KeyedIn Projects

Comments: Since making the decision to work with KeyedIn and adopt their product, the relationship with the KeyedIn team has been excellent; which made the configuration, build, test and implementation as painless as possible. We were able to request / have applied minor modifications to the "out of the box" package to suit our internal operating model and existing processes and we have thus far managed to roll out KeyedIn to all those that use it day to day as a project / programme management tool and feedback / adoption rates are very positive. KeyedIn appear to treat their customers as "partners" and are very flexible / agile and open to negotiation (which has made things easier when selling into our business). We never have an issue engaging with KeyedIn and their tech support team are quick to respond when we have technical queries that we are unable to solve internally. I would say that although this product is not the market leader right now, KeyedIn's flexibility, agility and desire to build the best value add / simple to use product (in partnership with their customers whom are readily invited to forward ideas for improvements) will take them to the next level.

Pros: KeyedIn Projects is very intuitive / easy to utilise and is extremely feature rich; with an excellent user interface and bags of potential for the future (given regular "releases" that introduce an array of major / minor enhancements). Navigation around KeyedIn is relatively straight-forward to get to grips with, and bottom up / top down views all seem to work seamlessly together. On screen dashboards and data "widgets" (out of the box) are very useful / neat and can be easily configured / tailored for different users / executives / role types across any organisation. Powerful data mining / search / filter features allow us to very easily understand how our portfolio is progressing (in real time) and gives you instant ability to drill down to the heart of any risks / issues and the user interface is such that anyone within our organisation is able to be presented with their own customised dashboard and focus on what matters to them.

Cons: A little more work is required to improve reporting outputs and ability to construct and run custom reports. However, major KeyedIn Project enhancement releases (scheduled in coming months appear to be addressing this), together with addressing customer feedback on the product and modifying where customer suggestions add real value across their customer base.

Comments: For the first time in GM&T’s history, we have up to date real time information on resourcing, finances and delivery available to our teams, our stakeholders, the parent group, to everyone. And for the programme delivery function it’s no longer an illusion of control Not only did we deliver transparency but we significantly dropped the costs to our business by 75%. Beyond that there are many other benefits, but the key takeaway is that it significantly reduced the amount of administrative effort freeing people’s time to complete more value add activities for the organization The icing on the cake is that this tool allows us to react quickly to the needs of the organization and adapt to the constant change of what seems to be the new norm of continual organization change

Pros: One of things I liked most about this engagement was the honesty and transparency the team showed throughout the selection process. They were upfront with limitations, but showed us other ways to solve the problems. KeyedIn is simple but powerful and met all our requirements around integrated resource management, PPM accounting and delivery. In a global organisation, it was important to have a tool that supported multiple languages and currencies too. The portfolio planning capability is a brilliant tool for annual planning and evaluating multiple scenarios. Finally, KeyedIn offer a very sensible cost model.

Cons: The tooling does support a range of reporting but for the needs of our organisation for rich reporting and the existing governance expectations it fell short initially. This is now being address by KeyedIn The tool plans on months and days but captures in hours and weeks which presents challenges at month end.

Pros: I like that we can track project plans based on tasks. It really works well for our company and helps keep our projects on point. I also like that we can set objectives (deliverables) and dates for those deliverables. This allows us to see when tasks are starting to "creep up" on the due date and either add more resources or push the deliverable date out. I also like that if we do push the deliverable out, we have to give a reason and the SW keeps track each time we push the date. This allows me to go back when the project is done, determine which dates we missed and see the reaons for the delay. I think this will help us find holes in our processes and fix them going forward. I really like the resource management tool, but are still pretty new to using it, so my knowledge is somewhat limited. Thus far, I am seeing some promise and anticipate it will become a very valuable tool. We are also just getting started in learning the reporting functions, but so far they are able to give us the exact information we need. It has made my weekly reporting to our Senior Team much more manageable and accurate.

Cons: I don't like that there isn't a customer portal available. We also manage customer installs with this software and it would be nice to give the customer a link or temporary sign on they can use to view the progress of their project. We can setup a user, but believe it take a license and we have around 50 - 100 customer installs going at any given time. Managing those users would be a nightmare, so we are opting to just email them reports from the system.

Comments: We are creating a PMO within the business and using KeyedIn to replace a far simpler project planning tool. Hence the learning curve has been quite steep for both the project teams in terms of the complexity of the KeyedIn administration and for the project managers in terms of managing the change from running a simple plan to running a KeyedIn project.

Pros: Feature rich, graphically rich, intuitive user interface, with strong portfolio and programme capabilities.

Cons: Inability to easily manage task-based dependencies across multiple projects and surface this at programme or portfolio level, thereby making it harder to effectively prioritise resources across multiple projects

Comments: So far so good

Pros: We’ve used KeyedIn since the Atlantic Global days. The improvements we’ve seen especially in v6.x have been significant. Much easier to use and extract valuable management information than before

Cons: There are still some limitations around number of fields that could be addressed