User:Old IT Guy/sandbox

PIEmatrix is a web application company that develops and markets Pie, a SaaS project portfolio management application.

Worth noting are perspectives from other experts that think PIE is a highly usable and robust platform Pie features project management, process management, team collaboration, time tracking, governance, and best practice execution for business improvement.

History
PIEmatrix was incorporated as a Delaware C corporation in 2006 and is located in Burlington, VT. Paul Dandurand is PIEmatrix's CEO and founder. One of the first companies to prove that PIEmatrix's tool worked was ARAMARK Healthcare as a Alpha customer in early 2008. ARAMARK Healthcare later purchased the software when it was publicly released in 2009. Other customers, as entire companies or just by some teams, have included but are not limited to RS Medical, NASA, Yahoo, TEDx, Catholic Health Initiative, Middleburg College, CapGemini, CSC, navin haffty & associates, and PUMA.

The purpose of PIEmatrix was to help people incorporate process standards into their project management tasks and to encourage project teams to turn lessons learned during projects into new best practices. After beta for a year, the product was commercially released in 2009.

CIO Buyer / User Experience
From a buyer's perspective, PIEmatrix is an interesting vendor because of the approach they took to create their software. PIEmatrix created their tool based on the process of managing projects, or methodology, and not the traditional task list approach used by the other project and program management vendors in the market. While researching software in the PPM space, I discovered that PIEmatrix's perspective was that processes are repeatable and so PIE, the software from PIEmatrix, needed to be designed to leverage a process multiple times. The power of this approach as an executive is that a process should be updated with best practices and lessons over time. These updates are then easily leveraged in existing or future projects that use the process that was updated. So, a company using PIE could invest in a project or program management process or methodology once and leverage it repeatedly allowing them to gain more return on their investment while continually improving on the process. Furthermore, projects can be compared regardless of who managed them or what the project was for since the comparison would be on the effectiveness of the process used, which is repeatable, and not on how effective a specific project manager was during the project.

Some users such as project managers do have to change the way they think and work if using PIE. The changes would include shifting from a command and control approach to project to am more collaborative and participative approach. PIE allows for full team collaboration during the project. This includes messaging within the project team, updating tasks and activities on-line and viewing the overall project status for all projects a person is assigned to, as a team member. Executives can view all project regardless of department, business unit or even process. So, Executives could bring up a dashboard with New Product Development efforts, Risk Management and IT projects all on the same page and expand or collapse each section and drill into each project to get a sense of what is working well and what project might have issues. This one stop shop for information helps executives, program, project and team members get on and remain on the same page. Status reporting and weekly meetings become useless as more and more people start using PIE. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings reviewing process improvement efforts related to projects take over where project status update meetings use to take place.