Every year in December I try to look back at the year and review how we’ve done, see where we can improve and do some thinking and planning for the year ahead. This year however it feels like we’ve had no down time and it really feels like just yesterday that I wrote the 2023 version of this one.
Our Team
One of the constants at PPO is our team. We’ve been together for a long time and when checking this year, I noticed our newest staff member has been with us for 8 years in March already. The benefit of having such a long serving and stable team is we know each other well, we communicate seamlessly, we trust each other, we know who does what and we know when to do it.
While some team members have moved into different roles, the company structure has remained the same for years and the org chart is flat. The entire company meets twice a month to review company goals, product changes, client implementations and marketing events. A single meeting of no more than 1 hr where we run through the standard agenda. It keeps us focused, aligned and all on the same page.
I’d like to thank the team for the year, their constant focus and dedication to making PPO better each day for our users and clients. We’re a small team, but we’re effective and get through the work of teams double our size, this is due to everyone’s daily effort and hard work, for this I thank you.
Quarterly Product Webinars
Post COVID we ramped up our product enhancements and had a busy couple of years releasing new features to our clients. This resulted in us introducing our regular product webinars and for 2024 our now, quarterly product webinars have been one of the highlights of the year.
Each quarter we present a 90min webinar to our users where we recap the enhancements we’ve made over the last quarter. A key topic in these webinars is our Customer Spotlight. These are 15-to-20-minute segments where a client will showcase a PPO product feature that they have adopted, share their successes and lessons learnt with our other clients. The clients do their own presentations from their own instance of PPO and answer questions from other clients and users. The feedback of these sessions is always great and often clients connect with each other post these sessions to share more knowledge and experience. We constantly receive such positive messages from our clients for these. If you missed these during the year, you can catch up with Mediclinic’s Amy Krause on their use of the Interactive Board Views, Harmony’s Gold’s Helga Olivier who shared their journey on creating Project Manager Scorecards in PPO and Avec Global’s Arne Gething who shared how they’ve leveraged the new customisable Home Page Dashboard to achieve more focused exception reporting. I’d like to thank each of these clients for sharing their stories.
Our 2025 webinar dates are already published, you can already get them into your diary by registering here.
Focus & Client Commitment
Our focus at PPO remains our product. We don’t provide project and programme management resources, we don’t do generic consulting, we don’t offer PMP or Prince2 Training. We focus on ensuring that every day we understand what our Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) clients and users want from their PPM tool, and we work hard to simplify and enhance PPO to be their favourite app.
We work with our clients daily, as their PMOs grow, mature, morph, shrink, merge, split and change to ensure that they get the most out of their PPO subscriptions and that we provide them with good best practice advice and guidance, recommendations of what works for other organisations and what’s best fit for their current situations. Each client has a named Success Manager, who typically meets with each PPO client monthly and provides a monthly monitoring snapshot of how the PMO has performed against a range of metrics, which PPO records and tracks, daily, weekly and monthly. These sessions are crucial to both, us to stay close to our clients and to our clients, to get that 30,000-foot view of their PMO and hear how they compare to other PMOs.
To every client who spends that 1hr a month with our Success Managers, I thank you.
Product Enhancements
We started 2024 with the launch of the customisable home page which has dramatically changed the way our users interact with PPO. It has resulted in increased usage per user of PPO but has reduced the number of pages and clicks each user makes on PPO. The customisable home pages have allowed users to create and publish their own dashboards and views of their project and portfolio data, that they interact with daily. It means less moving between data input and output (reports and dashboards) and being able to see what you need to see easier. I personally have created several views, which I’m often asked to share. Often at PPO we work on a feature for a period and release a feature which is solid and valuable, but we already have a string of enhancements on that feature. The customisable home page was like this. After a year of development, we deployed the feature which was quickly adopted and then deployed a range of enhancements including the ability to copy your home pages, the ability to share your home page with others, the ability to drill down into key metrics from the home page, the ability to PDF your home page and drag and drop on the home page calendar widget. In addition, we added the My Links widget to the home page, to allow users to access PPO links, reports, dashboards, task import screens, weekly dashboard updates or even third party apps with a single click, from their home page.
In addition, we added the ability to multiple select custom lists, which had been one of our longest requested features. We already have other enhancements on this feature and are currently deep in development on the same ability for resources / employees, so in 2025, we will be growing this feature to allow you to assign multiple resources to a single task, have multiple product owners on a project or even assign multiple resources to a single work item.
We simplified in PPO to allow for the selection of default values to make completing PPO entities quicker, we allowed admins to clean up users and custom lists easier, we moved subscription management reporting to the subscription page, added features to existing widgets and enhanced the BI API with usage stats. We allowed improved filtering to clean up missing data and added colour coding to date fields, for better visibility and management.
Our most exciting feature, that we’ve spent the whole of 2024 working on and will be deploying to all clients in 2025 is our own Scheduler. It’s a big change to PPO, and while we will continue to support (forever) the import of Microsoft Project Plans, Excel templates and Google Sheets, we believe that having the ability to do planning in PPO is something that will make PPO easier and quicker for users. We’ve already started rolling out free training to project managers for the upcoming features on a BETA version and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The ability to create, maintain and update project plans and tasks in PPO using simple drag and drop functionality on one screen will also dramatically enhance the quality of the task and plan information in PPO.
We thank you all for your ongoing commitment to PPO, we once again wish you a relaxing and fulfilling festive period and look forward to working with you all in 2025.
