Basic Work Request Management app

There are six core elements that are common to work request apps as follows:

• They are an app, meaning there is a core site dedicated to this purpose vs. it being a feature added to a team site.
• A requestor fills in a form to kick off a request.
• The requestor can see, track, and engage with assigned “workers” on their requests.
• Workers and Managers do various things (automated CorasWorks actions and forms) to respond to and complete the request.
• Requestors and others are notified of activities and/or collaborated with.
• You have reporting on the activity.

Customers Scenarios

Here are the 4 customer scenarios:.

Materials Storage for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

This application is for requests to store chemicals (materials) within a manufacturing group.  People make their requests and others work the requests noting how long items are stored and where. Requestors are notified of the work and they get pinged when their storage expiration date is approaching.

IT Requests for SharePoint Work and Help Desk Tickets for Health Agency

This customer uses a couple of different WRM apps for IT to support the organization.  One allows users to log the requests for the SharePoint team for new sites, changes to sites, or new apps.  The SharePoint team then manages these requests.  The other is a WRM-based “Help Desk” app where users enter tickets and Help Desk folks work them.   

Employee Requests of HR for Pharmaceutical

This customer is using WRM to enable employee across the enterprise to make requests of HR.  In this case, they created three request workstreams.  Each has a slightly different set of work management activities.  From the user perspective they are able to see the different requests in a single display from wherever they work.

HR Staffing Requests for Federal Contractor

An important process for many Federal Contractors is making requests of HR to find or recruit people to work on contracts.  In this case, a business development (BD) person working on a new proposal/task order makes requests of HR to staff specific positions.  The requests are related to specific Proposals/Task Orders.  However, HR manages all of the requests centrally.

Commonalities

All of the above follow the same basic design as described above.  People make requests.  People work on the requests.  There is back and forth.  The requests are closed out.  There is reporting.

The interesting part is that these are four very different “applications”.  In many organizations, they would presume that they would be looking to go out and buy or build completely different applications.  However, with CorasWorks on SharePoint each of these uses the same basic framework.  Thus, armed with one basic design you can now fill many different needs and save lots of time an money in the process. 

Further, when you build them, the things that you will primarily change are also common:

• The core data (fields) of the “work request” list are different.
• The request form is different.
• The worker roles are specific to the process.
• The app navigation is different.
• The displays and most importantly the worker/manager actions, work forms, and notifications are different.
• Reports are different.

With CorasWorks, each of the above is easily modified using our wizards.  So, you have a common app design and you know the common things that you will be changing to accommodate the specific needs of the app.  If you look at it like an assembly line, you are all set to deliver.

Key Deployment Differences of the Apps

While the four apps have many core commonalities, there are differences in the overall deployment approach across the SharePoint environment.  This is important because work request management is fundamentally a cross-functional collaborative process.  Thus, where people go to engage, whether requestor, worker, or manager, can be different based upon the scenario.

All-in-one

In the Materials Storage app, all of the different users work in a single app site.  Requestors go there to make their requests.  Workers go there to do their work.  Managers go there to manage.  This makes it easier to create the app and is the way you would typically start.  However, it is not really a best practice given the ability to distribute functionality using CorasWorks.

Distributed

In the IT Request app, the Requestors don’t go into the app app site to make requests.  They are able to be elsewhere across the SharePoint environment and enter their requests from their and see their requests and interact.  This makes it more convenient for the users.  Generally, you start by building the app as an All-in-one and then just distribute the displays.

Many Projects to Work Management Team (Hub and Spoke)

The HR Staffing app is a bit different.  In this specific scenario, you have many Proposal/Task Order sites (or could be project sites).  A team is working on these projects.  They enter their requests from the site.  However, the HR Work Request site is central – all of the requests feed into the one app.  HR is then able to manage it all in one place and interact with the requestors via their project sites.  This ends up as a Hub and Spoke deployment.

Self-Service

The Employee request design is different also.  In this case, there is a self-service page in the enterprise portal.  Users go to this one place and enter and see their requests across the three types.  The requests are funneled into the three different workstreams managed by HR.  HR is also able to work on them via a single display.

Getting You Spun Up for Work Request Management

The work request management category of app is a staple of SharePoint environments that have gone past basic site centric content sharing.  We often work with customers to train up their SDM teams to deliver this category of app.  We have a standard set of templatized apps and training to help get you going quickly.  Email support@corasworks.net for more information.

william

Our customer is a 3,000 person non-governmental Health Agency.  Their mission is to improve health and standards of living for 35 member countries across the Americas.  Headquartered in Washington, DC they serve a broad and diverse community with 31 in-country offices in the member states.

Getting to the New Model

They have been a CorasWorks customer since 2004.  They have used CorasWorks on both SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007.  On these environments, CorasWorks was used to enhance their Intranet with content services, collaboration, and work management.  In planning for 2011, they were preparing to move to SharePoint 2010 and to use CorasWorks v11.  They decided to expand their perspective of SharePoint from a collaborative environment to become an application platform.  To accomplish this they planned a shared services, Service Delivery model heavily leveraging CorasWorks that they would use to consolidate applications and build new apps.

App Consolidation during 2011

Armed with SP 2010, CorasWorks v11, and, a new App Service Delivery mandate, during 2011, they began building and consolidating applications on SharePoint.  Below is a list of the top 10 applications that they delivered based upon CorasWorks.

The applications had a broad range of Types. “Typing” and understanding the design patterns behind the types is an important part of the standardization of their Service Delivery model.  In addition, in the table we list how the application was delivered.  While all of them are CorasWorks-based, their service team used a different set of resources to deliver the apps to their business customers.  Note that more than half of the apps were delivered using just internal resources.

Cost Impact of CorasWorks-based App Consolidation

We worked with the customer to do an analysis of the delivery cost impact for these applications.  We looked at each application and alternatives evaluated.  Many of the alternatives were apps delivered as separate Application Services.  Some were only possible as a custom project.  The comparison applications were the middle range of applications with a comparable feature set.

The result of the analysis is that using CorasWorks they saved $321,000 or 64% of the cost of using alternative 3rd party off-the-shelf apps and services.  Some of the details are as follows:

- The total cost to deliver the 10 apps above was $184,000 ($18k/app).

- This cost includes software license costs to CorasWorks, CorasWorks Professional Services, services from CorasWorks partners, and, the man-days used internally to deliver the apps. The organization used 75 man-days internally.

- The cost of the applications if delivered using 3rd party software/services was estimated to be $505,000 ($50k/app).

Further, it is estimated that over the next 3 years with the CorasWorks/SharePoint licensing model, the organization will save another $250,000 in additional licensing and services costs over the costs of CorasWorks for these 10 applications.  In addition, they are able to leverage their Corasworks/SharePoint investment and Service Delivery capabilities to build and consolidate additional applications over the three years with even greater savings per app.

Overall Success of Service Delivery Model

The cost savings noted above are significant.  But, in their annual review of the model, they highlighted additional benefits as follows:

- The projects were delivered, and, within time, budget, and feature set. By delivered we mean, made it to production.  A 100% success result was significant.  There were few surprises because they knew in advance where they could get to and what it would take.

- The business users got what they wanted.  Unlike the alternative apps that were initially reviewed before they decided on a CorasWorks solution, the business groups were able to get what they really wanted and needed.  Thus, in their opinion what they got was superior to the alternative.

- They did this with little impact on the operating environment.  Only one feature required custom compiled code.  Thus, the apps were delivered on top of the standardized CorasWorks/SharePoint environment which enhances the ongoing maintainability of the entire shared services environment.

- The cost of applications is declining as they gain on the learning curve.

- The user experience is improving as the apps become inter-connected across the environment.  Thus, instead of a user having to go to many separate apps and learn new interfaces they are able to access all relevant apps from wherever they work and use a common interface.

My Comments

Here are some of my general comments about this organization and their success with their App Consolidation and Service Delivery model.

- They have very good people managing Service Delivery.  They know SharePoint.  They know and have invested to learn CorasWorks.  They are exceptional at understanding the design patterns for collaborative applications and how to apply them and reuse the designs, frameworks, and components.  They are confident enough to deliver complete applications internally and know when to outsource.

- The Service Delivery group has the trust of the business groups and the support of IT and general senior management.  It helps that a number of the applications were specifically for the senior management of the organization.

- During 2011, they invested in the CorasWorks Solution Frameworks, Cim for Collaboration, and PPM for Project work, which they have leveraged for multiple applications and which had a significant impact on the reduced costs.  The Solutions were on top of the CorasWorks v11 platform.  (These costs are included in the costs analysis above).

- Their organization is really just learning to collaborate.  Six months ago I was speaking with the Service Delivery Manager and he told me “people in our organization don’t collaborate; they work and they share information when they have to”. This may seem odd for an organization that has had SharePoint for 8 years, and, has a globally distributed operating structure.  But, real collaboration is a lot more than sharing documents in a team site.  Over the last 6 months with SP2010, CorasWorks Collaboration and the collaborative applications they’ve delivered and on their roadmap this has started to change.

william

NOTE: In large enterprises, you often have a core SharePoint team working globally with SD teams for different business groups.  In this article, I am focused on the local SD teams tied to a Business Group or an SD team in a smaller organization that serves both the end-user community and the business group requests.

Servicing the Customer

These tools are used to support and interact with their customers.

Site Request System – this is a high-volume system for users to request new standard sites (such as a Team Site) and then allow the Service Delivery team to review, approve, and manage the requests.

Change Request System – this system is used by users that want changes to sites or applications.  It can be combined with the one above, but, this is usually for larger application.

App Request System – this is really a project proposal system where business groups request project-based custom apps.  Typically, these apps go through a stage-gate review and approval process.

End-User Support Community – our best practice is to use a CorasWorks Cim community to make it easy to provide information as articles and provide a collaborative experience where articles can be rated and commented upon

Learning Center – like our CorasWorks Community Learning Centers, this system provides a more structured experience for users to learn.  These are also typically based upon Cim providing users with access to structured and community information.  In addition, it is a great place to surface the Request options, Support Options, and, examples of delivered apps with videos or even links to the apps.

The Work of the Service Delivery Team

This category consists of the tools that Service Delivery Teams use to manage their work and insure that they are prepared to deliver.

Work Request Management console – behind the Site Request system, the Change Request System and the App Request system is your teams Work Request Management console.  These requests flow into your team.  Via this console you manage the request process – review the requests, decide whether to them, interact with the user, delegate the task, track the tasks, let the system update the requestor, get reports, etc…etc

Task Management – a great number of items can be acted upon directly via the Work Request Console above.  But, some require that you assign a number of tasks to one or more people.  Using a CorasWorks-based task management solution, you can track the tasks and automate the work of people on them such as updating requestors and close out.

Project Management – some requests turn into projects that span weeks or months and require detailed task and resource management.  Leveraging CorasWorks PPM SDM’s are managing those projects that are big enough to require it.  A key element is that the SDM can track tasks, resources, issues across the projects as a portfolio.  In addition, the users can use see their tasks from projects as part of the day-to-day task management above.

App Catalog – this is a structured Cim-community based catalog of applications that you have delivered, can deliver, and want to be able to deliver.  It serves as both a knowledge base and the site to store and manage app templates, delievered apps, and published solutions.  It gives you a rich collaborative environment with as much structured taxonomy as you need.

Knowledge Base/Lessons Learned Catalog – again a Cim-community to capture knowledge.  There are lots of little tid-bits of useful knowledge.  This site serves as the grab bag.  Got some info, drop it in.  DO NOT worry about organizing or perfecting this knowledge.  Just collect, collaborate, and consume.  The knowledge will get better as people comment, enhance, and collaborate.  It is a resource.  From here, you may and will end up publishing finished product to the App Catalog.

Best Practice: Weekly Programmatic Reviews

All of the “tools” above effectively provide you with plenty of ways to track the flow of work and what assets are created. So, each week do a checkpoint and leverage the tools to give you the answers – easily and quickly.

In addition, with SharePoint and CorasWorks, Service Delivery teams have a great capacity to reuse knowledge and “artifacts” (templates, components, features, web parts, etc.).  To be most effective, you should measure each week what assets your team has created AND captured, in addition to, what work got done.   If you do this, after three months you will have a vast catalog and set of skills and your work should be a) more manageable, b) faster to deliver, and c) more robust because you will be better prepared to deliver more value.

william

The Challenge

IDIQs are a primary vehicle for the Federal Government to contract for work in IT and related services. In 2011, 30% of all contracts in this space were based upon IDIQ vehicles, representing about $40 Billion.  The 5 year projection is an increase in the use of IDIQs to over 70%.  With IDIQs, the contractor bids to become an authorized vendor for a specific IDIQ vehicle.  This gets them no business, but, it gives them the right to bid for business among the select vendors for that IDIQ. Then, they need to manage and compete on each Task Order that the government releases and win the business.  Task Orders are usually many millions of dollars and span years.  Accordingly, the challenge for these systems is that they are both high volume and they require very detailed management throughout the life cycle of Task Orders. 

Our customer wanted a system that would allow them to drive revenue, at high efficiencies, and that was effective at winning the right business (that which is profitable for them).  In addition, they wanted a system that was customizable to their needs so that they could continuously innovate to maintain a competitive advantage.  In addition, in this solution space there are a number of distinct challenges as follows:

• each IDIQ has different requirements which need to be supported by the system
• there is a high volume of Task Orders that need to be sorted, prioritized and managed closely – miss a date or a requirements and you are out
• each Task Order is different and needs to be managed separately with a process to determine whether to bid on it or not
• the turnaround time to bid over the years has gotten shorter
• many Federal agencies or specific Task Orders require teaming partners (small business, women owned, etc.) that are part of the bid, thus, the teaming partners need to have access to information and participate in the process and the delivery – thus security must be tightly managed

The Story, the Solution and the Business

Back in 2006, the customer won a single IDIQ (along with 10+ other vendors) that projected $10 Billion of Task Orders over 10 years.  They wanted a solution to manage the work.  They looked at various Project Management systems such as Primavera.  However, they believed that the IDIQ vehicle approach was going to grow in popularity and they wanted a system that would allow them to continuously innovate to competitively differentiate themselves.  Thus, they looked for a COTS product that was very flexible to build their own unique solution.  They selected CorasWorks running on Microsoft SharePoint 2003.

According to the customer, they built the initial system in a fraction of the cost and time of buying the COTS solution and trying to customize it to their needs.  They did this relying on their internal subject matter expertise and leveraging the CorasWorks product and CorasWorks training.  The key is that the customer a) was the subject matter expert, and b) the “builders” of the system.  Using CorasWorks, they were able to “build” the system and innovate without requiring custom compiled code. 

Over the last 6 years, that single IDIQ has generated $250+ Million in business in 80+ won Task Orders.  They used the system to purposely bid less than 10% of the 2,000+ Task Orders that were released under this IDIQ to maintain high win rates and make sure that they were doing the business in their profitable “sweet spot”.

Over the years, they continued to innovate and improve the core system. They also migrated the system to SharePoint 2007 and multiple releases of the CorasWorks solution platform to continue to drive innovation. About 3 years ago, their was an enterprise reorganization.  Given the success of their IDIQ TOM system for the initial IDIQ it was decided to consolidate IDIQ operations across programs/practices within this team.  They have since grown to manage 14 different IDIQ vehicles and all of the Task Orders through this CorasWorks-based system on SharePoint.

The current state of the business is as follows:

• The team/system manages 14 different IDIQ vehicles (including some GWAC contracts) and all of the task orders
• They have processed and managed 5,000 task orders since 2006
• They bid about 10% of the task orders received and have 300 active orders 
• They have driven $800 Million of business
• They have 250 teaming partners
• Teaming partners have access to the Task Orders that they have teamed on through the proposal process and forward if the Task Order is won
• Each Task Order ever issued is tracked for historical reasons
• The system supports Opportunity Management so that the customer and their Teaming Partners can work on customer opportunities and then drive the process of getting Task Orders issued

The core modules of this system are as follows:

• IDIQ Portal and Portfolio Management – looking across all 14 IDIQs and reporting on operations
• IDIQ Task Order Management – process to manage capture, Bid/No Bid decision and full life cycle of Task Orders for each IDIQ
• Task Order sites – one for each Task Order where information is stored, proposals are managed, status is updated and participants (including Teaming Partners) collaborate – throughout the life cycle of the Task Order
• Teaming Partner Extranet and Partner Sites – where Teaming Partner go to access partner specific information, submit interest in participating on a Task Order, submit opportunities, access Task Order sites.

Here are some details on the overall scope of the system and some key features:

• Every task order has a site that is automatically provisioned.  There are 1,000 active sites and a few thousand archived sites in the system.
• There are 250 different Partner sites providing them with their place through which to work with the customer across IDIQs and Task Orders
• Security is a key part of the system.  By separating each Task Order into a SharePoint site, the customer has a simpler way to manage security vs. attempting to use a role based approach with complex security.
• The historical data, particularly the No Bid decision and explanation, is important to determine which Task Orders they bid on and also enabling them to return to rebid when the opportunity arises.
• The opportunity management sub-system enables teaming partners to bring the opportunities to them, which they jointly pursue, and then, push through the appropriate IDIQ vehicle
• The system is managed by two Technical people and the there are three Task Order Managers that do the functional work
• The separate business groups that the team/system serve manage three elements using their own tools: large Proposal Development, Project Delivery, and Customer Portal(s).
• The customer is planning to migrate the system to SharePoint 2010 this year and to take advantage of the CorasWorks “advanced” capabilities of version 11 to continue their innovation.  When done, over 7 years, they will have evolved the system across three cycles of the SharePoint platform (2003, 2007, 2010) and more than 7 versions of the CorasWorks solution platform.

My Comments on this Solution

This is a very valuable mission critical system – arguably the key type of system for Federal Contractors in the IT/Services space given the growing use of the IDIQ vehicle.  Note that while the use of the IDIQ vehicle is growing dramatically, the overall IT/Services spending is barely growing.  Thus, the Federal Contractors are fighting it out within a pie that isn’t growing – if you win, your competitor loses.  Having a system that gives you a competitive advantage for the type of business you want to win is simply core to winning this game.  With CorasWorks, this customer got what they needed.

It is a big system, based upon the vast number of sites.  However, in many key ways its design is simple.  This simplicity is important to drive efficiencies and to be able to effectively maintain the system – most importantly the security framework.  Complex security designs are subject to human error.  This design makes it far easier to get right.

The managers of this system/business function, two key people, have continuously driven this system forward over the last 6 years.  Their experiences and lessons learned are continuously built back into the system.  They just keep getting better and the results of the system get better.  The CorasWorks product and support services are ideally suited to this type of situation where the customer wants a competitive advantage and has the will and skill to build it out with our support. 

This particular customer could also use CorasWorks for some other core IDIQ system elements, in particular, large Proposal Development, Project Delivery, and Customer Portal(s).  However, since this is a very big organization with this operation spanning multiple organizational groups, at this time, each group uses its own tools to do these three things.  They are looking into providing CorasWorks solutions for these as opt-in additional services to the business groups.

The overall design of this IDIQ Task Order Management system is what I refer to as a Broad, Distributed Work System (see my intro article Putting SharePoint to Work).  This type of system is incredibly well suited to a SharePoint environment.  In fact, it is hard to imagine designing and building such a distributed system on an alternative platform.  The features and benefits of this system in terms of flexibility, maintenance, efficiency and business effectiveness would be tough to match.

It is interesting to note that this system is effectively a single app.  It is really large and its impact is critical.  Many SharePoint customers talk about the challenge of managing lots and lots of sites that aren’t used -  a feeling of chaos.  However, in this case all of those sites are part of a single, inter-connected, system.  The overhead of many sites actually increases the efficiency, effectiveness, and security of the business and every site has its purpose.

Regards,

william

Ways that Customers are Putting SharePoint to Work

In this section I’ll give you a sense of the different ways that customers are leveraging CorasWorks to put SharePoint to work by looking at general classes of solutions.  This is a bit of a “state of the union” as it reflects where they are today.

Investing in Work on top of Content – A lot of time, money and resources still go into the basic SharePoint infrastructure to support file sharing and good looking, and largely passive, content environments like Intranets.  Our customers tend to drive value when they break out of the general content environment context, and, focus on specific work to be done, i.e., apps. The delta is just a mindset: is SharePoint an application for content or is it an application platform to get work done and drive your business.  Thus, with CorasWorks, often either a business group drives the requirements or an IT organization does a really nice job of demand management and on-ramping applications onto the platform.  In effect, what is happening is the consolidation of business applications onto the SharePoint platform which a) reduces costs and avoids costs, b) promotes reusability, and c) gives them the value of the app and the value of apps working together across a common work environment.  But note, most of our customers also have nice looking Intranets, they just don’t focus on it.

Self-Service Work Management – With CorasWorks, basic work management is simply the ability to see, contribute, and act with information from anywhere. It is about doing structured work where you can control what users see, what they can and can’t do, and automate the work that they need and want to do. The basics are forms, displays, actions, and workflow/notifications that structure and automate the work of users.  With CorasWorks and our wizards, creating these work management applets is a snap, basically, self-service apps done by business users.  The majority of our customers are leveraging this broadly across their environments.

Project Work – This is really a staple of SharePoint and CorasWorks.  It is an extension of work management.  Many customers start with our straight-forward, pretty much out of the box, project portfolio approach where they have a portfolio dashboard and multiple project sites.  With our pre-packaged Project Portfolio Management solution customers are moving up a notch to a more robust and out of the box feature rich solution for project work that is supported as a product.  There is now a rather new trend to leverage our collaboration features with project work for enterprise wide, project collaboration.  In many cases we are finding the new style of project collaboration, that is easy, interactive, and convenient, to be what people really want.  Further, at the high end customers are creating custom “executive information systems” that surface project work and work in other project systems (like Microsoft Project/Server), SharePoint apps and external systems.  With project work, our customers often implement multiple solutions up an down this continuum.  We just make it much easier, standardized, and less costly to get this done.

Processes and LOB Apps – This is also a staple of CorasWorks customers.  Using our standard app framework, customers spin up apps to get work done.  A common one is a Help Desk.  This often morphs into Request processes, ticketing systems, approval processes. With CorasWorks, it is easy for customers to create processes/apps that follow a stage-activity-gate structure.  The work flows through stages.  At each stage there is activity.  We structure and automate what the user does and can do at a point.  As required we fire off notifications, flow the work to different user consoles, and/or kick off workflows to support the process.  These solutions may be simple point solutions, or, they can be very broad processes such as a multi-stage, multi-year, innovation process.  Yet, they are easy to create, change, enhance, and maintain.

Purposeful Collaboration – You’d really think that by now, most SharePoint users would have effective collaborative environments.  In truth, for most, collaboration is still sharing files within a team site, assuming they know it exists, have access, and, the will to navigate. Or, with SharePoint 2010 it could be social networking or social activity. Leveraging the newish CorasWorks collaboration solutions, customers are putting in place very effective, purposeful collaboration systems.  These are systems with specific collaborative apps for knowledge, team work, project work, ideas, processes, news, policies etc.  Each collaborative app has a purpose and becomes a visible and interactive resource across the environment that is easy, convenient, and interactive.  Very slick, very collaborative, but, focused on the purpose.

Blending of Collaboration and Work Management – This is newish as we’ve rolled out the collaboration solutions.  However, many customers are getting the hang of solutions that blend collaboration and work management.  At the core is the idea of having structured work with a broad collaborative footprint.  For instance, you might have the whole organization able to enter Product Change Requests and collaborate.  They then get feed into a Product Team to slice and dice and put to work.  Or, the inverse, you may have a small group that manages HR/Corporate Policies through a review and approval process that then publishes them out to the organization and enables people to comment, ask questions and interact.  The collaborative and process activity is all feed into users business activity streams so that they can easily know what is going on with what matters and act on it.

Deep, Unique Applications – Particularly leveraging the “Advanced” toolset now in CorasWorks v11, customers are building very deep, custom applications.  They may use SharePoint data, a database, or a mash-up of enterprise data, applications, and services.  The value is the CorasWorks 80/20/20 value proposition.  80% is CorasWorks COTS software.  20% is the customer getting just the features that they want.  The other 20% is the ability of the customer to continuously improve and extend the app.  Since, all of this can now be done on the CorasWorks v11 platform, we take care of the dll’s and upgrading – no new compiled code.  The result is that customers are able to create unique applications that drive competitive differentiation in a fraction of the time, risk and cost.

Broad, Distributed Work Systems – Certain customers are realizing fantastic benefits with distributed work systems that incorporate multiple activities across different phases of a workstream and allow people to engage from wherever they work.  Examples are Idea & Innovation systems, Project Portfolio systems, and Capture/Bid/Manage/Deliver workstreams.  These systems often have many sites, different processes at different phases, and, are loosely connected.  Because of this they also allow for great innovation and extension. It would seem to be a natural for a SharePoint environment.  In fact, I find it hard to imagine how such systems would be designed and implemented on any other platform.  This provides a big competitive advantage.  Yet, at this time most organizations just can’t wrap their minds and hearts around this.  Those that have are really rocking.

Dashboards, Interactive Work, Virtual Slideshows and the Apps – It is two sides of the coin: the app and the UI that enables top down visibility and interactive work.  Powered by the “Advanced” toolset, customers are creating very slick, interactive ways of surfacing information and getting work done.  They are using SharePoint as the host, but, incorporating data from SharePoint and external data, applications, and systems.  The secret sauce is the CorasWorks v11 “Advanced” toolset that allows them to structure the “middle-ware” in a SharePoint context.  They can also create apps in SharePoint using CorasWorks for people to do their work that get surfaced.  Because of CorasWorks’ flexibility, customers are able to evolve these systems as the need arises and do so much more quickly, easily, and for less cost.

What we have done to help our customers succeed

Let me start by saying that in most cases, success is customer driven.  Our most successful customers have people that know what they want and use us to get there.  You folks are the subject matter experts and the heroes of your success.  With that said, here are a few things that we have done that customers tell us have helped them succeed…

CorasWorks v11 Base Improvements – we did a lot of base work for this release which first came out in October of 2010.  It is going into v11.2 in March 2012.  A couple basic items are improved installation and upgrade process, greater system integration, enhanced native SharePoint integration such as actions directly driving Windows Workflow Foundation, and 100’s of small features.  It is also great that the same product runs on SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 which has made it easy for customers to migrate.

Adding “Advanced” Toolset to v11 – In v11 we added the Advanced toolset into the product.  This provides customers with the ability to greatly enhance and extend what they do.  It includes a componentized middle-ware framework, an XML transport layer, and provides a great deal of flexibility at all tiers, UI, business logic, and data.  This has allowed our customers to achieve just about whatever they want.

Our Pre-Packaged Solution “Frameworks” – Over the last couple of years we have built pre-packaged solutions for Collaboration, Process, LOB Apps, Idea Management and Project Management.  These solutions make it easier to get to the business solution customers want without having to deeply understand SharePoint, CorasWorks, or do design.  Usually, customers don’t use them right off the shelf.  They customize them and leverage them to do what they want.  With CorasWorks they are then empowered to maintain the solution and even enhance and extend it at will.

CorasWorks Product Learning Centers – Over the last year, we brought online product learning centers for the CorasWorks v11 Platform and for our packaged Solutions.  These provide articles, videos, and other information to help customers succeed.  It extends the existing resources in the CorasWorks Community such as Forums, Blogs, Online Help, Downloads.

Distance Learning – The recession put a crimp on travel budgets.  This made our classroom training less effective.  Since then we have been doing a lot more distance learning (virtual classes).  We have standard, monthly distance learning classes and we also create custom distance learning sessions to specifically get customers what they need, when they need it.

CorasWorks Professional Services and Partners – Over the last few years we have grown our Professional Services.  Our PS used to simply help customers create their own solutions.  Now, we implement our pre-packaged solutions to their specs.  We also do a lot of projects for custom solutions that we deliver to the customer and are accountable for.  At the same time we are working with a smaller group of partners and going deeper to empower them to deliver more advanced solutions.

As above, in future articles I will be drilling down into specific customer solutions.  Talk to you then…

william

So, to level the discussion in this article I’ll talk about the Top 10 Custom Solutions and the secret sauce of the CorasWorks v11 platform in delivering the business value. 

First, at the bottom of the post is a summary chart of the Top 10 solutions.  The range of industries and business functions where the solutions are used is very broad.  In addition, most of these solutions are “mission critical” – very deep.  A couple quotes from customers about this.  “80% of our business relies on this solution ($10m business)”  “This app can’t go down, it would bring down our business (multi-billion dollar internet company).” 

Second, congrats and hats off to the business owners – They deserve a great deal of the credit for the success of these solutions for two reasons a) it was the business user that understood what solution was necessary to drive the business value, and b) the flexibility of CorasWorks means that the business user has the ability and responsibility to tailor the solution to optimize the business result.  A couple quotes from customers related to the business value “It was a 6 month project. We got our payback for the CorasWorks software and services in one month of operation”  “We have gotten a 10,000% improvement in the efficiency of responding to customer requests” (BTW, I got the zero’s right).

Third, in effect for solutions in this category CorasWorks is delivering two levels of value.  One is the lower cost, time, risk of creating the solution and maintaining them.  Another is the operating business value the customer receives from cost avoidance, cost reductions, and revenue increases.  A third value that really started to be realized this year for our productized and custom solutions was the ability of our customers to avoid the cost of very expensive COTS solutions that they would have had to spend a lot to rip up and customize.  In effect, over the last couple of years, the cost to build a comparative “custom” solution leveraging CorasWorks v11 is often dramatically less (factor of 2 to 3) than the COTS option.  And, most customers would say that they are better because they really meet the precise business need, even as the needs change over time (cheers for flexibility).

Some key things about the building/delivery of these solutions:

• They were all built with CorasWorks v11, running on either SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010.

• While the solutions are custom, they are not custom developed – meaning no custom compiled code. These incredibly powerful, broad and deep solutions, including database applications, where all built without having to install custom compiled code or for the most part ever crack Visual Studio.  This drives down the development costs, the risk, and, the maintainability of the solution over time.

• It takes a community – each solution was built/delivered by CorasWorks Professional Services, CorasWorks Partners and/or customer IT.  In most cases the parties collaborated to deliver the solution.  Again, because we have the v11 platform, any of the folks can pick right up and maintain, enhance, or extend the solution.

• Leveraging the Advanced framework of v11 – many of of the solutions leveraged the Advanced framework.  This toolset, incorporated into the platform in v11, enables the designer/builder to deliver very deep, custom solutions that functionally are all based upon a standardized, integrated, component framework.  It is really the secret sauce of the Top 10 and the reason that so many mission critical solutions got built with CorasWorks this past year.

• In general, each solution came in within budget and time.  This is pretty tough since the expectation is that a CorasWorks solution will cost half of other options and be delivered much more quickly.  It is the way with CorasWorks because we are building with a configurable solution platform (not a development tool), with standard design patterns, largely repeatable solution frameworks, a standardized, reusable componentized framework, and, no need for custom developed code that introduces risk.  Thus, this allows the provider to accurately estimate what it will take to deliver the result.

Below is the table listing the Top 10 solutions.  You’ll note that there were actually 11.  This is because with CorasWorks you always get more than you expect

Have a tremendous 2012!

william

Here is how it works…

You set up your engaging collaborative community.  Let’s take the Workplace Concierge Community (one of the 5).  People are asking questions, answering them and helping each other to succeed. Let’s say you are watching the activity.  You find out that you are getting a lot of questions about the clarity of your HR or Sales Policies.  So, you look into it and realize that you aren’t doing a great job with how you are publishing that information.  With some CorasWorks Work Management magic you can screen the collaborative activity and then drive tasks to others to make improvements and track the progress.  You can then comment on the item when new and improved material is available.

For instance, below we show a collaborative community for an R&D Research Project.  It is a listing of various posts in this community.  Here the project people collaborate to get things done.

The next tab is Managed Work.  Behind the collaboration is the ability to look at the collaborative activity and drive things forward in a structured way.  Below we show a view of the posts in Managed Work display.  These are available for managers/moderators to drive forward using CorasWorks actions.  These automate work.  You can create a broad range of actions to meet your needs.  Below we are getting ready to create a task that will be tracked as part of the managed work for a particular item.

To the users that are participating, this back-end management may be invisible.  The users may just interact in the community and see collaborative activity in their Activity Streams as shown below.  They are focused on easy and convenient collaboration.

However, to managers you now have great resources to work with.  Lets, take a look at the other 4 of the 5 collaborative apps I wrote about and see how a little work management behind the scenes can leverage the collaborative activity.

News Channels – you can set up a process for people to submit News that only they see.  You then approve it and it is public and the collaboration begins. 

SharePoint Users Helping SharePoint Users – As the users do their work, you now have the best source of information to drive formal support content, knowledge bases, and training.  So, you can start creating tasks and tracking them for individual articles.  The contributions by the community become the source for more formal output.  BTW, make sure to provide recognition to the contributor and collaborators.  A simply comment that you are using this for x does the trick.

What is Working? – This is vehicle to get ideas.  Thus, you would put a simple process behind it to evaluate the contributions as ideas and approve them and then task them out for implementation.  It is a great feeder for best practices.  Again, make sure to provide recognition.

Build-Our-Workplace Request Community – This is really a process at its heart.  People make requests and collaborate.  But, by design it is publicly known that Team ABC is screening these items, engaging as a collaborators, and, approving items and pushing them forward.  The Community will be looking and watching for action and results on their requests.

Wrap Up

So, just because you have lively collaborative communities doesn’t mean that you aren’t leveraging these resources to make things happen that are concrete and purposeful.  CorasWorks makes it easy to get both elements, engaging collaboration and structured work management, all wrapped up into one package.  

william

During this holiday season I am transitioning to 2012 and lightening up a bit.  Here is my thought – start 2012 with some simple, lively, useful collaborative apps to get everyone quickly engaged within your SharePoint 2010 work environment, and then, we can turn back to the heavier stuff. 

So, with that here are my Top 5 Lively Collaborative Apps for you to start with in 2012…

NOTE: The key for all of these is that all of the collaborative activity for communities that users watch will get feed into their CorasWorks Activity Stream wherever they work – so for 2012 you are starting off with ease and convenience for all of your users.  This will be welcome.

News Channels to Watch and Engage In

The News in most SharePoint environments is really far too passive and too managed. You see the News, which is controlled, for wherever you are working.  We can do better. Start off the year dropping in a few News Channel communities.  They can be departmental, enterprise, topical.  Think different channels for news.  The key is that leveraging the Cim Activity Stream Watch feature, the user can decide what to watch at their leisure and let the news flow to them.  Plus, let them vote and comment – liven it up in 2012 and give your users a choice.

Workplace Concierge Community

Put all of your helpful people at the service of each person.  Drop in a collaborative community for people to post questions to the group.  Typical categories are Where is?, Who is?, What are?, How can I?, Do we?  People ask questions and they get answered.  It should be open, lively, and rated.  The great part is that each time the question is correctly answered you’ve created useful knowledge.  You’ll really be rocking in a few months when people are referencing this new resource.

SharePoint Users Helping SharePoint Users Community

People are using SharePoint, right?  Instead of having the pros write formal support content let your community of users play a bigger role by collaborating.  Users can post tips, tricks, questions, links, ideas, needs, etc. etc.  Let it be raw; let them go.  And, let them vote, comment, and even do reviews of how useful it was.  Let the cream posts rise to the top.  Have a pro or two moderate it and lend a hand, but, you’ll find that your average user knows a lot better what they need then your pros.

What is Working? Communities, Challenges, or Contests

This is one of my real favorites.  In my work on Idea & Innovation Management, a core tenant is that people don’t know what other people don’t know.  So, if I’ve been doing something for 2 years, and you ask me for great new ideas, I don’t think of it.  And yet, that thing that is working may be a brilliant idea for the other 20 offices around the globe.  You need to encourage people to share.  Do this by bringing up a What is Working? community and/or launch What is Working? Challenges such as What is Working in Selling to ABC Industry or through XYZ channel.  Let the crowd contribute, vote, comment, and do evaluations where others note whether this idea didn’t work for them or did.  It is a great way to discover best practices.

Build-Our-Workplace Request Community

At its best SharePoint 2010 is a living, breathing, evolving work environment.  So, let folks request things.  But, don’t just have a hidden, black box request process.  Open it up so that all requests, through this channel, are open for comment, voting, enhancement, discussion.  The objective is to let the users know what is being considered and find ways of improving on ideas and pre-aligning on good ones and letting not so good ones die a natural death.  Of course, behind the community you will have a process to formally evaluate the requests, hopefully taking into account the community feedback, and move approved items forward with the system keeping all interested parties in the loop.

Wrap Up

Think about it.  As we get into the year, we will start getting back to the quarterly sales, the project management, and the ROI decisions.  But, by dropping in some of these collaborative apps we will get folks engaged at the start and can then channel their energy into the more routine and process/project oriented work. 

william

The beginning…

SharePoint 2010 was launched in the spring of 2010. Basically, the features that got in were those that were in the market circa 2008. Things like blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, I Like It tags. So, when you implement SharePoint 2010 out of the box, this is what you get – various social media features that can be used in a Social Intranet.

Recognize there are two perspectives of what SharePoint is (even within Microsoft). About 70% of customers think that SharePoint is “an application”. From this perspective, a Social Intranet is probably the high end of the stack of where they plan to go on 2010. The other half (less than half) see it as a platform. They view SharePoint as an enterprise, distributed work environment. It is a canvas to use to meet their organizational goals. For these folks, they may not even go to the Social Intranet, because it isn’t relevant to their objectives – they just leap frog over it.

What you end up with is a bit of a desert in the middle in the range of the Social Intranet at this point in the life cycle. It is too high for most right now. It is too low and irrelevant for the others.

Now, companies like CorasWorks cater to the platform half. We enable these organizations to go to the next level. In our case, in the context of social collaboration, it is deploying Social Business Applications on top of this platform that deliver a new layer of value and leverage an entirely new set of technologies. This next generation of applications are designed to tap into all those zillion users, engage them, and most importantly, channel their collaborative potential into activities that drive business value.

Below we show two comparative lists of items. The ones on the left are the capabilities that the super majority (largely IT-focused) people talk about in the context of a Social Intranet. The ones on the right are the Social Business Applications that the other half (largely business group driven) talk about putting in place to leverage this collaborative work environment to achieve a business result.

When we talk to customers, we are talking about the apps on the right. The conversations are just different. They focus on specific scenarios and how you get there leveraging what we offer along with everything else the customer may have.

It is true that our solutions provide a whole new set of technologies that leverage that collaborative potential and put it to purposeful use -things like Business Activity Streams (that actually filter out social and email noise), Stage-Gate processes, Task Automation, Collaborative Management Reviews, Portfolio management, custom forms, supporting activities etc. But, they are the means to the end, not the end in and of itself.

An interesting change up is that the majority of our customers for these new solutions purchase our products and services BEFORE they deploy SharePoint 2010 in production. This is really new for the SharePoint 2010 cycle (it didn’t happen in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007). We believe that these customers absolutely get the new breakout potential for SharePoint 2010 and are immediately moving to leverage it to drive business value. In today’s world, it is a luxury to invest the time and effort on something like SharePoint 2010 for a nominal benefit. These organizations are simply looking for leverage to drive significant tangible business value.

Those that breakout

I go back to my original question, “Why would you want just a Social Intranet?”. My guess is primarily because that is what you perceive the high-end of the use case of SharePoint to be within a given view of the cost, time and risk. You are not alone. In fact, as stated above, right now you are in the majority. However, I have a feeling that at this point this position is a risk. These new technologies and the applications they spawn for purposeful collaboration are powerful. Plus, we’ve gotten a lot better at reducing the time, risk and cost to get there. SharePoint 2010 is one of the great platforms to make this happen. Those organizations that figure it out are simply going to outperform those that do not.

william

Background

Over the last year, we have driven each of these solutions forward in their own categories with at least 3 releases for each.  Each solution has its own competitor vendors.  Thus, your analyst reports treat them separately.  And, most customers see them as separate animals.  However, when you start to consider the scenarios where they work together on top of SharePoint – you begin to uncover business results magic.

The three scenarios are as follows:

- Project Collaboration

- Project Initiation, Approval, and Management

- Innovation Management

Project Collaboration

In our PPM solution, people primarily work in project sites like many other solutions.  It has all of the great structured project management features you’d expect. Yet, how much of the success of a project is based upon structured management vs. collaboration (people communicating and working together)?  80/20? 50/50? 30/70?

With Cim we have collaborative communities that can be embedded into the CorasWorks PPM project sites.  Thus, smack dab in the middle of structured project work you have a very robust collaborative community.  In addition, users can be anywhere else in SharePoint and go to their Cim Activity Stream and see, contribute, and collaborate within any or all of the project communities for all of the projects that they watch.  Even further, other people that may not be part of the specific project team can be enabled to also watch the community and help drive success.

Here is a schematic depicting a typical user experience where Kim White, a web designer, is working on multiple projects.  She only needs to go to her Activity Stream to collaborate on multiple projects.

Let’s look at the types of items that you’d find in your project community.  How about: project updates and snapshots, meeting agenda and notes, issues and resolutions, all points bulletins for required resources and responses/volunteers, technical challenges and solutions, posts of core knowledge/information, announcements of handoffs, ideas to move the project forward and discussions…

One collaborative community to handle information, communication, discussions, and resolutions to drive the success of a project by getting the team and the expanded community to work together.  (NOTE: in many of the types of posts, you have two way communication, like a question and an answer or answers).

Project Initiation, Approval and Management Workstream

I previously wrote about this scenario with a focus on the New Project Initiation part of the workstream.  That article describes the business value of having a robust front-end project initiation process so that you make sure that you are doing the right projects.

Our full demonstration shows an integrated workstream where you start with people entering their ideas for projects.  This gives them visibility and allows for robust collaboration.  Then, the projects are evaluated via the Cim Process Management site that enables management and subject matter expert collaboration.  Once approved, you are ready to go into the project execution phase.  The approved projects may be pushed into the PPM Program Management Office.  Or, they can be pushed into a PPM Project Portfolio to kick off the project.

Thus, in this scenario the two solutions are aligned in a sequential workstream.  Again, at any point users can collaborate from their Cim Activity Stream.  Accordingly, a user that proposed the project can track the entire process and be engaged via the project community in the actual execution.  This is depicted in the following schematic.

Innovation Management

This is another workstream similar in design to the scenario above but delivering a different business value – innovation success.  In a typical innovation scenario you have a number of front-end communities.  They may be standing communities or challenges that capture ideas and allow for collaboration.  Then, the ideas go through a process where they are reviewed and worked on.  The additional boxes below at the process stage represent task management.  For instance, you may assign tasks to technical teams or marketing teams whose work supports the decision process.  The users can just use SharePoint team sites or they can use CorasWorks PPM sites so that the tasks can be more thoroughly managed in a programmatic manner.  The approved ideas are then pushed into project execution phase which might be managed by a Program Management Office, a Portfolio or Program Manager, or just a Project Manager.

As in the above scenarios there can be a great deal of collaboration at the front-end, amongst managers, subject matter experts, and, delegated teams in the process phase, or, as part of the project execution phase.  This collaborative activity is all surfaced via the users Cim Activity Stream wherever they like to work.

The Wrap

Typically, we have thought of the two types of solutions as separate animals.  They have been targeted at different user groups who see themselves working in very different ways. With CorasWorks, we have now designed the solutions so that they can be naturally integrated to drive the types of scenarios noted above.  They give you the structure you need to properly manage work and the power of robust collaboration to drive the results.  And, it all works on top of one platform – SharePoint.

william