CLARIFIED for Clarizen is going mobile!

Probably you already knew that CLARIFIED for Clarizen is the reporting and analysis service for Clarizen users, offers rich dashboards and enables you to analyze your Clarizen data across all projects, using various criteria. All this within just a few mouse clicks.

But did you know it can be used as a source for bringing your reports and dashboards to your mobile phone or tablet?

We have setup dashboards in RoamBI, a mobile business intelligence solution that transforms data from major BI Systems into dashboard-style mobile analytics for iPhone or iPad, for one of our customers using our CLARIFIED for Clarizen service.

Besides using RoamBI other third party (mobile) BI or reporting solutions can be used to create your own dashboards and make it accessible on any device. Similar to monitoring the financial markets on TV, you now can focus on the Clarizen metrics that matters most to you.

Interested? Please contact me via H.O.Israel@BI-Architects.nl or visit our clarified.biz portal for more information and to start your trial today!

New CLARIFIED for Clarizen product video

Today we have released a new CLARIFIED for Clarizen product video.



Visit our website at www.clarified.biz for more information about CLARIFIED for Clarizen.

Working with graphs in Clarified is easy!

Create a project performance chart within a few clicks.

The following demo shows you the ease of use of the Clarified Excel file. In this demo we use the Clarified Excel and MS Excel pivot table functionality.



Click here to go to the Clarified for Clarizen website.

Clarified for Clarizen published in Apps Marketplace

With great enthusiasm we introduce the Analysis and Reporting extension CLARIFIED for Clarizen to you. Working closely with Clarizen, BI Architects developed this extension. We developed it for Clarizen customers who require extensive analysis of their Clarizen project data and/or in need of extensive reporting features including dashboards and KPI's. The extension is published today in the Clarizen Apps Marketplace here.

Click here to sign up for a FREE 30-Day Trial.


The Clarizen Extension

The extension enables you to analyze your Clarizen data across all projects, using various criteria from a management point of view (highlights, KPI’s) or with detailed views for specific projects (Trends, EVA, CPI, SPI, Milestones etc.). All this within just a few mouse clicks. You can think of criteria like: Customers, Employees, Time periods, Project types and Task types.

To mention some examples what this analysis might bring you:
• Analysis on task types helps you to make reliable estimates for new projects
• Analysis by employee allows you to compare the performance with colleagues
• Analysis of project types will help you better determine what types of projects are successful and
  which are less successful
• Analysis on customers gives you insight into the profitability of customers.

Click here to download our Clarified for Clarizen brochure.

BI Architects uses TurtoiseSVN for version and source control

BI Architects (BIA) is the Business Intelligence specialist in Commodity Trading and uses the following tools:

• Microsoft: development and database tools for developing solutions
• Clarizen Online Project Management software: project management
• Turtoise Subversion: revision control, version control and source control software

In this blog I would like to write about source/version control and the way we handle source/version control within our company. As mentioned we use TurtoiseSVN. TortoiseSVN is an easy-to-use SCM / source control software for Microsoft Windows and Apache. It is implemented as a Windows shell extension, which makes it integrate seamlessly into the Windows explorer.

It is developed under the GPL. Which means it is completely free, including the source code. But just in case you don't know the GPL too well: you can use TortoiseSVN to develop commercial applications or just use it in your company without any restrictions.

TortoiseSVN is a Subversion client and therefore has all the features of Subversion itself, including:

• Most current CVS features.
• Directories, renames, and file meta-data are versioned.
• Commits are truly atomic.
• Branching and tagging are cheap (constant time) operations.
• Efficient handling of binary files.

BI-Architects mainly uses the following TurtoiseSVN functionality:

• New solutions are created as folders in the TurtoiseSVN database.
• Via the update functionality we update our local instance with the newest (committed) database version of the solution.
• Via the commit functionality we store the updated or improved version (including the end of day situation) in the subversion database.
• Release versions are controled by using tag functionality

With using TurtoiseSVN BIA has control on software development. More information on TurtoiseSVN can be found here.

Clarizen in top 25 most important Online PM Software

Clarizen, the online project management solution, was selected as one of the top 25 of the most important Online project Management Apps by GetApp.com. The infographic on Top Online Project Management Software can be found here.

BI Architects uses Clarizen for managing its projects and has developed a BI solution for Clarizen. More on our BI solution can be found in this blog Business Intelligence extension for Clarizen.

Clarizen posts BI Architects video to Social Media

We were very happy to see the posts of Clarizen, leading global provider of collaborative online project management software, in the Social Media referring to the video we made of our Clarizen BI Solution.

Thank you, Hilee Avrahami of Clarizen, for bringing this video to your customers and followers attention!

Here you can have another look at our video:



Our Business Intelligence solution for Clarizen adds reporting functionality that helps the project managers monitor, track and report project progress (including KPI's and earned values), the finance department enable swift and correct detailed invoicing and the management team gaining direct insight in the performance/profitability of projects.

For more information about the extension for Clarizen please contact our sales manager Erik Rongen-Kleintjens (E.Rongen-Kleintjens@bi-architects.nl).

Hermann-Otto Israël

BI Architects project manager

Business Intelligence extension for Clarizen - Presentation

Two weeks ago i posted about the Clarizen's online project management software. In the presentation below our Business Intelligence extension for Clarizen is described.

For more information about the extension for Clarizen please contact our sales manager Fred Booms (f.booms@bi-architects.nl)


Hermann-Otto Israël
BI Architects project manager

BI solution additional to use of Clarizen's online project mgt software

BI Architects develops Business Intelligence solutions for its customers. Furthermore it has developed BI solutions for managing its own business processes, such as the solution that helps the project managers monitor, track and report project progress (including KPI's and earned values), the finance department enable swift and correct detailed invoicing and the management team gaining direct insight in the performance/profitability of projects.


BI Architects has chosen the Clarizen's online project management software for the registration of customers, projects, milestones, tasks and writing time. The Clarizen tool takes care of the complete project administration/resource management/and much plus it gives basic insight in performance via reporting. What it lacks is giving a more detailed insight in the performance of project phases over projects (for comparing project performances and quality improvement), earned values (current status and expected outcome) of projects and more figures needed for project management that are available without starting reports, setting parameters, running the report and opening the result in MS Excel.


What we have done is developing a standard Microsoft SQL Server Integrated Services/SQL Server Analysis Services (SSIS/SSAS) solution that adds what we miss in the Project Management tooling. SSIS is used for the extraction, transformation and loading of data from the Clarizen database into a staging environment (dimension tables), while SSAS delivers actionable insights (cubes and its dimensions) and made available via a pivot table in Microsoft Excel.


All information is now available via MS Excel and on the fly customizable serving several purposes within the BI Architects (project) organization.


For more information on our project management BI solution please contact me via H.O.Israel@bi-architects.nl . For more information on Clarizen's online project management software go to Clarizen.com .


Hermann-Otto Israel
BI Architects project manager

Projects and customer involvement

How to make a success of your project? When looking for the answer on this question and using the keywords “project management success factors” in Google’s search engine I have found a lot solutions. Most of the found blogs, articles and other descriptions were written by solution providers (IT infrastructure and software) and aimed on using a specific project management method, for instance Prince2, to ensure project success.

But does this project success also result in a happy customer?

INTRODUCTION

A few weeks ago I have read a story on managing projects from the customer side. It was a real eye-opener. Why do we do projects for our customers? Just to make a lot of money by serving our customers solutions without considering if it is value for the business or is it because we do want to implement a solution that delivers added value to business. Is it quantity (lots of worked hours) or quality (a happy customer).

PUT THE CUSTOMER FIRST

It is clear that we have to deliver a solution to fulfill the customer’s need, but we have to ensure and keep ensuring that we have customer involvement in our projects. Research by the Standish group has shown that the customer is most influential on project success. The customer (executive, sponsor and user) is for 34,5% the success factor for successful projects, while the project team of project management are less influential. 

HOW TO DO THAT?

The greatest challenge in making projects successful is answering the question how to put the customer first and involved in the realization of the product or solution.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

To enable/ensure customer involvement our specialists work a few days on the Floor. While working among the end users or business representatives during design, development or testing/acceptance communication lines are kept short.

Our BI projects cannot be successful if we do not have an involved customer. BI projects are something you have to do with your customers, because this something you do for them. For us this is the key success factor in our projects and that is something we would like to share.

In the near future we will subject more of these Project Management and Customer Quality topics in this blog.

Hermann-Otto Israël

BI Architects specialist

Welcome to our blog!

Welcome! Before we describe what you can get from reading our new blog, we want to introduce ourselves to anyone new to this space. BI Architects is a specialist in Business Intelligence Solutions and is located in the Netherlands. Our mission is to offer customized Business Intelligence and System Integration, through honest advice and implementation projects where quality, commitment, up to date knowledge and understanding in and optimizing of the processes of our customers stands central.

What can you find at the BI Architects blog? Our blogging team will cover a wide-range of Business Intelligence topics, including Dimensional Modeling, System Integration, Project Management, News, Information on trends, and more. Check back on a regular basis to read about:

• Project Management approaches in Business Intelligence projects
• Business Intelligence with online Project Management software from Clarizen
• Business Intelligence in Trading & Risk Management with Commodity XL (CXL) from Triple Point
• Sharepoint 2010 dashboard solutions
• Innovations in Business Intelligence software

Our blogging team will also describe practical solutions for challenges we have with tools like:

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• SQL Server
• SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
• SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
• SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
• Sharepoint 2010
• etc.

So, enjoy reading, and don’t forget to comment. We want to hear from you.

The BI Architects Blogging Team