Nick Matteucci - Virtual Teamwork with Real Results

VCSonline reports 35% increase in revenue for VPMi SaaS project management software

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:11:00 GMT

Economic realities continue to force organizations to improve worker productivity with less staff. For 2008, VCSonline reported a 35% increase in revenues of their VPMi SaaS project management software. Customers cited the VPMi was a simple, sensible, and supportable SaaS alternative to Microsoft Project EPM, Daptiv, @Task, and Innotas for their project and portfolio management needs.

VCSonline Announces Microsoft Project Integration with their VPMi Professional SaaS Resource and Project Management Software

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:48:00 GMT

VCSonline announced the immediate availability of a .Net web-service that allows Microsoft Project 2003/2007 users to synchronize with the VPMi Professional SaaS project management software. The new capability further positions the VPMi Professional as a faster to setup, lower cost, and easier to use alternative to the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) server and similar competitive offerings.

SaaS PM/PPM ROI for a CIO of a Mid Market Company

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:20:00 GMT

SaaS PM/PPM ROI for a CIO of a Mid Market Company

You promised yourself you wouldn't do it. You wouldn't look at your Blackberry during the Monday morning project update and prioritization meetings. You just can't help yourself and decide to do a quick check of the company's stock price. Ouch, down another 7%. That will teach you for breaking your promise.

It isn't that you don't care what your directors are telling you, it is just that you can't DO anything with the information.

Every week it is the same thing. Every project is "OK" everyone is "working hard", and every new initiative is "high priority".

You have questions in your head that you don't dare speak because you know that nobody has the answers.

How many projects are in Yellow or Red status?

What roles are being under/over utilized?

What projects are running over on hours? On budgets?

What are my customer's priorities and how are we doing meeting their objectives?

What does my portfolio look like by strategy? By customers? By organization? By location?

What projects absolutely need my attention today?

Do I have the right mix of people to meet my commitments?

and the biggest one...

How do I directly relate my budget to our outputs so people can see exactly what won't get done (and the impacts) of the massive budget cuts being rumored.

Time for a new tack. Time to setup a single, web based, and quantitative. You are going to bury once and for all works like "OK", "working hard", and "doing fine". From now on it will be organized, quantifiable, and responsive. Your people may not like it at first but when they see how many jobs you saved relative to the other divisions, they will understand.

At a Glance: How the SaaS PM/PPM Saves YOU Money:

Cancel and Fast Track projects quickly

Projects at risk or in fact going over their allotted budgets and timelines can be quickly put on hold or cancelled while high business value projects with the best returns can be prioritized and optimized.

Meet goals while lowering staff levels

Going through mandatory budget and staff cuts? VPMi has demonstrated improve efficiency and project accountability with less staff. Supply and Demand resource reporting shows how many people (by role) you need to meet your demand. What-if allows you to eliminate functions and people under/not utilized.

Eliminate expensive redundant systems

Consolidate and eliminate expensive project, time, help desk, and other tracking systems.

Start for free today

No large capital expenses for software or servers. Free to try for 30 days and unlimited users. Cancel at any time.

Lowest competitive cost for full PPM

Low monthly costs (less then 1/2 of next nearest competitor). Average end user only pays $10/month.

No servers to purchase and setup

Eliminates servers, software management, procurement, setup, maintenance, and energy costs.

No software footprint or compatibility/upgrade fees

Browser based and delivered via the internet so no desktop costs for average user.

No dedicated technical support needed on-site

Software service is web-based and supported remotely as part of the low user cost.

Works with tools you own and know saves training and startup time and money

Integration with Microsoft Project insures quick transition from existing plans to VPMi.

Security is extraordinary and requires no further investment

Uses banking standard for secure communications and guaranteed service levels insure users have access to their work.

Eliminate wasteful meetings

Eliminate needless meetings with online collaboration and status reporting.

One source of reporting and projects saves teams time and the company money

Manage more projects with the same number of people.

Improve customer loyalty through project portal and collaboration for more follow on engagements

Enter issues and feedback online 24/7 with email updates to eliminate confusion and project administration. Customers can also enter change requests and new project requests for improved opportunity capture/delivery.

No capitalized purchase expense

No need to capitalize the expense (software as a service).

Save money when auditing projects

Projects are easily audited saving time/money in compliance functions like Sarbanes Oxley.

Teams can utilize best practices without spending money building their own processes

Utilizes the Project Management Institute best practices for easy recognition of forms and terminology to project teams.

Thanks for reading and let me know if any of you have any feedback on your own SaaS PPM efforts! I would love to hear your thoughts!

Warm Regards,

Nick Matteucci, Co-Founder www.VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable SaaS Project Management

Author: Nick Matteucci is a co-founder of VCSonline.com a SaaS web 2.0 project management software company headquartered in St. Louis Missouri. Mr. Matteucci is also an active board member and the Chief Technology Officer for the PMI ISSIG. When not obsessing over virtual project management best practices Mr. Matteucci enjoys spending time with his wife and three small children. He also enjoys travel, running, and all things automotive.

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CIO Fortune 500 Hitchhiker's Guide to Saving Money with SaaS PPM

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Something is really upsetting you and you just can't get your head around it. You look at the half eaten chicken wrap next to you but you know that isn't it. You worked for years throughout operations, development, and billing. You ability to forge alliances in the business and to deliver consistent results with comparatively small budgets landed you the CIO job. Now that you are here you wonder where "here" is and how to get "there" in this disastrous financial climate. You start reviewing the metrics on your desk you asked for 3 weeks ago and received this morning. The project and portfolio management information you thought would be "real-time" apparently took over a hundreds hours to prepare and nearly shut down the whole management staff. Sigh - 100 hours of effort to produce some simple reports that are already out of date. That will teach you for asking your directors "what is going on?" Looking over the numbers the first one grabs your attention. IT spent over 1,000,000 hours on projec

SMB CEO Hitchhiker's Guide to Saving Money with SaaS PPM

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

As a CEO / President of a small business in one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen you better shed excess costs while improving service. Find out how SaaS resource, portfolio, and project management software can dramatically help you cut costs and improve service.

Economic pressures lead to 200% increase in new customers of a leading SaaS project management software provider

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:58:00 GMT

In a troubled economy, organizations look for new technologies to improve productivity. These companies are increasingly turning to a VCSonline project management SaaS offering, VPMi Professional. VCSonline has reported a 200% increase in new customers this year and expects growth to continue with a new version which includes Microsoft Project integration, supply & demand resource forecasting, dashboards, earned value, and customer billing at a price well below similar competitive offerings.

Man vs. Machine - Who should set the overall status for the project?

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:13:00 GMT

Since 1998 we have sold enterprise (and now SaaS) resource, portfolio, and project management software. One of the most popular features has always been our weekly project and program status reporting tool where the project manager can set the Red/Yellow/Green health status of schedule, scope, resources, budget, and overall project.

What is scary (to me) is that many of our customers want to “over-ride” the Red, Yellow, Green indicators and take health status reporting away from the project managers.

I agree with setting some threshold guidelines around the dimensions of resources, scope, budget, and schedule. I don't believe they should be cut and dry rules that automatically place the project status. Let me explain.

For example they look at our issue logs for aging issues, the number of scope change requests, the deliverables & tasks for late starts, milestone slippage, and resource availability to calculate the Red, Yellow, or Green status, regardless of the opinion of the PM.

Although some of this can be a good thing (like setting the project to Yellow automatically if no status report was entered in the last 2 weeks) overall I see this as a dangerous trend in project management.

I would much rather have a qualified and experienced project manager "tell" me the project is in Yellow then a computer calculating it and over-riding the project manager (and I am the guy advocating the software).

The software tools like ours keep a full account of the quantitative measures of the project and they are visible in the project dashboard. The status report should be the qualitative analysis of the project manager based on guidelines and experience. It is their "State of the Union" if you will and as good as our software is, I would much rather have an experienced human at the wheel of the project then a computer algorithm IMO.

Thanks for reading and let me know if any of you have any feedback or would like to argue that the status should be automatic. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Warm Regards,

Nick Matteucci, Co-Founder www.VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable SaaS Project Management

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Online Software to Replace Inhouse? Get Your Head out of the Cloud!

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:02:00 GMT

These days many people are talking about Software as a Service (SaaS). Software as a Service (SaaS) is the concept of instead of buying a server, buying server software, configuring said software, and keeping up with maintenance you simply pay a software service provider a monthly fee to deliver the benefit of the software over the Internet.

The advantages of this approach are:

• No large capital outlay (servers, enterprise software)
• No resource management issues (training staff to install and support software)
• No footprint on existing hardware (no software to install on desktops and no storage issues)
• Pay as you go and only as you need (you only pay for the people using the software and there are no internal scaling issues)

Unfortunately, many SaaS offerings have unacceptable underlying hosting problems. They run on servers outside the datacenter, have little in the way of security, and are not setup to scale and perform to company expectations. It was so bad in the beginning that the industry changed its name from Application Service Provider (ASP) to Software as a Service (SaaS) to jump start the market again!

So onto the scene rushes Cloud Computing companies. Cloud Computing allows application writers to host their software on pre-established infrastructures. A Cloud can typically scale, support many applications on a variety of operating systems, and can absorb some of the peak loads.

So this is a great step forward for SaaS customers right? Allow application providers to team up with computing providers to deliver more robust solutions?

Not so fast.

Given the choice between application providers supplying their own servers and a Cloud Computing environment I would take a good Cloud every time it is hardly the panacea everyone is hoping for.

The first problem is who do you call for SaaS support when there is a Cloud when you have multiple service providers in the mix? When companies run into difficulties and problems, who do they call for support? Will the vendor have any pull with the Cloud Computing company? Probably not. Furthermore there is little flexibility in fine tuning a cloud. Many SaaS applications require diligent memory pool management, customized cache requirements, application business rules, and load balancing. In a Cloud environment Dr. Spock said it best “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and tuning for maximum performance are impossible.

Next is the problem of security. When a vendor hosts their own infrastructure they can impose strict rules over who has access to the computers, login access, rights management, and logging. Vendors hosting their own infrastructure can fine tune the firewall settings, opt for higher encryption, and verify that strict access controls are in place. In the cloud company? Who knows when passwords reset, if they are strong, if the firewalls are properly managed, and from what countries do administrators have access?

Finally, there is the problem of performance. SaaS providers can’t guarantee performance as it is in the hands of the Cloud. Under what conditions does the Cloud company add computing power, more memory, and new companies? Many of these Cloud companies are little different then the application providers in trying to sign up as many people as possible in as little time as possible to survive. Ever sign up for a new Gym membership only to find the line at the treadmill 10 deep? Also, one of the greatest bottlenecks in Internet computing is bandwidth. Many of the clouds share hardware with multiple applications. Bandwidth can be purchased but what happens during peaks on multiple applications? It is a lot easier to scale CPU and Memory but the stress from all these applications can put enormous stress on the whole Cloud that is not so easily understood and alleviated since providers never know who they share resources with nor understand the peeks and needs of these other SaaS offerings.

So what is the answer? When looking at hosted / SaaS models you need to spend a lot of time understanding the security, backup plans, and contingency planning that company has in place. Ask the tough questions to all the scenarios and you will know the players from the posers. In my option the answer is to partner with the best datacenter operations professionals and deploy virtualization with cluster Computing so that SaaS providers have a purpose built architecture, maintain control over the hardware (without managing it), and can ensure optimal security and the throughput to match the application.

Here is our story. We are a 10 year old SaaS/Hosting Project and Portfolio Management (PPM). We are relatively small but we are world class in contingency, backup, and redundancy planning and are still BY FAR the least expensive solution among our competitors.

The key for us was focusing on our core. What we do best is provide SaaS resource and project management solutions. We don't build servers, manage network operating centers, build data centers, etc. We looked at the Cloud and saw more problems then solutions. So we looked for the top partners we could find.

We ended up traveling to a short list of datacenters and I am proud to say we found probably one of the top 3 in the country. We know because right in front of our cage is the cage for PayPal and right to the left of our cage is the cage for Bank Of America. We then enlisted Iron Mountain and off site mirroring to make sure we cover every contingency of man made and natural disasters. It wasn't cheap but now we have 24/7 monitoring of our servers with full sets of spares ready if anything even begins to fail (thank you Dell), back up datacenters, offsite storage, etc etc etc.

If we had tried to build our own datacenter, build our own processes from scratch, etc we would have had a much more expensive, less agile, and less capable backup and recovery model then we have. If we had gone into the Cloud we would have no way to ensure (or even know) the support, security, and performance of our SaaS offering.

Thanks for reading and let me know if any of you have any stories or feedback. I would love to post your examples too!

Warm Regards,

Nick Matteucci, Co-Founder www.VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable SaaS Project Management

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When should your company use Software as a Service?

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:03:00 GMT

Q: When should a company use software as a service (per user/per month with hosted hardware and software)?

A: Whenever possible.

True story. Yesterday in St. Louis we had terrible storms and a tornado warning for downtown (very rare here). I was in the middle of a demo and ended up huddled in an interior hallway with the CIO talking about this very subject while we waiting for whatever would happen.

It was hard for them (very old company) to make the transition to SaaS but he knows that they must. He explained that resources were limited and no one considered it a career path to support someone else's software. The support costs are very high as vendors have to travel on-site and the support is slow. Then there is the cost of the hardware, energy costs to run / cool the hardware, the operating system/db/supporting software, etc.

I explained to him that a small fraction of us SaaS providers really do have world class data center operations. We deploy top of the line servers in a top tier data center, have off-site backups, have a backup data-center, and even have 24/7 hot spares ready and waiting. I explained I started hosting the VPMi 5 years ago before it was SaaS and I did it because I needed to insure the best possible user experience. Since this is all we do we know how to size, scale, and tune our systems. It wasn't a business model so much as a way to have the best possible experience for users. The fact it saves US BOTH money is a plus.

In the end he really loves having a SaaS account. If something is wrong there is no finger pointing or wondering who is at fault and who is going to make it right. That alone is worth it for most CIOs.

Luckily the storm passed and he shook my hand and committed to moving forward with SaaS and VPMi. It was a great day for both of us and reminded me that the more things change (SaaS, Web 2.0, Collaboration) the more they stay the same (focus on the customer, understanding requirements, building the people/processes to support technology).

SaaS at its best is just a better way to satisfy the end users and insure the system runs at its full potential. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Thanks for reading and let me know if any of you have any stories or feedback. I would love to post your examples too!

Warm Regards,

Nick Matteucci, Co-Founder www.VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable SaaS Project Management

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How to translate a project management job posting

nmatteucci@vcsonline.com — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:44:00 GMT

With the economy struggling and companies tightening their belts we are starting to see more and more resumes of good project managers on the street.

Having been in the project management web-based SaaS software field for 10 years this seems like the 2nd time we have been through these challenging economic times. The good news for our company is in down times our software sales actually increase as companies invest in systems to automate and replace people. The sad part is knowing that is taking place and good people will be looking for work.

Well since we have no control over the Federal Reserve the one thing I can offer is a way to decipher the job postings they find so they know the "truth in advertising" behind some of these companies.

NOTE: I literally lifted these off of the bathroom wall were many people post funny quotes and stories and am unable to attribute the original author. Whomever you are - thank you for your wisdom and the humor! Hope you like the project management liberties I took with your jokes!

Project Management Job listings translator

Job posting says:	What they really mean is:
Competitive Salary	We remain competitive by paying project managers less than our more successful competitors.
Join our fast-paced company	We have no time to train you or send you to PM conferences. Please introduce yourself to your project team members and co-workers as well.
Immediate opening	The project manager who used to have this project gave notice and left the company a month ago with no information on what they did or how they did it. We're just now running the ad.
Self-motivated	Project sponsors won't answer questions or provide requirements.
We offer great benefits	We'll allow you to fund your own 401(k) if you survive the 3 year project that got the last PM fired.
Seeking enthusiastic, fun, hard working, people	Looking for young project managers with no training, certification, or experience who won't mind our internship-level salaries.
Casual work atmosphere	We don't pay enough to expect that you'll dress up.
Dynamic environment	Your project team will be yanked from your project every 3 months or 3 weeks before a major deliverable (whichever happens first)
Fun work environment	Your project team members will be insulted if you don't go out and buy them drinks 3 nights a week.
A drug-free work environment.	We booze it up at company holiday parties and base bonuses on ability to hold one's liquor.
Must be deadline oriented	Your project will be four months behind schedule on your first day.
Some overtime required	Some overtime each night and some overtime each weekend will be required.
Requires team leadership skills	You'll have the responsibilities of your boss without the pay or respect.
Good communication skills.	Management communicates what they want from your projects in vague terms that are impossible to decipher, you listen, figure out what they want and do it under budget and ahead of schedule.

So now that you know how to decode a project management job posting so happy hunting and best of luck to all those looking for a new employer.

I hope this brings a smile to a few of you out there struggling during these uncertain times. Let me know if any of you have any "extras". I would love to post your examples too!

Virtually yours,
Nick Matteucci, MBA

Author: Nick Matteucci is a co-founder of VCSonline.com a SaaS web 2.0 project management software company headquartered in St. Louis Missouri. Mr. Matteucci is also an active board member and the Chief Technology Officer for the PMI ISSIG. When not obsessing over virtual project management best practices Mr. Matteucci enjoys spending time with his wife and three small children. He also enjoys travel, running, and all things automotive.

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