Project Office Portfolio (PPO) recently made its debut at the Project Challenge show in London. As the UK’s leading show for projects, programmes, process and resources with two editions per year, we can report back that the Spring 2014 event, which took place on the 12th and 13th of March, was a resounding success for us.
While we are well established in Africa, PPO is still growing its footprint and brand awareness across Europe, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom, where we established our base in May last year. The Project Challenge Spring 2014 show provided us with a great opportunity to meet PPM practitioners, consultants and – more importantly – project and programme managers from some of the largest UK-based organisations.
Not only did we have a strong presence at the show, with an exhibition stand that showcased the PPO solution, but our CEO, Guy Jelley, also presented to delegates, sharing lessons learnt in his presentation entitled “How not to approach a PPM application implementation” within the “Solutions and Software” section of the show.
Guy’s presentation was well attended, receiving a number of interesting questions and initiating many discussions. For instance, some of the audience members were trying to understand how important it is to define standards before implementing a PPM tool, how to deal with multiple PPM applications in a single organisation, and how to ensure that executive sponsorship is in the bag before an implementation kicks off. Most attendees said that they found great value in the lessons learnt and we have already been approached by several organisations to share the presentation material and learnings with them.
Interesting to note was that almost 60 percent of the audience had already implemented a PPM solution which was problematic, or were in the process of implementing a PPM solution but were experiencing issues.
It is also comforting to know, after numerous discussions with the attendees of the show, that the PPM challenges faced by our existing user community are universal. Most project organisations are battling to gain project visibility, ensure they are working on the right projects, make certain they are doing projects right and, more importantly in terms of technology, they are all looking for simple and cost-effective PPM solutions.
The Spring Show 2014 delegates were excited about the opportunity to explore PPO following our entry into the market, and its low cost and ease of use certainly hit the right notes. While the UK and European markets already have a number of PPM applications available to users, none seem to be as configurable, feature rich and flexible as PPO, at its price.
The Project Challenge has been a great success for us to share PPO and our learnings with the UK market and we have had great feedback and interest in PPO from the attendees. We look forward to attending these shows going forward.
PPO is an award winning online project portfolio management and collaboration application. PPO is simple, immediate, secure and affordable. PPO is flexible and can be configured to support any methodology.
