Daptiv participated in the Project & Portfolio Summit December 3-5 in Vienna, Austria. The Project & Portfolio Summit is the premier invitation only event in Europe for business decision makers interested in understanding the impact of better portfolio management practices. In addition to representatives from Daptiv's headquarters in Seattle, our partner from Germany, CIANS, was also present at the event to conduct demonstrations and interact with event attendees. Overall, there were many attendees from the UK, France and Germany! The agenda featured Gartner analysts presenting on a variety of topics, including the state of PPM tools to address project portfolio management today. Daptiv was a Gold Sponsor of the event and delivered a well-received Daptiv customer boardroom presentation featuring Madonna Swanson from Interoute. Interoute is a leading telecommunications and network provider - the largest in Europe today connecting 93 cities in 22 countries, and offering unparalleled homogeneity, reach and capacity. Interoute's products and services include bandwidth, virtual private networks, high speed internet access and transit, managed hosting, communications services and media streaming.

Click here to read the Interoute case study that was delivered during the boardroom sessions.

 

What is SaaS Brazil's background?

SaaS Brasil is a company founded by people with extensive experience in the the software and service business in the Latin America region. I worked for companies like Accenture, Compaq, HP and CA before SaaS Brasil. In those companies I had previous experience in selling, implementing and supporting PPM products for the Latin American Market either directly or using a partner network. My partner Antonio Candal used to lead Peregrine in Latin America region and have introduced many software companies to the region and Carlos has a sound previous experience in Project Portfolio Management. Our technicians also have experience implementing SaaS solutions in the customers.

How did you hear about Daptiv?

We have actively looked for a Project Portfolio Management solution to complete our offer for customers in Brasil. After our search for solutions available we reached Daptiv since it has a solid and well positioned solution that is greatly recognized. An example of this recognition is the evaluation that Gartner Group gives to Daptiv.

What interested you in working with Daptiv and why do you think Daptiv is different than other solutions on the market?

Our company mission is to offer solutions that can improve the quality of our customer services in a more effective manner with smaller costs and that can be purchased in an innovative way. In that sense Daptiv SaaS offer is a logical choice. The Daptiv leadership in the SaaS PPM, its proven experience brings to the market the kind of confidence it is demanded for a SaaS key solution like PPM.

Besides the classical SaaS advantages: a more cost effective solution, improved business focus, lack of infrastructure problems, experts managing your application and a solution that you pay for something you use instead for unused boxes in the shelf; Daptiv provides an integrated solution for Project Portfolio Management that can be easily implemented for any customer today in the maturity level they are and that can grow with them as soon as they increase their maturity level.

The decreased subscribe to live time that Daptiv solution provides is another unique offer we can provide since this can decrease the implementation and service cost of the solution with an increased return on investment.

You’re based out of Brazil – what’s the market like in Brazil for collaborative business software?

The three major drivers for the software in this are:

1) PMO creation with PPM software supporting this initiative - Related to this driver the Brazilian Market is in a phase were organizations are managing projects in an individual level and are considering a PPM solution to share and consolidate project information under a PMO guidance. They also want to establish a more collaborative environment where teams can share information and cooperate to improve the maturity level.

2) Governance – In this driver the main objective is to obtain the most accurate information about a project portfolio through a consolidation of all individual project status (including financial status). This consolidation today is manually done using individual project manager reports. Daptiv brings online, real time accurate information to the table.

3) Innovation or New Product evaluation – Some organizations also have a kind of project approval board that needs to revise all new project or product requests. In this case it is needed a tool to automate the new project or product evaluation, decision and creation process. Usually, this is not automated and it is done using four to five different and not integrated tools to get the job done.

What are the most common business issues and pain points your customers face?

The most common scenario in the customers is that they have some kind of tool that is not collaborative to manage projects without the ability to scale to a complete solution. Sometimes to fill in the gaps they use Excel and Word to gather, consolidate and share information. Since this is a not automated and a very cumbersome process and the information generated is usually out of date and incomplete. No collaboration is possible in this environment.

On the other hand, some process like new product evaluation is not done very often and some decisions are made using this partial information with unpredictable results. After a project is approved, it is impossible to keep track if the original project budget was enforced in the execution phase or not. Since a project usually have some change requests during its lifetime this analysis will not be easy to do in Excel. Also, approvals are not tracked or it will be tracked in other solutions without any possibility of an integrated view.

In this situation, customers have analyzed an integrated PPM solution but a long time to implement, lack of internal resources, cost and integration needs have blocked the initiative.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job?

The most satisfying part of our job is to succeed in implementing the solution in our customers and verify that they evolved in the process along with our team creating new skills and achieving their business goals and generating real competitive advantage.

Also, the most interesting piece is that we know a lot of different people and have a lot of fun in the process growing each time an obstacle is reached and surpassed together.

Mark Klebanoff, Chief Financial Officer

I was born in New York City but moved to Seattle when only a few months old – so I think of myself as a Seattle native. Growing up here was a great experience – hiking, biking, sailing, skiing. I returned to the east coast for college and business school (both at Yale) and a few years working in New York City. I settled back in Seattle in 1992 and have been doing CFO and venture finance jobs in the Seattle high tech sector ever since. I have had the good fortune to help a number of start-up companies grow and achieve commercial success. I joined Daptiv in October 2008 as the Chief Financial Officer. I decided to come to Daptiv because I believe the company has great products, a strong team and a compelling business model.

I have three wonderful kids, ages 17, 14 and 10 who keep me challenged. I just celebrated 20 years of marriage - my wife is a part-time teacher. We have a cabin on a lake in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle where we enjoy snow activities in the winter and boating in the summer.

European Network Leader Interoute Saves Time Across Time Zones with Daptiv PPM

Interoute's voice and data network is the largest in Europe today, offering unparalleled homogeneity, reach and capacity. Their products and services include bandwidth, virtual private networks, high speed internet access and transit, managed hosting, communications services and media streaming. A privately held company, Interoute is owned by a number of internationally based shareholders, the largest and major shareholder being the Sandoz Family Foundation, one of the world's largest private family foundations. Interoute is headquartered in the UK with offices all over Europe.

Business Challenge—Wasted Time and Cumbersome Desktop Tools

Interoute’s office in the Czech Republic had been using a combination of MS Project, Outlook and Excel to manage their projects and workflow. They found that it was very time consuming to fumble between the applications and it wasn’t flexible enough to meet their needs. With people spread across Europe at different offices, it also became very difficult to collaborate effectively on projects. Interoute began looking for a solution that could better manage resources and easily create reports. Overall, they wanted collaborative business software
that was:

• Easy to use
• Easy to implement
• Flexible
• On-demand

Solution

Interoute evaluated into 24 different software vendors and narrowed it down to a packaged software vendor and Daptiv. In the final stages of evaluation, Interoute requested demos. The other vendor presented first, and Daptiv presented the next day. “Three minutes into Daptiv’s presentation, my boss turned to me and said, ‘We’re SO getting this!’”, says Madonna Swanson, PMO Program Manager at Interoute. “Daptiv’s usability really impressed us. I’d ask a question and the response was very simple – normally the answer was ‘oh, just click here, or just click here – it was click click job done’ . In contrast, the other vendor’s answer to the same question would be, ‘It would require a small implementation,’ so we were immediately sold on how simple it was to use Daptiv PPM and how much time we’d save.”

Because of Daptiv’s on-demand model, Madonna and team were able to start using Daptiv PPM without delay. “We were able to get into our Daptiv user accounts within minutes and we started uploading our projects and began creating custom applications,” says Swanson. With Daptiv PPM, Interoute can now utilize functionality such as resource management, dashboard reporting, and Daptiv Dynamic Applications to better manage portfolios and projects. “Daptiv Dynamic Applications have provided us with a lot of flexibility,” says Swanson. “For example, we’ve created a ‘Lessons Learned’ dynamic application that we’ve made into a web page. We send this link out to users and they submit their responses, which are captured within Daptiv PPM so all the information is in one place.” Interoute has also used Daptiv Dynamic Applications to create a risk log that focuses on critical items. In addition to Interoute’s Project Management Team, additional teams are using Daptiv PPM for approval tracking and creating auto-generated project request forms.

It’s Like We’re All in the Same Room

Interoute team members in different countries are also seeing benefits to Daptiv PPM now that they are better able to collaborate more effectively. “Collaborating with people in Germany, Sweden, London and Prague is now so simple with Daptiv PPM because it’s on-demand – we can all pull up the schedule and work with it dynamically – everyone is viewing the latest copy and all people can see the changes as we make them during our meetings,” says Swanson. “It’s like we’re all in the same room and everyone can see project changes right away.” Reporting capabilities have also improved dramatically with Daptiv. “Sometimes I used to spend 25% of my time collating data and making reports for my large program which contained 13 individual projects. Now, I spend 0 time – the reports are in my email box every Friday morning. During the week, within the normal course of our project meetings and activities – our notes and updates are logged right into Daptiv. We easily made a report that collates all the data we are interested in and makes a one page report. The report is extremely professional and looks like something you would spend days creating.” The robustness of Daptiv reporting was a key item for us at Interoute. “Anything you want to report on, you can do it with Daptiv,” says Madonna. “Again it is just click, click – job done.”

Value

Time Savings

“One of the top benefits of Daptiv PPM is that we’ve saved so much time across the PMO organization,” says Swanson. Some Interoute metrics that Swanson shared include:

95% time saved in generating reports. “Now I do nothing…I enter normal project activity and open up my email on Friday mornings and the report is there.”

60-70% time savings on project requests. “We used Excel for workflow management and it was incredibly time consuming. Now people are automatically notified about project approvals and everything is recorded - the process is now seamless.”

Minutes, not hours with Tasks. “Before, it wasn’t possible for individuals to quickly organize, view and export their list of tasks. With Daptiv PPM, they can go to their tasks page, sort and export their tasks and it takes 3 minutes.”

60% time savings and 40% Productivity increase. “From our project managers’ point of view, Daptiv PPM saves an incredible amount of administrative time that could be better utilized to complete more projects.”

Process Improvements and Better Data

In addition to saving time, Interoute found a lot of value in being able to accomplish things that they couldn’t do before. “Daptiv PPM has given us the ability to improve on processes. We are now able to track items that are critical: project requests and project change of scope,” says Swanson. “Before Daptiv, when there was a project change of scope, it can was tricky to monitor this type of change because we used to keep a scope management document and it was difficult to update and share that information in real-time. It is imperative to have the freshest data available, especially when so many items are time-sensitive. With Daptiv PPM, we enter an approval, people can comment, and we see that change immediately.”

Makes Project Managers Look Good

Swanson also points out that Daptiv brings her a lot of personal value. “Daptiv makes me look good and I’m a better project manager now.”

The Daptiv Difference

Sales Process: “Daptiv didn’t hesitate a bit to present us with a live demo when we were looking into different collaborative business software solutions. When we asked for a similar experience from other vendors, they didn’t provide us with the same level of attention. It was a great sales experience – we are a small company compared to some global companies, but Daptiv really treated us like we were their biggest customer – everything was so expedient.”

Great Support: “Daptiv support has been very responsive in following up with any questions or requests we may have and it feels great. It makes us feel important, and that level of customer service is practically unheard of in Europe.”

Product Innovation: “Daptiv’s level of product innovation is a huge asset. As a customer, your suggestions really mean something…and Daptiv’s adding the Greenhouse proves that. You see your suggestions come to fruition and it’s wonderful that you can help influence
the product.”