We call our products "gap filler" products because they address a need unmet by the currently available tools for project/program management.

Gap No 1. Over and over we find within an enterprise projects that are too big to be managed by Excel spreadsheets and yet too small to carry the burden of MS Project or even Primavera. Many organizations have more projects that fall into this gap than don’t.

Couple this gap with the ever more popular trend of geographically dispersed (or virtual) project teams and you can understand why we find our clients, and our clients’ clients, are frustrated with the inability of the state of the art to help them with project management in the gap.

Handshake™ is designed to fill the gap for an entire enterprise, an organization with multiple projects and hundreds of users. Not only does it fill the gap, we expect Handshake™ to replace Excel for management of smaller projects (the left side of the figure above) and make a serious dent to the right side. The reason is cost savings. On either side of the spectrum, we find projects incur about $160 per month per person paying people (sometimes a team of people) to "conduit" status information into the tracking tool. Handshake™ cuts that down to just $23 per person per month. Click Handshake to learn more.

Gap No 2. While we often find projects or programs with tens of thousands of lines of schedule content, we also find a general inability of the current tools to roll that status up into anything that makes sense and is readable by executive level decision makers, or just as important, stakeholders. To solve this problem we developed a proprietary process for integrating multiple sources of status information into one readable product that (in our experience) becomes the Rosetta stone for planning, strategy, and execution discussions about your project/program. Not only is this true "up and out" with executive decision makers and stakeholders, but also "down and in" with your team itself. Below is an example of our ExecView™ product for the NASA Constellation Program. The excerpt below shows the Ares I launch vehicle upper stage development.

ExecView™ puts a spotlight on the "what matters most" information happening right now on your project or program. With this information executives make better informed decisions and the entire organization benefits from a greater degree of enfranchisement, simply from being able to see how the program elements fit together. Enfranchisement is important. In our research it’s one of the three essential ingredients to project success. Contact SmithOps’ Vice President Norm Smith to discuss ExecView™ for your project or program at norm@smithops.com.