What’s the value proposition of Sensei IQ™ when you already have Microsoft Project?

Most of our technical folks have 20-25 years of experience with Microsoft Project and project management.

Since we started Sensei 11 years ago, our focus has been on incorporating industry standards and best practices into the tools used by project teams. In everything that we do, we integrate into the Microsoft ecosystem so that we deliver a seamless experience to our end users. Sometimes, that causes confusion because it can be hard to tell where Microsoft ‘ends’ and Sensei IQ™ begins.

What is Sensei IQ™?

There are plenty of good options for task management tools. Sensei IQ™ pulls together tasks from five execution tools and provides a turn-key template for Project & Portfolio Management that sits securely inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. We natively support five tools: Project Online, Project for the web, Planner, Azure DevOps and Jira. Regardless of where the tasks are managed across these tools, Sensei IQ™ enables visibility and ensures consistency in Work Management, Project Management, Program & Portfolio Management, Resource Management and Strategy.

Work Management

Sensei IQ™ enables project team members to see all their work across projects in different execution tools while managing and working on Deliverables, Risks, Issues, Decisions and Change Requests in a central location.

Project Management

Sensei IQ™ also provides a single location inside of Microsoft Teams for the team to come together and collaborate. It provides chat, files, project notes and tasks all in one place, and enables the project manager to manage the project with Key Dates, Financials and Status Updates.

All of this is then delivered to executives through automated reporting.

Program & Portfolio Management

We help organizations manage the intake of work and prioritize projects based on business value and resource availability, and organize all of it into programs and portfolios.

Resource Management

Your resource management is probably at one of these three distinct maturity levels, and Sensei IQ™ enables them all:

1. Visibility into WHO’s working on WHAT WHEN.
2. Formal requests and allocations of resources to projects.
3. Timesheet to track all work across projects, non-project work, and non-working time.

Strategy

Sensei IQ™ helps organizations connect Strategy to execution through Strategic Themes for the organization that are measurable through quantifiable Strategic Goals so you can track Benefits to realization.

Conclusion

The most commonly used work management tools do a very nice job of allowing you to manage the tasks (scope) of the project, which is a critical part of project management, but also only one part of the equation. These work management tools focus on assigning work to people. But in order for an organization to deliver quality projects, they also need consistency in collaboration, governance, reporting, intake, resource management, strategic alignment and much more, as outlined above.

The value proposition of Sensei IQ™ starts with providing visibility into all tasks from all the work management tools used in the organization. Then, on top of that, it adds the key features needed to be successful with all aspects of Project and Portfolio Management.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of Sensei IQ™ in this post. If we’ve piqued your interest, check out the full demonstration here: Sensei IQ™ On-Demand Demonstration.