AirSaas: a new generation PPM tool
PPM tools are often complex and costly to implement. AirSaas offers a new-generation PPM tool, to say goodbye to your 1200-column Excel today!
PPM tools are often complex and costly to implement. AirSaas offers a new-generation PPM tool, to say goodbye to your 1200-column Excel today!
A PPM tool (Project Portfolio Management tool) enables your to get more visibility on your portfolio and to prioritize projects according to their potential benefits for the company.
No more 5 days of training: import your Excel, invite your team and off you go. The interface is ergonomic and intuitive, you can get started from day one.
A PPM tool should not simply help you better manage your projects - it should allow you to bring more value to the company. AirSaaS helps you monitor essential indicators and measure the return on investment of your actions.
In a world where tools are multiplying, it's essential not to have to re-enter information from one tool to another or to search everywhere for a shared document. AirSaaS connects to your communications, finance, development tools, to simplify everyone's work.
To make the right decisions you need the right input information, up to date and consolidated. The performance of your business depends on your ability to be efficient in managing your steering committees.
AirSaas provides you with a dashboard of all your projects, which can be filtered according to essential indicators, allowing you to see only the information important to decision-making.
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Your teams regularly receive questions about the progress of projects, and the manager spends a lot of time filling in Powerpoint slides, gleaning information left and right.
We've created the flash report for you. With one click, a presentation (.ppt, .pdf, url) is generated, containing the project slides with all up-to-date data. You can now keep general management and business unit managers up to date on the progress of your activities, the human resources mobilized, and so on.
The Timeline view gives you an overview of current projects and their associated milestones. You can drag and drop elements and consider new scenarios. Make sure resources are available, and prioritize projects by importance, chosen solution or software, assessment of importance to the business, etc.
You can't afford to be caught unprepared: you need to monitor the use of your budgets and resources on an ongoing basis. AirSaas connects to your development tools to retrieve consumed man-days, and your financial tools to retrieve consumed budgets. The aim is to provide you with a consolidated, exportable view.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Business units criticize the IT department's slowness and failure to take their needs into account. IT is short of resources, and the departments are critical of their lack of investment. AirSaas provides a common workflow and a consolidated view to highlight the constraints faced by each party.
AirSaas is collaborative "by design", enabling all stakeholders to work together around a single tool that everyone can understand. The tool provides regular reporting, as well as feedback on problems encountered and successes achieved, so that teams can engage and move forward with confidence.
Airsaas includes guided scoping, where users are helped to fill in the essential information required to get the project off to a good start (expected gains, success criteria, effort required, etc.), plus the option of filling in the information collaboratively and asynchronously. When sufficient information has been filled in, the project can be validated by the steering committee.
Send a regular, anonymous survey to team members to gauge their confidence in the project's success. With AirSaas, you create a cooperative link between IT and the business units. Businesses are no longer IT's customers, and IT is no longer IT's servant. Sound collaboration is essential to the success of projects throughout their lifecycle.
A communication plan is essential to the success of your projects and your team. Keep Committee members and business managers informed to reduce frustration, highlight successes and encourage other employees to join the transformation movement. This is normally a time-consuming task, but the automatic flash report will help you enormously!
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Often time, there is confusion between PM tools (Project Management) and PPM tools (Project Portfolio Management), even though they don't have the same goals, so let's start by distinguishing between these two types of project management tool.
The PM is used to manage a specific project. It will simplify all of the project manager's tasks:
While a PM tool optimizes the planning of a particular project, a PPM tool will organize all the projects in an organization. When a company is constantly evolving, it inevitably reaches a stage where it will have to manage several projects at the same time. And it's precisely when this number of projects starts to grow that project portfolio management software becomes essential.
Although the first project management tools began to appear as early as the 80s, it's worth noting that new companies have continued to develop competing software ever since. It's also interesting to note that, while all these software products now address project portfolio management issues, not all of them were initially developed to serve the same purpose! Some prioritized project management, while others addressed project portfolio management from the outset.
Problem targeted at the date of creation
We can see that a majority of project portfolio management tools actually began by offering project management services! It was only later that these were supplemented to enable several projects to be run optimally at the same time.
It's worth noting, however, that from the outset, some tools focused on project portfolio management (Planview), even if some of them also offered project management functions (Sciforma, Ganttic).
Today, almost all of these softwares meet both needs: project management and project portfolio management. It's clear, then, that there's a need to streamline decision-making in companies, whether on a project management scale, or on a more global scale using a PPM tool.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
If project portfolio management tools don't all have the same functionalities, this is partly due to the way they were historically built, but it's also a consequence of the vision of project management they promote.
But why are there different visions of project management in IT Departments?
Most white papers on the subject agree that, in recent decades, the IT department has moved from a largely technical role to one focused on the business needs of the professions. The IT department is no longer reduced to ensuring the operation of the run, by providing purely technical assistance, but must also need to understand the needs of the various collaborators in order to bring them value in their core business.
IT departments' expectations of a tool to manage their projects have therefore inevitably evolved tremendously: from a monitoring tool to manage technical issues, IT departments often need their PPM tool to simplify communication with the business and the feedback of their needs, notably through the mediation of the project manager.
The development of digital technology enables CIOs to help their companies in new ways, and in particular by contributing more to the success of business goals. For example, an IT department can structure the digitization of processes, which saves time for the business units and helps them to be competitive with their competitors. It can even contribute to value creation, in particular by supporting changes to the company's business model. We can also think of the anecdote from Pierre Raschi, CEO of Référence DSI, in which he recounts how a part-time IT department enabled a butchershop to renew its ageing clientele thanks to digital technology.
This structural change in the era of digital technology for a company is leading to the IT department being entrusted with more responsibilities, which in turn means that it has to manage its projects differently, and therefore expects new functionalities from its PPM tools - which in turn means that these tools have to evolve!
The two changes outlined above imply an evolution in the way the IT department collaborates with the various departments and teams within its company. A technically-focused IT department used to try to control the behavior of its employees, so that they were not held back by any technical problems and the information system was not adversely affected. Today, if IT wants to have a positive impact on the company's business, it must be able to understand the needs of the various business units, and therefore work closely with them. And such collaboration requires breaking down the silos that may exist between departments, or within teams themselves, and involving each and every employee. Thus, an IT department wishing to control all existing processes will not need the same type of tool as one seeking to structure a strong collaboration with its teams.
To put it more bluntly, Maslow's pyramids represent two major visions of CIOs in opposition to each other:
Once you've understood that not all PPM tools meet the same needs, you have to ask yourself a question: which PPM is best suited to how I envision the role of the IT department, and to my goals?
Of course, there are PPMs that offer various functionalities, more or less advanced:
But beyond this list of features, it's possible to highlight opposing PPM styles to differentiate them more easily.
Some PPM softwares, such as ERPs, aim to meet all CIO needs in a single package. Many of them are effective, but their lack of flexibility once implemented means that you need to take the time to think things through before making your choice.
On the other hand, other softwares (often SaaS ones) offer fewer functionalities, but can be synchronized with existing tools. In this way, they avoid duplication and reduce the cost of changing a tool - whereas upgrading a heavy PPM tool will be a major, time-consuming and costly project.
These two types of tool do not correspond to the same vision of the IT department's role. In the case of a software that integrates with existing tools, the IT department is seen as no longer having to acquire a software that enables it to progress on all fronts, but rather as having to be able to connect and disconnect different tools, according to the company's evolution. The idea is to be able to stick to existing needs, constantly, and at lower cost.
Depending on the CIO's vision of his role within the company, a collaborative space incorporated directly into his PPM tool can really simplify his day-to-day work and that of his teams. While most companies already use "classic" channels for reporting business needs to the CIO (Teams, Slack), choosing to use a PPM software that offers a more structured exchange interface enables information to be centralized for more effective collaboration.
The benefits of choosing these PPMs are twofold. Firstly, if you want to involve your staff in subjects as technical as those dealt with by the IT department, it's best to do it on an interface they'll enjoy. There's nothing more discouraging than being asked to work on a giant Excel spreadsheet when you're not the person who spent dozens of hours creating it. PPMs that focus on UX therefore generally have a sufficiently intuitive interface to facilitate collaboration between technical and business profiles.
The second benefit is to increase the adoption rate of these PPMs: employees will only need a few hours to get used to using these new softwares, rather than a few days, which can be a very interesting lever if the goal is to quickly engage.
No tool is really neutral; each tool has an intrinsic methodology. If you want to maximize the adoption rate of your PPM tool, one of the key factors is to choose one that uses a methodology adapted to the functioning of your organization: at the level of existing processes, set objectives, or even your vision of project management.
Taking a PPM tool with a methodology opposite to the one in place would be as counterproductive as swimming against the current one. Thus, it is essential to question the methodology you want to apply, in order to choose your PPM tool accordingly.
While it's best to adopt a tool whose methodology is close to the reality of your operations, a PPM tool can also be a lever for changing your working processes and your company's culture. Indeed, a corporate culture is the fruit of the behavior it adopts in the face of a particular environment. So, if you change the environment, in particular by changing the software used, you change the culture!
This means it's possible to use a new tool to bring about a change in practices. However, you need to make sure that the desired change is not the opposite of what you are currently promoting. Indeed, if it is not accompanied by decisions and directives in the same direction, a tool alone cannot shake up the habits ingrained in an organization.
In short: choose a tool with a methodology close to the one you're currently promoting, or at least the one you'd like to implement.
As described at the top of this page, AirSaas is a rather lightweight project portfolio management tool that doesn't aim to be an all-in-one software package, but includes most of the key functionalities an IT department needs to ensure project execution.
Jira
By integrating with Jira, you'll automatically have project progress data in AirSaas. This will give you an effortless overview of all projects and their status.
Microsoft Teams
AirSaas is integrated with Microsoft Teams. Automatically, the most important information on current projects will be sent to your dedicated Teams communication channels. With this integration, you can easily share project progress with the whole company. If you use other solutions, please let us know!
Our gamble: in order to get the business units involved, the IT department needs a PPM tool that they can grasp quickly and without friction. We believe that it is not by forcing departments to work on complex tools that companies will succeed in breaking down silos and structuring close business/IT collaboration.
We've taken this collaborative approach to its logical conclusion: AirSaas offers a search engine for solutions (external/internal) accessible to business managers. When a business has a need, it is already looking for solutions on its own, without necessarily informing the IT department, which can even end up dealing with Shadow IT.
Our idea here is to provide IT departments with a solution for managing these practices and structuring their efforts to find solutions, while helping them to understand the technical constraints of the information system.
AirSaaS is a lightweight PPM software that can be seamlessly integrated with existing systems, and which uses a strong collaborative methodology to involve the business units.
