Hello again from the Best Practices Conference.  There is so much going on today that I felt it was time for another update.  We seem to be getting a lot of questions today at the booth regarding Professional Services.  These questions are coming mostly from clients that have used our products for a while and just have a new group of employees on board that they want to get up to speed.  We have also had a few potential clients ask about us helping out with the initial installation and a run through of training.  Being that our Professional Services are somewhat of a new offering from Bamboo, I thought I would put the word out in this blog.  Also, if you are here at the conference, please stop by and talk to Daisy Anand, Director of Bamboo Services, as she would love to talk to you about the many different Services offerings we have available.  For those that could not make it to La Jolla, here is a quick breakdown:

Project Management Central is targeted as the solution for your project management needs, but we would recommend an evaluation of the value-add of  Bamboo's Project Management Suite.  The suite includes PM Central and a host of additional Web Parts.  Some of these Web Parts are packaged in PMC and cannot be used outside of the application, but the suite purchase will give you the freedom and flexibility of using them elsewhere in your SP deployment.  For example, if another department in your organization has a need to color-code their calendars or rollup list data to a master calendar – both features of Bamboo Calendar Plus, the suite will give you the ability to deploy Calendar Plus to these sites.  Please let me know  If you would like more information on features or possible use cases for any of the components.

Services for PMC or PM Suite are as follows:

Deployment Planning:

This typically would be the starting point for your deployment.  We have partnered with Innovative-e, the leading consulting firm in Project Management and SharePoint, to guide you through the steps your organization needs to effectively utilize PM Central and mature your company's project management system. Using an organizational PM maturity self-assessment, we will evaluate your current system against the knowledge areas of the PMBOK Guide and deliver a deployment plan  that outlines how to improve the SharePoint project management efforts in your company.

Installation Support: 

We will assign one of Bamboo's experienced technical consultants to conduct an assisted install of PM Central and set up basic configuration in one environment (test, staging or production). 

Design & Configuration:

Once PM Central is installed, let a Bamboo PM Central consultant lead you through the configuration and customization of the tool. Referencing your company's existing project management process, the consultant will map it to PM Central's capabilities and create two distinct project site templates. The end result will be a design and configuration for PMC that details the information in each tab for the portfolio, department level, and a project site template. 

Administrative Training:

Targeted at administrators who are responsible for PM Central's deployment, the training gives you a deep dive into the capabilities of PMC, the configuration best practices and how to maintain the application. In this 3-hour session your PMC administrators will learn how to:

• Enforce project site standardization across the portfolio
• Navigate PM Central and create new tabs
• Configure KPI indicators to visualize project status

End User Training: This is geared to get your Project Managers and Team Members started off on the right foot with End User Training to help them learn the basics and avoid rookie mistakes. In this 3-hour session, your end users will learn how to: Navigate the PM Central project site Enhance and extend team collaboration by taking full advantage of PM Central's features Monitor project health and status using dashboards, charts and data-views

Until the next blog update, take care!

 

Read our complete coverage of the SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011:

• Checking in from Best Practices 2011
• Keynote with Bill English and Owen Allen
• Please Save the Pandas
• Questions from the Bamboo Booth "Do You Offer Installation, Configuration or Training Services?"
• To Social or Not to Social
• Keynote with Ben Curry – SP Server 2010 Best Practices – You Can’t Fix Stupid!
• Why Projects Fail? How to Leverage SharePoint and Bamboo PM Central for Project Management
• Wes Preston Presents 'SharePoint: When to Crawl, Walk or Run'
• Final Day – Ask the Experts Panel