Decision Stories
Why Saint Louis University chose Daptiv?
Interview with Claire Schwartz, Director, ITS Projects & Plans Group
What drove your organization to look into collaborative business software like Daptiv? What were your motivations, and what were your business needs?
- As our organization has grown and matured we have recognized the need to develop and implement more formalized processes for managing projects, resources and our project portfolio. While we have developed a number of tools (databases, spreadsheets, templates), they require significant manual intervention and are not well integrated. As a consequence, information is difficult to access, incorrect or out of date, and difficult to analyze or perform what-if analysis. We recognized that in order to fully implement our processes we would either need to add more people to support our manual processes or find and implement better tools.
What process did you go through to select a software provider? What were your selection criteria?
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First we collected requirements based upon use cases describing what we were trying to accomplish with our existing processes and how we wanted to expand and enhance those processes in the future. The requirements were prioritized based on need and what we felt would best support our process objectives. We created a Request for Proposal (RFP) and conducted an internet search to identify companies that might be able to meet our requirements. We also consulted with Gartner.
Our selection criteria included:- Ability to fully support traditional Project Management definition, planning and tracking processes. This includes capabilities for scheduling and schedule tracking, issue and risk management, team communication and collaboration, status reporting, document management and information distribution.
- Ability to support a mature Project Portfolio Management process including project evaluation and selection, prioritization, evaluation of investment trade-offs, and on-demand management reports on project and portfolio performance.
- Ability to effectively manage our resource capacity against demand for both project and non-project work. This includes the ability to create and maintain a skills inventory, forecast resource needs, and schedule work against available capacity.
- Robust and flexible reporting at the resource and enterprise level.
- Workflow capabilities to support routing, reviews and approvals.
Lastly, after much consideration we agreed that we preferred a SaaS solution, which we felt would provide us greater flexibility and reduced ongoing support costs.
In addition to Daptiv, did you look into other PPM / Business software providers? If so, which ones did you look into and why didn't you choose them?
- We did look at other providers including @Task, Innotas, and VCS Online. Daptiv most closely met our highest priority requirements.
Why did you choose Daptiv?
- In addition to meeting our requirements, we chose Daptiv because it appeared easy to use and administer. We also liked the flexibility of the reporting and dashboards and the Dynamic Applications which appear to provide us with the capability to support other processes in the future. Lastly, we liked the user community and Daptiv's overall support model.
How do you hope to use Daptiv PPM in the future (which departments, to track what type of work, etc.)?
- Initially we will use Daptiv within ITS to manage our resources, projects and project portfolio. We eventually hope to manage other work types such as work requests. There is also some interest in using the software for Change Control. Other areas in the university have expressed some interest in looking at Daptiv, but they are waiting to see what our experience is before making any commitment.
What do you like most about Daptiv (benefits of product, why Daptiv as a company is unique)?
- While the product is very flexible it strongly supports the fundamentals of project, resource and project portfolio management. It seems very easy to use and maintain. The documentation is clearly written and there is plenty of it. We like the availability of training and the active support for a collaborative user community.
We were also impressed with Daptiv's willingness to work with us, particularly when we ran into some resistance.
