Will Treinen of Treinen Associates presents a short-case study of how he used Kerika to build a more effective Project Management Office (PMO), enabling him to manage the extraordinary growth of his business. (600% last year!)

1. Kerika
A better way to manage your knowledge
Case Study: Transforming a PMO – Leveraging Agile Methodology

2. Treinen Migrates to the Cloud for PMO Needs
Increase in number of
projects
Need increases to expand
PMO and account
management functions
Explore options; move
from “sticky notes” to
cloud solution - Kerika

3. As Treinen’s Project Portfolio Grows Rapidly…
• Treinen Associates, Inc. (Treinen) has been exploring various tools to
assist them in managing a large and increasingly more complex
portfolio of projects:
• Single personnel engagements
• Large multi-person projects
• Fixed priced/deliverable-based projects
• Unique partnering and management combinations
• Interstate project needs and demands

4. The Role for Account Management Becomes
Paramount
• While the dynamics of a couple of dozen projects while things are
static can be easy to manage through simple tools, the environment
quickly can change:
• Management of resources must be flexible and proactive
• More activity occurs for account management overseeing larger projects
• Increased visibility into the portfolio dashboard to align support model
• Easy to see differentiation of resource types, utilization, and availability
• Allow for constant information feeds from multiple sources that does not
encumber already encumbered staff

5. Exploring Options Led to an Unexpected Find
• Treinen uses a variety of standard tools to support clients and all were
explored and to some degree, tested and piloted.
• Due to changing needs and nature of our business, we looked to
some leap-frogging technological as a paradigm shift to match how
we do business.
• Landed upon Kerika and worked with them to vet out the concepts:
• Took several business functions and splashed them against the tool
• Build more sophisticated templates and dashboards for PMO resource
management
• Upon learning how to structure information, tool become more universal

6. The Transformation to Kerika was Painless
Describe your
business
needs
Visualize this in
terms of data
management and
relationships
Begin laying design out
in Kerika:
-Fast
-Flexible
-Intuitive

7. Illustrative Process
Current Process:
• “Sticky Notes” =
resources, status, role
• Colors provided
differentiation
(employee/contractor)
• New needs (orange)
placeholder
• Basic project information
noted on stickies
• Very easy to “move”
people around or add
new sticky

8. Challenges and Needs Identified
• As portfolio grew, quickly determined that more eyes and fingers
were needed to assist in managing scope and needs of clients and
staff
• Worked for one person, but not visible or usable to others; was not
supportive of multiple branches and locations
• Needed something that was “as easy” or actually easier than moving
a sticky around – that was a hard proposition we believed
• Desired to have both data and visual components to address both
executive level “snapshots” and account managers needs for task
level information

9. Embraced Agile concepts and the Cloud
• Met and worked with CEO of Kerika a year ago in Seattle by chance
• On and off discussions continued, but we focused on existing tools to
“push them” to do what we wanted
• Realized challenges and decided to test out Kerika in detailed pilot
• From a hour discussion with Kerika, we spent 4 hours to create PMO
in tool
• Logical layout within Kerika was obvious once we began
• The “card” is the most versatile element, so determine that first
• Now completely manageable via the cloud, but secure and restricted
to only those members that are invited

10. The New PMO….
NEW PROCESS:
1. Projects are now laid out and
can be ordered in any
fashioned desired; alerts are
noted for past or coming due
items.
2. Each project has account management, new
opportunities, and project specific tracks
3. Resources, tasks, and information can flow easily between
tracks or across projects.

11. Center of this Project is Resources
• Our Utilization List (a Project
in Kerika) managing each
resource
• A resource = “card” that can
be moved, used (multiple
times), has attributes that it
can be assigned

12. Benefits of Kerika
• Intuitive thinking can leverage Kerika for any kind of knowledge
management, information sharing, or project activity.
• Local company with extremely engaged and responsive President
• Able to manage a vast amount of information from many different
sources at multiple levels of details
• Very customizable to meet diverse business and organizational needs
• No hardware or software purchases needed, but can leverage existing
infrastructure (e.g. SharePoint).

13. Kerika compared to other Solutions
• INSERT TABLE
• Main differences:
• Kerika is being used by State of Washington Agencies and the OCIO.
• Kerika’s staff and model is all about supporting their customers
• Frequent releases to incorporate client needs;
• Local presence, accessible and engaged in customers business
• Etc….
Product Feature 1 Feature 2 Feature 3
Kerika
Terrello
Etc.