understand, but not always easy to stick to. Of course, software has to help the business… but gathering the correct information means taking the time to consult the right people, sifting and sorting the information, getting the business requirements down on paper, getting executive buy in and checking afterwards that you did it properly.

How do Business Requirements Get Defined?

The simple answer is “by business people”, but there’s more to it than that. It’s true that the starting point is to match with the strategic objectives of the organization, the thing that the software solution (whatever it is) is supposed to be helping. However, major objectives often don’t translate directly into a software functionality laundry list. Tools exist to help business and technical people do just that. For instance, the IEEE 1074-1995 standard lays out different steps: as a joint business and technical effort, first make a systems requirement specification, with an overall business orientation; from that, make a software requirements specification, which defines what the software will do. Then work backwards to check that every software function defined like this makes a useful contribution to the business.

What if We Forgot Something?

It can happen. The challenge is then to manage the change needed to fix that oversight. Even if the functionality already exists in the software chosen, reconfiguration and rebalancing of system interdependencies can be a delicate operation. Different ways exist to evaluate the completeness, consistency and correctness of requirements, ranging from “use cases” to obstacle analysis. But remember also to get information on requirements from all the relevant sources. For example, go outside the firm to check out some of your major customers to see what they might be asking your company to do in the near future.

The (Infamous) Pilot Project

Software pilot projects can be a good idea – if they are approached correctly. They only become infamous when they are launched as some sort of vague proof of concept, with no clear objectives and no link back to a specific business benefit. This doesn’t mean that a pilot project has to meet the key business objective of a company all by itself. However, it should have a realistic, measurable goal to improve the business in some way, and be measured by that goal in terms of failure or success.

Scope Creep or Business Responsiveness?

On paper, software implementations can have a lot to offer. Take the example of project management software that promises to ease the planning and tracking of complex projects, optimize and balance the allocation of resources, and facilitate alternative plans. The good news is that these promises can all come true! The condition of course is that the implementation of the software respects various principles and avoids certain problems.

But not every software implementation is crowned with success – either immediately or even eventually. What then are the top reasons and pitfalls why they fail and how to avoid them? Here’s our take on a category by category, blow by blow basis.

1. Lack of Management Buy-in

While it’s just conceivable that a major software implementation can benefit an enterprise even if management support is absent, you’re likely to feel like you’re swimming in molasses: very tough, very tiring and it takes years to get anywhere. Management needs to be involved from the outset to ensure that the project is aligned so it contributes significantly to overall business objectives, to participate in the identification of business champions, and to hold the right people accountable for implementation success.

2. End-users Absent from the Implementation

While management needs to be there to nail the business benefit, the people actually using the software (and therefore triggering the afore-mentioned business benefit) are likely to be a different group. Keeping them out of the project until the system is installed and then suddenly presenting them with the log-in screen is a horribly effective way of building up resistance and resentment from the very people the software should be helping. Involving users from the beginning and having discussions of user needs, considering their comments and fostering the perception among these end-users that this is also their project, is far more constructive.

3. Underestimating or Mis-estimating Implementation Time

There is an unhealthily wide choice of ways to do this, ranging from the direct miscalculation or omission, to planning backwards from a drop-dead completion date, through to suddenly tripling the number of IT engineers to try to make implementation go faster. Any of these approaches will typically end in tears, or worse. A common variation on this theme is to cheat on testing (as in skipping it) when it becomes apparent that the original software implementation schedule cannot be met – this is a short term hack that can do long term damage.

4. Skimping on Technical Competence

A word of advice – don’t. If the technical competence you need to get the software working well is not available in-house, then talk to an external provider (for example, LoadSpring for P6 project management). A good provider will help you accomplish your software implementation cost-effectively, and even assist you in transferring competence and know-how to your organization.

5. No Change Management Process

Plan for it, prepare for it and get all the key people involved, because if you don’t you’re going to get into trouble. The bottom line is that change is bound to happen. What you need is a good process for dealing with it.  The crucial thing is to know beforehand how to handle such situations so as to minimize negative impact on the software implementation.