Strategic Procurement Automated RFP Evaluation

This tool is focused on managing the strategic procurement process in support of implementation planning. It manages details behind RFP stages as PRISM tracks the stages as single deliverables. Strategic procurement reflects the methodology to make sure the requirements for the product as well as the proposal / bidding process are clearly defined as well as validated. It also provides an audit trail of due diligence and fair competition that protects against any potential vendor objections to the selection of a competitor proposal that could delay projects. SPARE incorporates detailed scoring and financial analysis processing of competitive proposals.

Requirements Elicitation, Verification, Execution, And Linking

This course uses a tool to manage the requirements analysis process to make sure business needs are reflected and implemented in applications software. REVEAL supplements the PRISM tracking process to manage details that may clutter status reporting, to link detailed requirements with specific implementation steps. The nature of these steps depends on the type of project involved: the related methodology is focused on a hierarchical elaboration of requirements to define exactly what must be achieved. You can associate REVEAL with detailed SPRITE project management to track specific steps where a requirement is executed. The objective is that no requirements are overlooked.

Project Requirements Implementation Cost Estimates

This course is focused on highly detailed cost estimating by analyzing requirements, using PRICE as a tool to perform complex calculations for large multi-year project initiatives with annualized financial cash flow projections. One of the challenges for project managers is to create project budgets without sufficient detail to know how much work is involved in completing the work effort. While this tool does not magically generate budget details, it does help you to organize a budget in a way that facilitates reconciliation, and it allows you incorporate “what if” logic in spreadsheets to develop budgets. The challenge is that with automation tools it is easy to get carried away with features and complexity: that is one of many penalties you end up paying when people try to force solutions because they can get away with it. The theory is illustrated with our Excel™-VBA tools that increase this dynamic with complete Bill Of Materials functionality.

Swim-lanes Process Operations Review Technique

Many process modeling methodologies utilize the concept of swim lanes as a mechanism to organize activities into separate visual categories in order to illustrate different functional capabilities or responsibilities. With this tool you are able to focus on the activities and have the diagrams drawn automatically. When used to diagram a business process that involves more than one department, the analysis can clarify not only the steps and who is responsible for each step, but how delays, mistakes or conflicts are most likely to occur. Swimlanes.xls is a simple Excel™-based solution that is easy to implement in almost any organization where MS-Office is standard. This tool is used to map operational processes to analyze how processes can be transformed and streamlined.

Generate Automated Test Execution Scripts

This functionality represents a radical change from traditional test execution management and test automation. A major challenge for test script writing how to manage changes to be incorporated into the scripts and to be ready before testing actually has to start. GATES methodology handles that challenge top down to manage change approvals that should be reflected in the scripts to make sure that what is built is what the client asked for, yet work out the details bottom-up to make sure all combinations and permutations are reflected. GATES can use a common repository to generate manual scripts, automation scripts, and test-harness scripts as required, and to update/age data conditions to match what should be in database files – which is the most volatile aspect of any testing. This course explores what the project manager must know to prevent end-of-project crunches and the risk that testing exploses major deficiencies that cause the software to be rejected.

Timed Input & Load Testing

This tool is focused on managing quality assurance testing to confirm that the products match client expectations. Core functionality includes generating transaction and driver files, but that same basic functionality can be extended to manual and automated test execution, in order to confirm that the implemented products meet or exceed stakeholder expectations. TILT supports smaller loads for manual testing, generating test scripts for people to execute, and it supports different options for test automation (directly or as a front-end tool to generate input for specialized test automation drivers) and batch-application test execution.

This financial analysis modeling process is much simpler in nature, to build business cases that justify projects. This course explains the use of a basic financial analysis template to compute the results necessary in support of any project business case and is to show how to enter data and to use these calculations as is, or how to adapt these calculations to a special purpose analysis that is relevant to your specific initiative. The goal is to end up with a result that is self-contained with all your assumptions documented in a way that others can work with the information as required. One point to consider (and illustrated in the course) is that your information should include any external references used for input, so that someone later on can revisit these sources to update the information.

Simulate Concepts In Excel Native Computing Environment

This versatile estimating tool has an enhanced simulation engine that lets you drive Excel™ models to evaluate different types of analyses, and it keeps track of relationships between parameters defined as ranges, so that it can calculate and graph the results over a range of estimates. This can be used to optimize the solution space and set parameters for conventional estimating and budgeting, or to compare implementation of alternative technologies defined within an Excel™ worksheet. For example, you may combine values into a deterministic report or graph that shows the optimal approach for a network design or other infrastructure. You can refine the model with updated vendor price quotes to know instantly the impact on a project.