We took SharePoint and made it do all sorts of great things for CA PPM.

See how you can work with CA PPM easier and faster via our suite of SharePoint integrated solutions. The Boss suite provides an integrated system designed to provide CA PPM clients exactly what they need to attain, refine, consume, share, and to be mobile.

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Webinar topics – the great things you can do via SharePoint.

• CA PPM documents and team collaboration.
• CA PPM Dynamic Portlets made easy – No coding needed.
• CA PPM tasks – 6 ways to update & sync.
• Agile Solution – Manage Agile tasks via our PPM Scrum tool.
• CA PPM Timesheets – Enter/update time where and how you want.
• Ideation for CA PPM – Enterprise wide Idea management.
• PPM Boss solutions now available via the Office 365 store.

 

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The webinar was a huge success with our valued partner in the UK CQC Solutions, We had the best Question & Answer session to date from any of our previous webinars. Federico Pena Bio (seen in the left pic) knocked it out of the park, and provided clear informative answers to all the questions, see the transcript below.

 

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Our Twitter hashtag #CAXOG includes all sorts of info and links to some of the resources and tools mentioned from the webinar.  Additionally, there is a thread at CA Communities that has several examples/scripts and a review of XOG & Query Bridge that was used during this webinar: https://communities.ca.com/message/241757789#241757789  

The slide presentation for this webinar can be downloaded here.

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS TRANSCRIPT:

Q – What is Federico using for running the XOG?
A – See #CAXOG We have a tool called the ZOG & Query Bridge. It allows single or multiple ZOG requests, with XSLT support. See Min 32:09 for a quick demo of the XOG & Query client for CA PPM http://www.itroisolutions.com/xog-sql-query-ca-ppm …

Q – Is the web-based CA PPM XOG client version of this tool available at no cost?
A – Yes it is, here you go http://www.itroisolutions.com/xog-sql-query-ca-ppm also if you are in the US, I
have a Desktop version I can mail you – if in Europe CQC Solutions has some they can mail if you like. Or, you can download the XOG & Query Bridge desktop version here.

Q – Are there any XOG Bridge Examples and Documents on the site we can start with?
A – #CAXOG Here is the link to the XSLT Examples and Tips & Tricks file: http://www.itroisolutions.com/xog-sql-query-ca-ppm

Q – Is there any way for the XOG not to output all the data (views, lookups, etc). We have had cases where not just 1 object is in the output XML, even when trying to read only 1 custom object that we had to migrate.
A – See Min 21:55 for the detailed answer.

Q – Have you considered using RegEx in NP++ instead of XSLT?
A – See min 28:05 for the detailed answer. We have, we found Regular Expressions are not quite as flexible as XSLT. The primary purpose of XSLT is to manipulate XML data. The problem we found with Regular Expressions is that with one simple character, you can kill something and not know it. XSLT is structured in an easier way, allowing you to manipulate XML files much easier.

Q – How do you auto-submit or auto-approve financial plans via a process or gel script? Any example you can send would be greatly appreciated.
A – Please reach out to our support team and they can send you some GEL Scripts. – It will use XOG to auto approve – also a GEL/ Integration Best Practices webinar is on the docket for April 22nd.

Q – Can you please provide some options and detail regarding XOG actuals to CA PPM?  Via transaction object or timesheet object.
A – See min 25:00 for the detailed answer- YES – both are supported ways to get actual into CA PPM. Please reach out to our support team for some examples.

Q – How do you exclude a parent object when reading?
A – See Min 30:00 for the detailed answer.

Q – Does version number in the header tag actually makes a difference? We’ve used from 8 to 13 and seen no change in the way the data is moved or shown.
A – See Min 26:47 for the detailed answer. Only if the version in your header is greater than your CA PPM version.

Q – Can we get API to XOG action items?
A – Yes, but there is limitations. See Min 31:00 for the detailed answer.

Q – Regarding performance of processes in Clarity PPM that use XSLT, would you recommend them? We’ve seen a heavy impact on run times of our processes that have custom scripts. Any tips regarding performance?
A – See Min 40:37 for the detailed complex answer. This is Gel related question. If Gel is not written correctly, it will be your worst nightmare.

Q – OK I might be skipping ahead, but regarding autonumbers in CA PPM, how do you go about them when they are not custom objects? I know for a fact that customs can be easily done with a few header settings but in ideas/projects it doesn’t seem to work the same way (we’ve actually had to use some procedures to get next IDs and such…)
A – See Min 35:50 for the detailed complex answer.

Q – You didn’t make it to the Query API section, but can you discuss how you approach the 10000 node limit if returned data?
A – See min 56:29 for the detailed answer. That is an application restriction, because it’s not on the Query API.

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IT-ROI Solutions are working on several SharePoint (On-Premise and Online) projects. We are constantly looking for updates on software development technologies to provide a better user experience (UX) with our SharePoint integration products.

This post is going to show you the approach to build a SharePoint Front-end application that could be reused in different SharePoint distributions: SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online.

Sometimes SharePoint native components are not enough to create highly interactive applications, we must provide new mechanisms for developing these kinds of applications.

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Suppose we must manage any JSON configuration at the SharePoint side, and suppose that the configuration requires complex user controls, additionally, this application needs to interact with external legacy systems. Of course, we could create a new web part in SharePoint for this purpose, but what if we need to reuse this application in SP On-Premise and SP Online? Then trouble arises because our C# approach and server side development are not valid approaches for SP Online scenarios, so we chose to build a Single Page Application(SPA) which allows us to reuse the same complex Front-end code in both SP distributions: On-Premise and Online.

Recently, we started a new project and one of the most important requirements was that our product should run over SP On-Premise and SP Online distributions. So we decided to develop a Single Page Application, in this way, we can reuse our front-end code for both SharePoint environments: On-Premise and Online.

The architecture of our solution looks like the following UML components diagram:

As you can see, the front-end component is agnostic to the SharePoint distribution, whereas the requests to the server are made with modern AJAX fetch instead of XMLHttpRequest object. In SharePoint, we write our SP logic and share data with front-end side via JSON.

The next view shows technologies involved in the project:

We choose Microsoft TypeScript as the programming language. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript which means that all we can do with JavaScript is covered with TypeScript and more. Aspects as Microsoft support, strong type checking, easy code refactoring, Object Oriented Programming enhancements by adding classes and interfaces and support for new ES6 features makes TypeScript a highly configurable tool for web development. The TypeScript compiler trans piles written code to JavaScript that is the final programming language the browser executes.

Another important tool we selected is Facebook’s React library. We included React for create views components and improve user interactivity, with server side rendering of react we can provide some preloaded data to the Front-end tier. Additionally, we used Redux for application state management, Redux allowed us to work with programming logic out of the React views, this way, we could reuse programming logic between different GUI components. Finally, we selected Office UI Fabric as the Microsoft Official framework for building the user interface, Office UI Fabric provides a set of UI components such as: Buttons, DatePicker, CommandBar, ContextualMenu  and many more…

In part 2 of this blog, I going to show how to create a basic Single Page Application with architecture and technologies shown in this post.

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Check out IT-ROI’s SharePoint integration technologies:

• Integration suite for CA PPM
• Integration suite for ServiceNow
• Integration suite for HP PPM

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The need to implement CA PPM inside an organization normally surges from wanting to replace an existing tool or shifting their project management methodology towards a tool such as CA PPM.

Implementation issues arise when they want to model the exact same formats, fields and workflows without keeping in mind the tool’s native functionality. Organizations also focus on carrying out an implementation that meets all the requirements and encompasses the entire project in a single phase.

All of this leads to project failure because:

• Not all functionalities are utilized, for example best practices aligned to PMI with the PMO accelerator.
• Implementation of functionalities which are not used.
• Makes the tool unintuitive for end users that leads to them not using it.

As an alternative, strategies can be presented so that these types of implementations tend not to fail:

Have an expert consultant team – An experienced team can advise the client on the decisions regarding the requirements that could and should be implemented according to the client’s needs.

Divide and Conquer – From my experience, this is a strategy that I find valuable and successful. It begins by implementing at different stages, so that end users can start to learn to use the tool and start giving it proper use, while carrying out best practices according to the PMI for effective project management.

Here is a previous client’s implementation business case, where a 15-month rollout was carried out in four stages:

• Implementing Foundations (resources/users/OBS).
• Implementing ideas/projects and data migration.
• Implementing the portfolios module, creating personalized objects and reports.
• Implementing the financial module and integrations.

For each stage, the following cycle is repeated:

Requirement Gathering > Design > Construction > Tests > and then the move to Production.

This cycle provides maturity for the client regarding CA PPM use, and it clearly establishes their needs that translates into requirements which are helpful for user adoption and to carry out a successful joint implementation.

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Check out more great CA PPM tips & tricks on our blog:

> CA PPM Functional Knowledge Base

> CA PPM Technical Knowledge Base

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All companies, no matter its origin, whether its public or private, have business strategies based on growth, resource generation and the wellbeing of its people. With a mission to provide quality products and services that meet the demanding conditions of its clients and customers alike while delivering the implied value promise. This quest for excellence has led companies to implement business management systems that support the organizational processes in an easy and efficient way.

Thus, companies articulate and integrate with each of these systems to attain their value promise in operational feasibility and efficiency represented in organizational productivity.

Likewise, the implementation and correct management of said systems present challenges for everyone at the company. The increased complexity and the scope of the organizational process with the business systems all of a sudden challenge workers to get the most value from management input and business operations.

These challenges are organized into 4 different roles of decision makers within the company:

• Managers: Those workers inside the company over whom the responsibility for purchasing and executing the tools falls.
• Users: All those members who must use the tool to visualize information, as well as manage and manipulate the data inside the system.
• Technical: The people in charge of installing, supporting and administering the tool’s functionality.
• Economical: Corresponds to the financial decision makers regarding the acquisition of the tool.
  

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The above identified challenges for each role in the purchase and implementation process for a tool are described:

Each of these challenges represents an opportunity for improving the implementation of organizational processes through business systems. The question the purchase decision making team must answer is – These challenges existed when we bought the tool, so, how have we solved them day-to-day in the organization? Perhaps, the answer to this question lies in a representative analysis of the operational costs of their organization.

By implementing a management or operational support tool, as was mentioned earlier, the company was looking to increase its productivity and efficiency. It’s possible that, at this point, the company feels these goals have been met, and the challenges have been overlapped with a greater or lesser degree of difficulty. But, which actions have they executed to that end?

Easy access to the information

In the competitive business world, decision making becomes an advantage differentiator, but for that, the strategic and tactical levels in their organization require having the right information. Maybe their company invested in a tool with the goal that all their processes were storing information in their system. Now, accessing said information has become complex. First, you must pay for a license to access the system; second, you must identify the type of report you need to have and find the relevant data, finding its source of information and even building it. This takes training time and action execution time, which represents expenditure and delays, money which will go directly to the operational cost and will affect your productivity indicators.

Pertinence of the information

Good business management systems/tools are based on understanding the challenges of each of the agents in the business management process. And, through simple processes, allow to improve organizational productivity, reducing operational times, information procrastination and generating the required knowledge for effective and efficient decision making, in an ever-changing business environment.

Tool learning curve

A change always exists, resistance to it will arise, the learnt way of doing things, although not very efficient, it generates the trust of experience in the people within the organization. Each new business management tool represents a challenge in learning time, mistakes made, and all of this translated into costs, that results in affecting the company’s performance.

To help in the transition, IT-ROI aims for the operationalization of said tools to be made in friendly environments that are known by the users through the use of interfaces and unidirectional and bidirectional integrations with Microsoft systems such as Excel and SharePoint. Facilitating the learning process for workers, reducing tool adoption time and mistakes made, increasing productivity.

More credentials

A new tool means more licenses required for the organization, the question that arises from this is – what do you need people to do in your system? The answer can be as varied with profiles you find inside your company. There will be those who require administering the system or manipulating information inside it. You’ll also have profiles that only require visualizing the information and/or modifying simple information. Because of this, it’s important to keep in mind the types and amount of licenses you need to purchase, or rely on information and collaborative systems so your organization can save on licensing expenditures.

Operational overcharges

A successful company continually searches for that competitive edge, and thus, productivity becomes a strategic goal. The overcharges caused by the implementation of a new system directly affects productivity, so it is essential to reduce the costs of operating the system, thus profiting to the maximum benefits of the investment.

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Check out this short animated video on leveraging Microsoft SharePoint and Excel as your business content management system.

 

 

 

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Related Topic: 3 Simple Steps That Will Help Improve Your Managerial Information Process

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Stop fishing for the right information and see how you can improve your data-driven decision making and reporting capabilities in less than 14 minutes.

Check out the “How to Get Reliable and Real-time CA PPM Reports via SharePoint and Excel Webinar” clip.

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The clip primarily covers the demo portions from the webinar, including:

• The benefits of using Microsoft SharePoint and Excel as your enterprise reporting solution.
• How to display CA PPM data via Microsoft Excel very quickly and in a repeatable manner.
• How to build reports from your CA PPM data and display them in SharePoint in real-time

> MP4 version (opens and plays in a new tab)

 

WEBINAR FULL VERSION
(With the PDF slide presentation available to download)

WATCH IT NOW

The full version of the webinar includes the following topics:

• Data-driven decision making importance and challenges.
• The 4 big “V” enemies of managing your data.

• Solutions to help make decision making easier and more effective.
• Demo – How to visualize all your CA PPM data in SharePoint and Excel with consistent “real time” information.
  
• Demo – How to put everything together from multiple applications to create one holistic view.

Here is a short animated video all about Bob and his daily struggles with enterprise content management and decision making. The video outlines our ServiceNow and CA PPM to SharePoint Integration suite (ecBoss) and how it makes sense to leverage SharePoint as your single source Enterprise Content Management system.

Integration with SharePoint allows organizations to get maximum value from their SharePoint implementation by seamlessly integrating their enterprise systems to get a single view of their content that matters most. The integration effectively transforms SharePoint into your single source Enterprise Content Management system that everyone can use, with enhanced content management and reporting.

We hope you enjoy the video as much as we enjoyed creating it.

 

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More Info: ServiceNow Integration with SharePoint

More Info: CA PPM Integration with SharePoint

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Related Content: Top 4 Challenges in Enterprise Content Management – ECM

“If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles”, Sun Tzu

At some point in life, every person in this world has been forced to make a decision whether it’s what they’re having for breakfast or even to decide who they’ll marry, decisions are a daily thing in life for all human beings. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines Decision as “a determination arrived at after consideration”, or more simply put, it’s choosing between 2 or more alternatives. These decisions depend on situation, circumstances, objectives, goals, and the expected results. But decision-making affects not only the lives of human beings, they’re also present in the business world, and this is where we’ll focus.

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Image from lifeder.com

The days of the industrial revolution are far behind us, where changes transcendental for mankind took place on the economic, social and technological fields, times when monopolies existed and the environment was smooth and silky. Today, companies around the world are faced with a hostile and changing world, an environment where globalization allows the exchange of information to be faster than ever imagined, and it’s here where data starts being part of the winning equation when supporting decision making.

Trends like BI (Business Intelligence) and Big Data allow managers to make decisions with a very low uncertainty margin. Although Big Data is a more actual concept than BI, it’s giving new life to business intelligence by offering the power of prediction to those in charge of making decisions every day. Predictive analytics was something used exclusively by some data statisticians and scientists dedicated to tasks which had nothing to do with business intelligence and entrepreneurial decision making. But Big Data is about to change that.

The more data flows that connect and integrate in the existing business intelligence systems, CRM, ERP, PPM and other critical mission systems, the closer we are to achieving a single 360° view of the client.

The big majority of companies, whether they are large, medium or small, even if it isn’t visible to the human eye, swim in a sea of data. This is because companies store data in different repositories, whether text files, spreadsheets, databases, emails and now even social media; but the fact that they’re swimming in a sea of data doesn’t mean that the information they have is of the best quality. First, the data must be processed and turned into information, which leads decision makers to have the knowledge that allows companies to reach goals more efficiently. In the following graph, you can see the knowledge pyramid, which represents the structural models between data, information and knowledge showing a relation between the amount of data and the quality they must have.

Data

Data is the base of the pyramid, and as we mentioned previously, here we can find different origins such as spreadsheets, text documents, databases, emails and data stored on social media. But this sea of data doesn’t contribute anything if it can’t be visualized in a proper way, and this is where IT departments begin to suffer with requests for reports from each of the departments or business lines within a company. Some of the queries which must be built to visualize this information can be quite complex and impact on very ample development times, and generally they can disturb the performance of the servers where this data is stored and this entails that sometimes the information won’t be available at the time it’s really needed.

For that reason, it’s at this point where business intelligence methodologies like Inmon and Kimball could be used to help manipulate data to be stored in places like data warehouse’s or data marts, and may be visualized in a correct way without impacting transactional databases that operate on a day to day of the company.

Information

After having the data identified and processed, the next level is that of information, which is constituted by a group of data already supervised and arranged, but what’s really important of keeping this data organized is that it provides the following advantages for information:

• Makes necessary information available at the opportune time.
• Facilitates communication and coordination between different actors, in the scope of risk management.
• Enables cleaner, more effective decision making.
• Maximizes use of information resources.
• Preserves historical memory.
• Contributes to identify and divulge learned lessons.
• Potentiates and stimulates the formation of human resources and investigation processes.
• Promotes the creation of synergies through networks based on knowledge.

This information can be seen on reports, which can show: patterns, trends, relations, associations, and even predictions, as long as these are well developed and achieve the goal they set out for, which is to visualize the data correctly. Generally, business intelligence models are built to support decision making with historical data, but at this stage, big data tools begin to fit perfectly because they can help process data in real-time and not just historical data. It’s here in this stage where data analysis or data mining gain strength.

Until not so long ago, advanced analytics, big data and unstructured data were reserved for the more specialized nucleus of IT departments. Users in the organization had to conform, at best, with transactional data that was provided with a skewed vision of reality.

The percentage of those who knew of the operations and even of the client who they frequently dealt with was limited to their action scope, and the efficiency suffered. It’s difficult to get it right with decision making when you only know part of the problem.

Big data has meant a change. This transformation begins to broaden the business users’ vision (from middle managers to supervisors, going through other employees in contact with the consumer, for example, through their work in client services. Non-transactional data is put on their hands for them to exploit for strategic decision making in the long run and in the immediate present.

Knowledge

The next level is knowledge, which is the intangible asset that yields the most competitivity for nations and organizations in a global economy. Bill Gates said, “Knowledge management is nothing more than managing information flow, getting the right information to the people who need it so that they can act on it quickly”. With companies, this knowledge makes them more competitive and efficient at the time of making decisions to achieve their goals. On Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, he said “The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition”. This knowledge may be useful on issues such as:

• Client typology.
• Shopping baskets.
• Contact frequency.
• Client potential.
• Loyalty degree.
• Market share.
• Client satisfaction.

Knowledge yields a very ample impact on the organization because it’s very hard to imitate among its competitors, it’s too costly to emulate and gives the company a highly differential point for the clients making them efficient and effective at the time of achieving their goals.

Intelligence

And at the top of the pyramid, corporate intelligence, which is based in the recollection and analysis of information that facilitates decision making, be it to anticipate a future event (like a new investment) or to provide solutions to a particular problem or conflict situation. In this new era, key activities are listening and analyzing, because everyone has information, but extracting practical knowledge from huge amounts of data requires a scientific methodology. Intuition or mental models no longer suffice to be successful, which is why it’s necessary to have more people within an organization with the capacity to analyze, aside from having the right technological tools, because a world rich in data is an open and very competitive world.

For that reason, decision makers in this phase must be able to differentiate very well between tactic and strategy, which, although always together, don’t mean the same thing, and it’s very common for companies to mistake them at the time of execution. Corporate intelligence has the only mission of routing the company towards the path that costs less and provides more input for the fulfillment of its entrepreneurial goals.

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In conclusion

Peter Drucker once said, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” This doesn’t mean that just by making a courageous decision all companies will be successful, but something certain in this phrase is that, someone at some point, in this successful company, left fear behind and was determined to make a courageous decision. Deciding with high uncertainty causes a lot of fear at the time and this is why data is there to reduce said uncertainty.

We live in a globalized world where, thanks to the Internet, we can find abundant information to document ourselves and be able to make a decision. Tools like Google Trends, SimilarWeb, and WooRank, which are freely accessible, help validate market trends, company website traffic behavior, average time a person spends on the website as well as many more benefits.

This type of information may help growing companies to know more about themselves and their competitors, and this knowledge enable business managers to have a high action range to lead their companies.

And this takes us to the specific importance of technology. It’s true that it’s a fundamental variable for the appropriate management of information besides it putting up high barriers to competitor entrance and gives a certain feeling that things are being done well, but we must not forget that technology is not the ends but the means through which companies may reach efficient decision making, and this is where a leader’s intuition also becomes relevant in the process.

As an example, let’s take Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app. If a driver needs to go across the city from one end to the other, the app suggests the most optimal route to reach their destination, but this app doesn’t take into account places that are unsafe for private vehicles to be in, and this is where the driver’s intuition comes in to make a decision. If they take the fastest route regardless of it being unsafe, or if they’d rather follow the route that takes more time but doesn’t expose them to any type of danger. Intuition and experience will always play an important part in decision making because, in a certain way, experience is knowledge and this knowledge can be transformed into intelligence.

Related Topic: 3 Simple Steps That Will Help Improve Your Managerial Information Process

References:

• http://www.fundacionseres.org/Lists/Informes/Attachments/959/150528%20Big%20Data%20ES%20Completo%202015.pdf
• https://tecno.americaeconomia.com/articulos/5-razones-de-por-que-big-data-y-la-analitica-son-importantes-para-tu-empresa
• http://blog.powerdata.es/el-valor-de-la-gestion-de-datos/como-big-data-aporta-inteligencia-de-negocio-y-mejora-tu empresautm_content=54612704&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
• http://www.fticonsulting-latam.com/~/media/Files/emea–files/insights/brochures/inteligencia-corporativa.pdf
• https://trends.google.es/trends/