Keen Program Governance powered by Creatio

Keen Program Governance powered by Creatio enables companies to achieve delivery excellence across their portfolios of IT and non-IT projects.

This pre-configured application is not just another project-management or task-management tool that is tactical in nature. Rather, Keen Program Governance is a strategic tool for investment teams, executive leaders, and PMOs to realize consistently successful delivery of the programs and projects for which they are responsible, even those spanning across different organizations, while their project teams continue to use whichever tactical tools they might prefer (Jira, Trello, MS Project, Monday, etc).

Keen Program Governance differs from merely tactical tracking tools by enabling and automating the two critical success factors for any endeavor with transformational ambitions and scope: 

1. Stakeholder alignment, especially at the leadership level, and
2. 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 Program Governance, 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 Program Governance is powered by the low-code Creatio BPM / CRM platform.  Specifically, it extends the Sales Creatio application (both the Team and Enterprise editions), and it integrates seamlessly with Marketing Creatio, Service Creatio, and the Creatio Portal products.   
• Implementation.  As a pre-configured application leveraging the Creatio BPM / CRM platform, Keen Program Governance can be implemented in 6 to 8 weeks, even less, 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 via REST APIs with other systems (including feeds from data services) per modern industry methods.  
• Extension.  Due to the power of the low-code Creatio BPM engine, the platform can readily be extended to support business functions other than commercial operations, if desired.