Epic Project Management

As the owner of Epico, I'm here to tell you about an awesome business tool that will help Project Managers and Small Business Owners go from Zero to Hero by seamlessly moving from Excel to SharePoint! Bottom line up front, although this solution is customized, IT IS AFFORDABLE! How do I know? I set my own prices, so I'll work within your budget... Too Easy!

Have you ever wanted to live in or do business in Hawai'i? I know I do! To get there, let's say your company was just awarded a $700K contract with two military bases in Hawai'i, Hickam Air Force Base and Pearl Harbor. As you've always done with past projects, you pull up the previous Excel project schedule tracker (like the one below), click "save as", rename the file, and off you go. You're always overly cautious in Excel worksheets and the new assistant Project Manager wants to help you track this one (it's in Hawai'i... who wouldn't want to help?!). If it was just you touching the worksheet, you're safe, but one accidental change to a cell and you have a mess trying to find the last version... I've been there, trust me!

In walks Epico with this solution to save the day! We took your Excel tracker and rebuilt it in SharePoint! Here are 3 AWESOME BENEFITS to using it:

Benefit #1: The image below has the same entries on your Excel tracker. The difference with SharePoint is what you see on the screen cannot be deleted by accident. Unlike and better than Excel, you have to purposefully edit an entry to make changes.

Benefit #2: Tasks are highlighted based on the phase of the schedule (e.g., Pre-Start of the contract is pink, Phase 1 is teal, Phase 2 is orange, Phase 3 is green, and Project End is again pink). If a task needs to move from one phase to another, just edit the entry and change the phase... Too Easy! SharePoint will automatically re-color the entry plus regroup all entries based on your changes.

Benefit #3: With SharePoint you can enter the total days to automatically calculate the number of weeks and hours for each task. If the task is billable or not, it's conditionally highlighted with red text/shaded gray. Now, you can quickly determine how many people you will need for each task. From the image below, the Quality Assurance Plan in Phase 1 has a total of 608 hours for 25 calendar days. When you divide that by 120 (3 weeks at 40 hours per week), you get 5. Now, you can plan to assign 5 people on this task to meet the timeline... Too Easy!

I know I said, "3 AWESOME BENEFITS", but I have to point out one more... The entries can expand and collapse in SharePoint so less scrolling up and down! In time, you won't need to see past phases, so just click the "down arrow" (left of the Phase) and you're done!

Yeah, yeah... I know I said, "3 AWESOME BENEFITS" and then gave you one more, but this LAST ONE (I promise) I just had to share! With just a click, you can switch to a Calendar View of the same tasks and ALL of your highlights will show with no extra input!

In the calendar view above, you can clearly see that your first task is to setup team user accounts on 3 Jan. All other tasks taking place in Jan and early Feb are color coded by their respective Phases... Too Easy Again!

This solution is centrally managed and can be accessed by all members of your team. If you just want them to have "Read Only" access, done! Suppose you would like this connected to Outlook and other apps, or exported to Excel to create reports, done! These and many other capabilities are part of SharePoint with no additional 3rd party software.

That's just one way a SharePoint solution from Epico can help you manage a project. Let's chat and see what we can do for you! Thanks for your time and have a Blessed Day my friends!

Shawn

#SharePoint #Epico #ProjectManagement #SmallBusiness #JesusLovesYou