Document the project vision and link it to business objectives to improve project approval and success rates. We facilitate stakeholder groups to document the vision for the project and identify the business strategy and goals it supports. Our experienced consultants document the vision both graphically and textually to help you communicate and build project support.

Establish the strategy, tactics, and processes needed for successful portfolio management. Our project management specialists can organize your critical technology projects into a single portfolio consisting of reports that capture project objectives, effort, timelines, earned value (EVM), accomplishments, resources, risks and other critical factors. This enables your executives to spread resources appropriately and adjust projects to produce the highest returns.

Establish a firm foundation for the success of large-scale projects with a PMO or ePMO. A well-structured PMO helps you implement new cross-organizational technologies and projects more effectively by reducing redundancy, benefiting from best practices, managing multiple projects efficiently, and easing the transition to the new system. We can ‘jumpstart’ your project by setting up and staffing your PMO, providing projects with the templates, processes, and tool support they need for a successful start-up.

Reduce risks by using our certified, professional project managers (PMP) and business analysts for your technology projects. We combine accepted project management methodologies and templates with our extensive experience to ensure effective scope and quality management, schedule management, and risk management. We work with you to tailor project management tools and methodologies to your culture and project needs. Don’t have the levels of expertise you need internally? Let our project managers staff and manage your PMO, mentoring and guiding your people to success.

Avoid project cancellation and reduce the risk of failure. Our certified, senior project managers can help you salvage critical, but troubled projects. We will assess your current situation, report back on our assessment, and design a project recovery strategy to get your project back on track. Once you regain control, we can keep you there with project management support, monitoring, and expert guidance.

Provide meaningful answers to the question, “How’s the project doing?” by capturing and monitoring the metrics that matter. Building on the predic-tive project plans our professional project managers prepare, we continually capture and use metrics to communicate to project sponsors and improve project success. The monitored criteria include time, cost, resources, scope, quality, and outstanding action items. We display project progress against criteria using Microsoft tools and collaborative environment for near-real-time dashboard reporting using simple icons (stop lights, charts, graphs) that focus attention on areas that need attention.

Assess and audit your organization’s project management maturity and the health of critical projects to reduce risks and improve project success ratios. Let our PM experts guide your organization’s self assessment, using PMI’s OPM3 maturity model and process. This includes managing the assessment process, identifying capabilities and areas of practice not yet fully developed, and planning the implementation of improved processes. Or we can audit the health and ability of a single, critical project or program to achieve its goals, identifying risk elements and opportunities to improve success. This includes informal interviews with project team members, a review of processes, tools, and practices, and an analysis of project plans.

Improve the skills of critical PM team members to build a strong foundation for project management success in your organization. We develop and deliver high quality training at your site in topics including project manage-ment, project selection and portfolio management, MS Project, time management with MS Project, and others. We also can assess your PM training needs and craft a performance-based curriculum that focuses on application and use, versus PM theory. We can also create high-quality job aids to coach and guide ongoing success and improve the retention and use of learned content. Or we can provide a certified professional to coach and facilitate the skill development of your PMs.

Capture valuable lessons learned and best practices at the conclusion of a project or project phase. Our easy-to-use, web-based survey collects information covering 10 critical factor areas from project team members. The tool also captures demographic information about each respondent’s project role and length of time on the project to enable comparisons across roles and sub-teams. Results, including statistics and findings, highlight project activities considered “best practice” as well as those that could be improved to enhance the success of future projects.

Track time in their Microsoft projects using a proven time keeping system. Cognitive Technologies provides the coordination, scheduling, planning, communication, and implementation of the key configuration templates and processes for project time management. Our project professionals work with your team to configure both the Microsoft Project Server and Journyx time keeping system to provide synchronized data on tasks and projects. A standard PTM implementation is 6 weeks, 3 of which typically occur on-site, working with your team.

As a Certified Microsoft partner, Cognitive can install, configure, and deploy a MS Project Server solution for your organization. Our professionals are experienced in installing MS Project Server 2003, 2007, as well as SharePoint.

We provide offsite resources to help you bring immediate project management capabilities directly to your organization for short term productivity gains and long term business value. Our professionals can perform remote project scheduling, project plan assessment, project oversight, and project planning and construction. Our staff uses proven communication and collaboration tools from Microsoft and Citrix to provide you the support you need — no matter where you are.