One of the objectives when we created ManagementStudio was to move organisations away from data silos; those little pockets of information that exist in isolation but are incredibly valuable to transformation and delivery teams. We’ve all done it – that spreadsheet containing your hardware inventory or post-deployment feedback that lives inside a shared mailbox. While they’re quick to setup, they are inherently difficult to keep up to date and share outside of the environment in which they exist.

That’s where ManagementStudio comes in. Our web portal makes sharing information and collecting feedback from end-users incredibly easy. Many of our customers have used the feature to validate colleague requirements, collect testing and post-deployment feedback, and to share reports with stakeholders in real-time. But with v14, our developers have re-imagined the portal, extending its role from a place to transact data to a facilitator of employee enablement.

So that’s the intro, but what does this really mean for you, the ManagementStudio practitioner?

ManagementStudio In Your Pocket

Information is only useful when you can do something with it in timely manner. Imagine being able to easily view upgrades for the day while on the train, make decisions about the deployment plan while waiting in line for coffee, or trigger a series of scheduling emails from the treadmill.

With the new portal, we wanted to introduce new ways of working with the data in ManagementStudio while complementing the existing client. So, we’ve made key features and functionality accessible from a browser to make it easier for teams to interact with our data from any device, at any time, and any location (Lycra is optional!). Whether you want real-time charts on display in your ops room, or to take your project with you using the mobile in your pocket, the portal is a game changer for anyone involved IT transformation and service delivery.

Simplifying Access to Information

In an ideal world, the communication strategy that accompanies a transformation is pivotal to driving success in the project; if people feel informed and part of the process, the perceived value of the change increases and action rates improve. But that’s not always the message I hear when I talk to organisations:

• Mass emails from other projects, parts of the business, or third parties creates fatigue
• To minimise the number of emails sent by the project, more information and multiple calls to action are included in less comms, resulting in ambiguous messaging
• Whether through apathy, information overload, or the content simply not being relevant at that time, response rates and action inevitably decrease

While this isn’t solely a technical challenge, the v14 portal makes it much easier to provide the right information, at the right time, to the right person.

Having an extra channel to your communication strategy provides another route to articulate important and timely information more effectively. Moving content into the portal puts the user in control of how and when it’s consumed, leaving space in the email for communication teams to focus on core messaging and driving action. No more long emails that are skim read or frequent comms repeating the same text.

The new portal also supports multiple landing pages, but what makes this incredibly useful to transformation and delivery teams is that it’s context aware – we know who is viewing the page and can present different data or options depending on where they are in the process.

Users now have one place to visit – at any time! – that provides an overview of where they are in the process and what’s happening next. But this isn’t just about information, we’ve also brought self-service to the portal to make it easier for users to provide information, make decisions, and take action. If you want to see what this looks like, Ben has created a short video to demonstrate example use cases.

Although I’ve focused on end-users interacting with data, the same concepts apply to decision makers and stakeholders. Department heads can see, at a glance, when their team is due to be migrated; application owners have full visibility of their apps throughout the lifecycle; programme managers can view project progress in real time. The new portal increases the potential to provide key information to any audience simply through a browser.

Process Workflow

So far, I’ve talked about the new portal from the perspective of your users, but your IT teams can also leverage this functionality to improve how they deliver service and change. For many, ManagementStudio is already the central hub of their operations and change, and the portal enables the consumption of data off-platform in a way that suits users, project stakeholders, and engineers.

Consider two of the common scenarios that our customers encounter when deploying new hardware: drop-in clinics and desk side visits. In each case, an engineer would need to know what bookings are scheduled for that day and understand key details about each handover, like:

• The user’s name, building/location and scheduled slot
• The asset ID or hardware type of the user’s new device
• Additional peripherals or devices
• Applications that are required

Having easy access to this information on a portable device, like a mobile phone, offers greater flexibility in how you deploy engineering resource, deployment staff can travel lighter, and any last-minute changes are instantly available to your engineers, ensuring a seamless and accurate handover and happier users.

The portal is a fantastic resource for consuming information and keeping people informed at all stages throughout the project. Information is also fed back in real-time to keep the project team up to date as and when changes happen, or things go off plan.

For example:

• Engineers can mark hardware as collected the moment it’s received
• Home users have a self-service portal to manage their delivery, handover, and collection of old equipment
• The process to recycle returned hardware can be initiated before the equipment has returned to your config centre
• User migration slots can be rescheduled, or emails sent, directly from the portal
• Access to applications can be removed/granted at the point of handover, reducing demand on the service desk and improving the user experience by minimising disruption to services

These features bring great benefit to a project, not only in the form of improved user satisfaction but also project efficiencies. Things just happen quicker – end of day true-ups are reduced or removed all together, no-shows are rescheduled quicker, and hardware passes through the lifecycle with less friction.

Reporting

Having greater access to data is nothing without insight and analytics, so we’ve made it easier for programme managers and stakeholders to consume, and interact with, project highlights.

Whether you’re interested in the overall project status or focused on specific use cases, like upcoming migrations or application testing, the core functionality that you would expect in the ManagementStudio client is replicated in the portal. The updated dashboards and charting provide new ways to visually interact with ManagementStudio, enabling you to create custom views of the information that’s important to you.

But if that wasn’t enough, you can also trigger action from within a report. You can easily send booking invitations from a report that shows which users are now ready to migrate or send follow-up emails to users that haven’t responded to their application survey.

The new dashboards and reports in v14 allow you to create an efficient and dynamic workflow, enabling you to interact with information and make decisions quicker.

New Graphical Builder

To help you deliver new ways of working with ManagementStudio’s data, we’ve re-architected the portal from the ground up and created a new ‘drag and drop’ builder that enables administrators to create project landing pages, self-service for end-users, and different reporting scenarios. Some of the highlights include:

• Easy to create multi-column designs without any prior experience of coding or web design
• Security is defined at the page level, making it easy for organisations to secure pages with sensitive data using common standards like:
  • One-time passwords
  • ManagementStudio authentication for project/engineers
  • AD and Azure AD authentication
• Users can now request access to the portal via a dedicated landing page, simplifying the process and reducing access time
• We’ve made it easy to be consistent with common page elements – banners, page headers, footers, navigation menus, fonts, logos, colour – while also introducing support for multiple branding and styles across the portal
• Portal pages support conditional content so that your user only sees what’s relevant to where they are in the process, making it easier to consume information and act on it
• And if you’re an HTML nerd like me 🙂 the builder also supports raw code for more advanced customisation

Upgrade Your Portal Experience

I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with the new v14 portal. It represents one of the biggest changes to ManagementStudio since we launched, bringing benefits to end-users and stakeholders alike by improving transparency and collaboration, streamlining workflows, and maximising real-time updates. Many of our customers have already developed new ways of working and sharing information using the portal, taking their project and service delivery to new heights.

If you haven’t looked at the portal yet, or are only just getting started, we would love to show you what’s possible.  Tap the button below to contact support.