Tools and Methods

Introduction

Shown below are some useful best practice Methods that you may need for your e-service projects along with some recommended Tools, many of which our experts use at e-service-expert.com.

Naturally we are keen to use best of breed products on the market for ourselves - products that adopt best practice, that are easy or intuitive to use and represent good value for money. Therefore we have no hesitation recommending them.

In some cases we like the product so much that we become a reseller of the product. This provides us and you too with a number of advantages. For example, we are kept up-to-date with product development and often times we can pass on discounts to you. However, rather than influence you unduly we would prefer you take a look at out recommendations ... as just that, recommendations.

But we would strongly advise you to take a look at our Best of Breed Page - where you will see clearly what if any relationship we have with the products or services. Also we offer more advice and guidance regarding these products - why we recommend them and whether or not we can secure any specials for you or provide additional services, e.g. customization, free training etc.

Just remember we are hardly going to recommend products or services that we might be called on to use with a vengeance - perhaps at your site...So they have to be good, in fact, in our opinion, best of breed!

Strategy

E-service strategies come in many different forms and here at e-service-expert.com we try to cater for all. So on the one hand you will find advice and guidance about setting up national or regional strategies and on the other strategies more suitable to a small to medium sized business or even a individual wishing to establish an online presence. Learn more about methods for developing e-strategies

Project and Program Methodology

If your organization is undertaking large a e-health, e-government or other e-service program you will certainly have multiple project portfolios. Ensuring a consist approach across all projects is vitally important. To provide that consistent approach you will need to follow a sound methodology.

There are a couple of methodologies considered best practice which are used almost universally - Project Management Institute's PMI methodology from the US which is used worldwide and Prince 2 from the Office of Government Commerce OGC in the UK which is popular in many countries from Australia to Cyprus to UK. There are other popular approaches too such as Pro-C used by the telecommunications industry.

Each has their strong points and provide a project life cycle and usually a rich repository of information and guidelines. However even with these guidelines and manual, implementing a methodology into an organization from scratch can be very time consuming and very expensive.

For example, each of these approaches provide outline templates, e.g. project charters, business cases, issues, risks, communication planning, and many more - but worked examples of completed templates are also needed to help project manager's and their teams complete them properly and make them work for their organization. These all have to be developed.

Furthermore, most organizations will want to customize either the life cycle or the templates to better fit their unique way of doing things and to fit into existing terminology.

Once the approach is installed you have to develop training to ensure it is used properly and everyone understands it - all of the training materials must be developed.

Organizations can spend months, even years, developing best practice approaches and getting it embedded in to their organization.

Fortunately, there is a better way. There are some excellent tools on the market that take much of the hard work out of implementing a best practice approach into an organization quickly and efficiently.

One of our favorites at e-service-expert.com is MPMM. First and foremost MPMM is a gold mine of information, guidelines and worked examples for even the most experienced project managers and their teams. It is easy to navigate and all the information and templates, documents, etc are integrated with its project life cycle. Everything is doubly compatible with both PMI and Prince 2 best practices and has been built with training in mind - there is even an educational version. The professional and enterprise versions can be used 'out of the box' or fully customized - which means you can develop additional methodologies as well!

If you need a quick and cost effective best practice project management methodology in your organization check it out the MPMM Tool here.

Project Control Tool

Once you have a consistent project approach defined for your organization you will need project control tools, e.g. Microsoft Project.

All projects undertaken by e-service-expert.com experts anywhere in the world are controlled (planned, scheduled, resourced and tracked, etc.) using one of the best online project control tools available, which is fully compatible with Microsoft project. This means that our experts can manage projects from anywhere in the world and we provide access to our clients too. You can check out the online project control tool our experts use here.

Alternatively, if you simply want compliant templates, e.g. Business Case, Risk, Issues and Change, etc. you can get excellent templates as a set or individually from the MPMM people at Method 123 Project Management Templates

Business Analysis Methodology & Tool Kit

The international standards body for business analysis with chapters around the world is the IIBA. For an IIBA compliant toolkit try the recently launched Business Analyst Tool Kit.

Free Project Management e-Book

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