Keen Portfolios and Projects for Creatio

Keen Portfolios and Projects for Creatio (KPP) enables companies to achieve delivery excellence across their portfolios of IT and non-IT projects.

Keen Portfolios & Projects is not yet another project-management or task-management tool that is tactical in nature. Rather, KPP is a strategic portfolio-management and program-management tool for executive teams and PMOs to realize consistently successful delivery of the programs and projects for which they are responsible, even those spanning across different organizations. For classic task assignments and resource planning, project teams can continue to use whichever tactical tools they might prefer (Jira, Trello, MS Project, Monday, etc). On the Creatio platform, Keen360 recommends the SalesUp Project Management add-on as an excellent tactical-level tool.

Keen Portfolios & Projects differs from the classic PM tools by: 

1. Automating the PMO reports and communications,
2. Bringing about stakeholder alignment, especially at the leadership level, and
3. Promoting effective governance, which comes from clarifying accountability, facilitating communication, and focusing on the few metrics or indicators that really matter (i.e., separating signal from noise).

Keen Portfolios & Projects, in other words, enables the right people to have the right conversations on the right topics at the right time.  It does so via the functionality summarized below.

Use cases:

• Offices of CEO / Transformation:  Maintain visibility and accountability for projects across the organization at a level appropriate for executive leadership.  Enjoy the efficiency and effectiveness of 1) a built-to-purpose tool (as opposed to generalized storage-and-collaboration tools such as MS SharePoint), and 2) a minimum-data-entry approach (as opposed to heavy-data-entry, false-precision applications on the market from established vendors, which overly-engineered applications typically fail either to generate timely insight or to sustain adoption after roll-out). 
• CIOs & PMOs:  Keep track of your team's projects and commitments while greatly enhancing communication and partnership with your steering committees and key stakeholder groups, whether from your user community, your vendor base, and/or your non-IT leadership environment.  Enable your PMs to greatly improve their effectiveness both "upward" in the management chain and "downward" into their own workstreams and teams, even while allowing them to continue to use the tools they prefer for tactical management of backlogs and assignments.  
• Investment Teams (VCs & PE Firms):  Maintain visibility and accountability for project-oriented initiatives in your portfolio companies.  Obtain a view into the pipeline of post-sales projects, including costs and margin, as a complement to the view that you already possess for the pipeline of pre-sales leads and opportunities.  Access all information while on-the-go via native apps for Android and iOS.
• Steering Committees / Boards:  Lift the game of your PMs in terms of reporting status, making requests, and obtaining decisions in a manner that respects executive-level priorities and time pressures.  Shift attention to milestones, key deliverables, and important stakeholder groups, i.e., the things that really make a difference to successful delivery.  In other words, achieve consistent success via a pre-configured three-tier governance model that accounts for key stakeholder groups.  
• HR & HCD Leaders:  Enable PMs and their teams (i.e., evaluators and evaluatees) to schedule, conduct, and submit performance reviews within the management platform that the PMs are using regularly.  Capture ratings and feedback from both evaluators and evaluatees.  View the reports in the context of the historical data for the projects themselves.  Define what the evaluation criteria and metrics will be for any given evaluation cycle.  Complete the organization-wide evaluation cycles in a data-driven and automated fashion.  Optionally, engage in up-front project resource planning by participating with HR-specific functionality in the opportunities and cadences in the Sales organization.
• Finance Teams:  Obtain a view into how projects are accruing cost and generating margin across the entire organization.  React to early signs of negative deviations from planned budget and/or profitability.  Interact with Steering Committee members and PMs within a unified, automated system. In other words, enjoy the benefit of early signals to bad news (or good news!), with the ability to question and escalate to whichever parties in the delivery organization are most appropriate.
• PMs & Team Leads:  With rich automations for efficiency, become vastly more effective in communicating with and delivering for your leadership, your key stakeholder groups, and your own team members.  Boost your effectiveness especially in executive communications.  Devote more of your time to high-impact ("strategic") issues and risks instead of administrative tasks and mere task/schedule management.  

Key features:

• Portfolios, Programs, & Projects:  Define and maintain your hierarchies of portfolios, programs, and projects.  A portfolio might represent an initiative, an organization, and/or a department.
• Project Teams & Stakeholders:  Define and maintain the members of the delivery team(s), the program office, the steering committee, and outside stakeholders.  Keep history if what people served in which roles over time.  Use this information as a basis for status reports, project evaluations, ad hoc communications, and more.
• Snapshots & Key Success Drivers:  Focus your reporting and attention on the key factors that influence successful delivery.  Out of the box, these factors include stakeholders, scope, schedule, governance, administration, and budget/margin.  Factors can be changed to your organization's preferences or methods.  Send periodic snapshots (e.g., bi-weekly reports) to team leaders, steering committees, and outside stakeholders, as appropriate.  Keep the history of the snapshots over time for purposes of review and audit.
• Tracker Items & Finance Updates:  Capture and share standard PM updates such as logs for issues, risks, and changes; also such as financial status in terms of actuals-to-date, estimates-to-complete, and deviations from plan/budget.  
• Milestones & Deliverables:  Keep the leadership team's attention on the milestones in the schedule and the deliverables for which each project was planned, approved, and launched.  
• Communications & Escalations:  Give your PMs the ability to send info and updates via automated alerts and emails to any and all individuals, groups, or organizations that are involved in their projects.  Leverage templates as well as automations for these communications.  Keep track of escalations and resolutions in the governance structure.
• RACI / RASCI Methods:  Promote a culture of responsibility and accountability by employing the RACI / RASCI method for project deliverables.  Adjust the RACI / RASCI method itself to your own organization's preferences.
• Team Evaluations:  Enable PMs and Team Leads at the project level to conduct automated performance evaluations of all team members.  Allow all team members to submit self-evaluations.  Schedule and track sessions for evaluators and evaluatees to discuss assessments.  Roll project-by-project assessments into an organization-wide evaluation process.  Move from evaluations to actual project data with a single click.  Thereby facilitate a culture of constant learning and high performance.  
• Organization & Project Methods:  Adjust all key methods for management and reporting to your organization's preferences.  As appropriate, make further refinements on a project-by-project basis.

Notes:

• Leverage.  Keen Portfolios & Projects is powered by the no-code Creatio BPM / CRM platform.  KPP requires both a standard Creatio Platform license (Growth, Enterprise, or Unlimited) and a Creatio Productivity App license for its users.   
• Implementation.  As a pre-configured application leveraging the Creatio BPM / CRM platform,KPP is typically implemented in 12 weeks, with the duration being mainly a function of how much process-design work is desired, how much data is to be cleansed and imported, and how many non-CRM systems are to be integrated.  
• Integration.  Keen Program Governance integrates with other systems via REST APIs, OAuth, webhooks, and other modern methods. Configuration is via no-code API tools.  
• Extension.  Due to the power of the no-code Creatio BPM engine, the platform can readily be extended to support business functions other than commercial operations, if desired.