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How to break into the Europeon market

Terra Dotta have entered the European market with their cloud based solution for Universities. The University of Manchester are implementing now!

The Company

Over 370 educational institutions and businesses trust Terra Dotta software to manage their application process and streamline their operations. Terra Dotta is committed to effective process automation and the secure management of data. Flexibility and robust features have made our software essential to all types of organizations. Terra Dotta's international education roots and innovative software capabilities serve the complex needs of many educational and business offices.

Terra Dotta software simplifies your everyday processes from the way you access information to the way you gather data and create reports. Risk management capabilities are an integral aspect of the software, providing the ability to locate and communicate with your applicants and travelers worldwide. Simply put, Terra Dotta software allows you to realize the full potential of your data and use the software your way at your institution.

Terra Dotta clients have a strong influence over the evolution of our software. We encourage and embrace client suggestions for new features they need to facilitate their enrollment processes. These suggestions are the basis of
new features added in each new version and over the years have helped make our software strong and flexible.

Our Mission

Our mission at Terra Dotta is to offer the very best products and services in higher education software. We are committed to delivering a user-experience that transforms the way our clients operate and engage with their constituents. We accomplish this through the continual deployment of best-in-class technology, and the focus we place on mutual trust in each and every one of our business relationships. These values form the Terra Dotta difference.

http://www.terradotta.com/

How to Sell a Cloud Service!

Project Managers' finally have access to a proven Business Change Tool

Press Release: APMG launches collaboration with Changefirst

Thursday, 3 July, 2014

 

APMG launches collaboration with Changefirst to offer Enterprise Change Management Platform,        e-change® to ACO's

APMG International and Changefirst Ltd are partnering to deliver the e-change® Enterprise Change Management Platform to all APMG Accredited Consulting Organisations (ACOs). ACOs will use e-change to provide change management consulting to their clients and as part of this will be able to licence clients as e-change users.

“We aim to extend our support to the consulting community by bringing to market a leading-edge toolkit that allows organizations to plan, execute and track their change projects. It will significantly help them ensure projects are in line with the business needs to deliver required benefits”, said Eddie Kilkelly, APMG International. 

The launch event was held on Wednesday 2nd July at the Park Plaza Hotel in London and will be followed by another launch event in Sydney later in the year to promote this collaboration to Australian ACOs and bringing to market this unique enterprise platform.

"This product is definitely different. The value it has for me is that it allows project managers to use this change management tool effectively and implement change even if they are not change management experts. It is practical and can be implemented easily irrespective of the scale of the project- big or small” said Darius Johnson, Pcubed, at the London event.

“One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is creating and maintaining the capabilities to change. e-change® allows them to implement more change, more successfully”, said David Miller, CEO - Changefirst. “For nearly 20 years we have offered face-to-face change management training to clients. We developed e-change because we wanted to make all our training, tools and databases available to a much wider audience. We wanted to offer clients the consistency, convenience, scalability and cost-effectiveness that an online platform can give to organizations. ACOs will be able to win some business with this world-class application”.

e-change provides a cost-effective way of learning a proven change methodology online.  Users can identify project adoption risks and get suggested tactics to manage project risks and can benchmark their change project against a global change database. Project plans can be aligned with the preferred project framework like PMI, Prince 2 or DMAIC. 

“Everything comes together in the e-change planner, where users can track and manage people risks by fetching in data from risk assessments and build robust action plans that can be assigned and shared with colleagues”, explains Nathan Brewer, Operations Manager – Changefirst.

“We’re quite excited because we see a real need for this product with our clients”, said Piotr Kotelnicki, CEO from the Polish ACO, Devoteam.

You can download the full press release here.

The Truth about Cloud Economics

The Truth About Cloud Economics

BY DRUE REEVES AND DARYL PLUMMER

The financial reasons for the huge growth of cloud services seem crystal clear: cloud computing

simply allows us to pay for what we need only when we need it, right?

But the truth is, companies adopting cloud computing often miss the risk and depth of change

needed to embrace a cloud economics model as they embrace cloud services. It turns out that

the financial model for cloud computing has far more nuances for both a company and its cloud

services provider than many people understand up front.

So what is the financial model for cloud computing? Let’s start by saying it’s a combination of

how people make money in the cloud and the risks associated with adopting new payment

styles. Many people assume it’s all about moving to a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) model and while

this is certainly a big piece of it, it also involves operating versus capital expenses, subscriptions

to services, and customers paying for outcomes (not technology). The good news is that these

models are already familiar to most businesses.

Companies routinely spend money on items vital to the business. They also trade operating

expenses for subscriptions and services necessary for business operations, but not directly related

to the business. This includes those that would otherwise be too expensive to own and operate

(think electricity). They expense nonessential items to someone else who specializes in offering

these items as a service.

Cloud computing is no different. Why should a toy or cosmetics company own and operate

multiple data centers? It’s much easier and economically sound to pay for a service for a short

time period and then stop paying for it when you’re finished with it, rather than wasting money

on something another company can do better, faster and cheaper. But this can present issues for

both the consumer of the cloud service as well as the provider.

For companies, cloud computing’s new economic model stands in stark contrast to the traditional

economic model of IT where we buy technology from a vendor as a capital investment and

continue to invest in maintaining and servicing it over time. Traditionally, much of the money

allocated to technology has been locked away in capital expense allocations used for buying

physical goods. However, cloud services are just that, a service, and require reallocating money

to operating expense budgets. This can be a big change when your company must still pay to

maintain existing infrastructure. It may even mean that new lines of expenditure must be created

if cloud services don’t replace existing services. (And you don’t need us to tell you how hard it is

to create new lines of expenditure.)

The reward for this potentially painful transition to operating expense is that the business gains

flexibility and the ability to buy the services they need when they need them. But if you’re a CFO,

you’ll have to decide whether you like consistent or variable expenditures. Operating expenses

FROM HBR.ORG

9:48 AM | APRIL 13, 2012

[continued]

ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

Drue Reeves

is vice president

and research director at Gartner,

Inc., and

Daryl Plummer is

managing vice president and

Gartner Fellow, Gartner, Inc.

brought to you by

can be difficult to predict and control because service subscriptions can come from anywhere at

any time. Ask yourself if you have a predictable cloud requisition/governance strategy that makes

future service acquisitions easy.

For cloud services providers, the PAYG model’s flexibility lets customers scale their services up or

down based on their needs. If the consumer can easily add or subtract resources and pay for cloud

services in small increments, the provider has no guarantee of future business. Therefore, to

reduce this risk, the provider must dictate service terms and conditions in its favor. But here’s the

problem: if the consumer assumes most of the risk, then he will never host a critical application

with a cloud service provider. That would limit cloud computing’s market growth to the set of

noncritical applications or to small-to-midsize businesses that would rather use cloud services

than build a $500 million data center in the U.S.

On the other hand, if cloud providers assume all the risk, then in most cloud environments (with

multiple consumers), the amount of liability within a provider’s service could be greater than the

value of the company (which we all know is no way to run a business). And if the service provider

cannot afford the insurance premiums necessary to cover the liability without raising prices to the

level that the service becomes too expensive to consume … well, you get the picture.

So, to combat this kind of risk, cloud providers will enter into what are called “enterprise

agreements,” where the two parties can define the parameters of the relationship based on mutual

risk sharing. Essentially, this ensures that each party has a vested interest in the financial success

of the other party. There’s risk, but there’s also reward for better service.

In the end, providers that deliver better service and better guarantees will ask for — and get —

more money. Consumers, on the other hand, will get the flexibility of “pay-as-you-go.” As long as

they can figure out a way to pay for it.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CLOUD ECONOMICS | BY DRUE REEVES AND DARYL PLUMMER

WWW.HBR.ORG

The PAYG model’s

flexibility lets

customers scale their

services up or down

based on their needs.

 

Interview with Atul Sood, Vice President for

Advanced Technologies, Wipro

We know that the cloud has been great for start-ups. But how are established enterprises

adopting the cloud?

To answer this question, let’s look back in time and reflect on a critical aspect related to high transaction

costs being one of the reasons for the existence of large organizations as postulated by Nobel Prize

winning economist, Coase. But when the transaction costs decrease or are removed, you would find

large organizations being under attack from smaller, nimbler and more agile start-ups. So, we begin to

see the rise of start-ups that set out to become bigger and better.

The established companies on the other hand made note, but they struggled because of the sunk costs

in IT systems which, once served them well, but proved to be an impediment to growth in a connected

world. On the other hand, business leaders within large organizations saw opportunities through the rise

of new-age technologies, but were held back due to locked-down set-ups, processes, and engagement

models that had been built by their company’s IT. In fact, the frustrated executive could not understand

why the IT team would take three months to help launch a new product , when it could be done easily

through the ‘always available’ IT systems through public cloud environment made available with the

swipe of a credit card. And, this healthy tension between business and IT began to change things within

the company. This pressure from the businesses and an understanding that IT needs to respond much

faster to the market; to the external environment; and service the customer in a much faster way

heralded the adoption of new-age technologies within large enterprises.

So, whether you are a start-up or an established company, the economics of cloud makes sense.

Technology has played a big role as a disintermediary of businesses and we have seen examples where

businesses have been totally redefined by new-age technologies like cloud.

How has the cloud helped companies preserve cash for a stronger balance sheet?

In a post-2008 world, companies have been holding onto cash and committing to new projects or to

asset refresh only after much deliberation. To give you a data point, the time for refresh for an IT asset

would run to three to five years in the late nineties. But after 2008, companies are holding on for five to

eight years to refresh. More importantly, start-ups are now formidable opponents who use Pay As You Go

(PAYG) IT from cloud service providers.

So what does it all mean? Businesses on one hand are under extreme pressure to innovate but they do

not want to go down the old route. They are looking at technologies like cloud where a business division

leader can swipe a credit card and get some of the best IT environments without up-front investment.

So, you have a ‘pay and consume’ based cloud model which is defined not only by technology and its

benefits, but also by the economics around it.

We now see complex workloads migrating to the cloud, as the cloud model is maturing even on the

pricing front. This feeds more innovation, and more specifically around industry solutions. So, today,

solutions for a bank could be different from a utilities company or an insurance provider. This in turn

allows solution providers to come up with unique business models that serve the needs of an industry.

For instance, in India, Telecom service providers, working with cloud providers, developed a model

for timely onboarding of customers as opposed to spending millions of dollars to set-up and run the

infrastructure. In the process, new partnerships were forged between the consumer and provider with

new business models. My sense is that we are heading to an age where the ‘art-of-possible’ will define

the intensity of partnerships.

What should companies do in order to take advantage of the cloud?

First, you have to look what is core and non-core to your company; and, not just in today’s context but

say five years from now. Why? Because, what companies define as core might be completely non-core

as we go along. Remember, we agreed that technology can be a great disintermediary. So, companies

need to re-evaluate their models to identify what they want to hold on to, from a competitive advantage

standpoint, and — leverage the forces of advanced technologies like social, cloud, mobility and analytics

to make their organizations more agile, more dynamic and more responsive. A key aspect here is

to look business process downwards to applications and then infrastructure. If you do not optimize

your business processes, there is a high probability that you would fall into what Robert Solow calls

productivity paradox. This is typical of a scenario where technology does not live up to its stated benefits

because archaic processes still define the usage of technology. Post this; you should cut over to an agile,

dynamic and infinite scalable IT. The icing — you consume on a PAYG model!

 

WWW.HBR.

Oracle e-business suite versions R11.x - time to upgrade

Computer Weekly article http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240219471/Businesses-face-Oracle-applications-support-timebomb

highlights the risks for clients currently using R11.x versions  and the challenges of upgrading to R12.x and the emerging Fusion offerings!

UK organisations running the older software will need to update their systems before 6 April 2015. After this date Oracle will no longer provide updates for changes in taxation and other legislation.

Upwards to the Cloud!

 

More businesses are moving their core business activities to the Cloud to stay competitive in the on-line word were clients require interactive solutions, with blended learning options and more dynamic support solutions.

Changefirst a change management consultancy who’s traditional model was to run client side training workshops costing several thousands of pounds plus travel costs to European or US destinations has recently transfer their change methodology and tools to the Cloud.

The clients are responding by encouraging more of their staff to log-on to the Cloud based solution to engage the Change Management tools when supporting or running projects. This represents a paradigm shift for the consultancy and the client but one that makes perfect commercial sense as more employees can be trained and supported through the project life cycle.

The solution delivers a number of key benefits over the traditional class room approach;

·         Users can select a number of proven change management tools ( 20 in total) from stakeholder analysis mapping to change agent readiness assessments

·         Each tool is supported by a bit size training course available in the knowledge pool

·         The assessments can be benchmarked against company, industry and over 500,000 data points within the solution

·         The assessments can be added to project plans and shared with colleagues in a country, region or globally

·         The solution allows users to build and access ‘communities’ and share or request information rather than ( see diagram below) where no one is on the same page, you have no clue who is working on what, work gets lost, you’re eating up funds, nothing is on time! This has been proved successful at AtTask a cloud based provider of project management tools.

·         An on-line tutoring and coaching facility can be accessed to further enrich the users experience and accelerate users allow the change management and project life cycle  learning curve. This has proved very successful Rosetta Stone as on-line coach

introduces you to real conversation in online sessions with language coaches who are native speakers. Supercharge your learning and experience everything communicating live has to offer.

 

Oracle Trusted Advisor

Oracle Trusted Advisor

Over the past twenty years Praktis Solutions has been supporting clients on their  Oracle journey’ implementing Oracle applications, databases, middleware and BI solutions. Our people joined because they wanted to get away from working with organisations such as Consultancies and System Integration who too often were involved in poor Oracle implementations.

The Oracle marketplace in the UK has seen Oracle Partners come and go, with many acquired by System Integrators and Consultancies. The small so called ‘boutique partners’ seem to survive because they are trusted by a handful of loyal customers

Listed below are prevailing factors which shape the UK marketplace:

1.       Oracle tends to recommend their preferred sector partners.

New clients are shocked to find out that Oracle does award Partner status based purely upon the quality of the consultants and more importantly referencable customers that have actively audited. Oracle manages their partners by focusing upon licence sales  

2.       It is mainly large SI’s (not experts) who respond to ITT’s.

The large SI’s have the resources to support large bid processes and often pull in a partner or contract resources to resource their delivery process . Clients fail to apply the required evaluation criteria and specifically, name the types of Oracle resources they require to underpin the delivery of their project

3.       Companies select their trusted Consultancy.

Management teams often feel more protected when selecting a consultancy with a long term track record in their organisation or industry sector. The old adage about ‘nobody got fired for buying Big Blue’. Many of these consultancies don’t employ dedicated Oracle professionals and tend to sell in expensive and more senior business consultants into a project.

4.       Turn to the Contactor market when the initial Project fails!

Sadly too many Oracle clients suffer at the first stage attempt to implement a solution and burn a significant proportion of their budget before turning to the contract market. The UK contract market is the place to find experienced and high quality functional and technical Oracle consultants. Why?

·         Not one  SI or Consultancy has sufficient market share to run multiple projects in any one year

·         The good contractors ‘don’t sit on the bench’ and are actively implementing new Oracle applications, functionality and technologies

Finding good quality Project Managers and Solution/Technical Architects in more of a challenge and these key resources ultimately define the success of the Oracle project

5.       Companies carry all the risks and fail to engage a Trusted Advisor

Implementing Oracle application and technologies can sometimes feel like you are at the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology or unique in the way your solution is being delivered. Employing a Trusted Advisor can provided the valuable insights you need to make the key decisions that shape your solution design confirm your build decisions and validate your implementation strategies. Independence of mind and with no commercial bias the Trusted Advisor can take you on a journey that avoids all the usually project pitfalls and temptations to customise Oracle!

 

The Future ‘must have’ Project Manager Role

The Future ‘must have’ Project Manager Role

Managing the delivery of a number of digital marketing projects for a client organisation

Key areas of activity include social media marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing, online PR, email marketing, online advertising, measurement and web analytics

 

So here’s a starting point

Do Projects adequately capture the change risks related to people?

How often do Project Managers build a Risk Register ( within  a RAID log) with the  intention of capturing all known project risks and specifically those related to managing change within the organisation but fail to engage the so called business change worksteam or transformation project/programme?

Well here's a useful tool called e-change from Changefirst which allows the busines team to perform risk assessments leading to the output of key risks.....all ready to be inserted in the risk register!

Sunday Telegraph article below
http://business-reporter.co.uk/2014/04/what-are-the-people-risks-in-change-projects/

e-change demo can be found here
http://www.changefirst.com/e-change

When Projects Fail and GO legal!

When Projects Fail and GO legal!

Sadly, seven out of ten projects fail. Some lead to customers taking their IT Partner (System Integrator, Consultancy Firm et al) to court to claim damages. The outcomes of such cases are rarely reported and many lead to compromise agreements. Obviously, both parties will not wish to ‘hand their dirty washing out in public’.

For the Project Manager community we never get to learn the lessons from such legal cases. So based upon my experience over the past ten years, I calculate that three projects out of every fifteen ended up in court.

So what went so badly wrong to land the respective parties in a court of law defending their respective positions?

1.       The respective parties expectations of each other failed to align and were only fully exposed at the end of the implementation. Sadly, often too late to address the underlying issues. I have witnessed organisations failing to take ownership and seemingly leaving it to the implementation partner to shoulder all the responsibilities for getting the project live. Hard to believe in 2014 when you would have assumed organisations are project savvy.

·         There is a case going through the courts now where an organisation requested significant customisations to an ERP solution and then blamed the implementation partner for poor quality code after the solution went live! So what went wrong (if anything) in the testing stages and perhaps more importantly why did the organisation fail to adopt the solution?

·   They failed to adequately invest in internal business project resources to support the key stages of testing and transition into live running

·   They failed to acknowledge the likely business impacts and then invest in business change resources to help the employees adopt the new ways of working enabled by the solution

 

2.       The solution fails in testing, possibly UAT and heavens forbid fails in live running. The solution fails for one or many reasons and doesn’t do what it says on the tin!

·         There is a case where a large organisation pulled the plug on a service management solution at the UAT stage having invested over £20m when they discussed that the ERP vendor had previously advised their System integrator that the proposed solution would not work a year earlier!

·   Avoid the bleeding edge projects!

·   Work closely with the application provider and their design/development  team

3.       The client bought a standard application solution but had to demand customisations that extended the scope of the project and led to major project overruns on time and cost

·         A recent case in the local government sector saw a consultancy firm challenged in the law courts for failing to manage the delivery of the solution with all the required customisations within the agreed budget (revised many times). Ironically, the consultancy firm had produced the original business case detailing a cost of implementation which the Council approved but then three years later and two behind schedule the cost had tripled. Why did they get it so wrong? They took a standard approach to delivering an ERP solution without realising the client had significant requirements that had not been fully identified, specified and validated  

o   Do the basics right!

o   Define your business requirements, document and valid them with your key managers and SME’s, who own them during the implementation lifecycle and beyond

o   Avoid the temptation to go with a template solution or process flow accelerators without stamping your organisation mark all over them!

Oracle Cloud Computing - Hitting a Cloud Home Run

As cloud computing goes mainstream, the companies that offer software as a service or SaaS; platform as a service, or PaaS; and similar solutions will lead the way. According to Gartner, that's exactly what Oracle is doing. With a full complement of cloud services and solutions, all emphasizing the value of SaaS and similar revenue-generating products, Oracle and IBM are ready to duke it out for No. 2

Should your organisation adopt the Oracle Cloud Computing strategy (known as Oracle on Demand in the e-business community) and move away from locally hosted applications and database solutions?

For existing and especially larger organisations making the journey to Oracle on Demand will be expensive in terms of committing budget and internal IT resources to making the transition to Oracle on Demand. The journey will obviously delay any business projects that would have been managed in the transition time window.

So what compelling events will encourage or force organisations to transition to Oracle on Demand?

·         Upgrade  to R12 and eliminate a significant a number of R11 customisations and avoid the temptation of your organisations to add new customisations

·         Migrate to Fusion – some existing R12 customers (locally hosted) are already using Fusion applications via cloud computing. A number of Peoplesoft HRMS applications are being used by Oracle e-business users ( who have implemented HRMS)

·         Reduce the risks and retention issues around internal Oracle professionals and dependency upon long term contractors

·         Reduce the operational risks and costs of managing data-centres. I came across one Local Council last year who could not afford a disaster recovery solution!

·         Adopt a new IT Strategy - Allow Oracle to manage the Oracle Technology Stack and perform the quarterly patching of the database ( and perhaps even the application)

·         Form a Shared Service Centre with one or more partners and select Oracle to run the IT functions thus allowing the SSC to focus on delivering services to clients.

·         The Organisation is a new Oracle customer – a significant number of new customers (typically small or medium size firms) are adopting Oracle on Demand. Recent implementations I have been involved with include Masternaut and Abtran who also adopted Oracle Accelerators to fast track their implementations and adopt ERP best practice

Can the benefits be realised – what are the potential blockers?

·         Management and IT inertia – keeping IT in-house

·         Organisations retain significant customisations and interfaces making the Oracle Cloud solution potentially more expensive when performing upgrades in the future. Oracle on Demand offers a far more flexible approach these days to managing client environments in the cloud and also those all-important customisations which organisations will continue to develop and upgrade

·         ERP projects continue to focus on ‘installing’ IT at the expense of ‘implementing’ business solutions. Organisations need to invest time and resources into adopting a business change methodology. I have used Changefirst on a several occasions to empower the business community to impact the key ERP process and support the journey to full adoption.

In theory Oracle on Demand should make implementing the IT part of the project easy allowing the project to focus on key workstream like process management, data migration, user testing etc

Adopting Cloud Computing will allow Organisations the opportunity and platform to implement new applications from Oracle and many now are badged under Fusion plus also BI tools and solutions.