Project Portfolio Office is revolutionising the way it educates its users, potential clients and evaluators across the globe, with the introduction of online and on demand learning. The reasons? Greater geographical reach, reduced costs, and user convenience.
“Training is very important for software as a service (SaaS) companies like PPO,” explains Jimmy Hekma, Project Portfolio Office CTO. “Unless our software is adding tangible value to a client, they can terminate their subscription at any time.
User engagement and the ability of our users to get as much as possible out of the product are critical. That is why we put so much emphasis on ease of use, the availability of an extensive Knowledge Base and FAQs, as well as providing top notch support and training.”
The new PPO learning approach offers both a self-paced and a live environment. The scheduled, live webinars allow participants to interact with the presenter during the scheduled session, and interested parties can book themselves on the courses through the webinar calendar published on the PPO Web site; whilst the recast webinars can be viewed at a date and time that suits the user.
The new training approach has been specifically designed to meet the needs of evaluators, team members, executives, project managers, and administrators. This means that they will be able to easily access content that is relevant to them and their role. How easy is that?
“Unlike training delivered in the classroom, webinar or video-based training scales exceptionally well. Users can attend a webinar when it is convenient for them, or they can even watch a recast version or access a YouTube recording from the comfort of their home or office.
“Furthermore, when users are having trouble with a specific problem, they can watch the video related to that precise issue, without having to sit through an entire, full day training course. Best of all – it is entirely free,” Hekma adds.
“And while this type of approach is a new direction for PPO, it is however widely accepted within the SaaS world, with best of breed SaaS applications such as SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, MailChimp and others all utilising this form of education to great success.”
“As a company with users that span the globe, classroom-style training sessions have become impractical,” says Guy Jelley, Project Portfolio Office CEO. “We believe that we needed to move a large percentage of our training online, to make the information more easily accessible. By also offering the option of self-paced attendance, learning more about PPO and its plethora of functionalities is now considerably more convenient.”
“The new approach also provides our clients with an easier way to track, manage and embed PPO training in their new employee induction programmes, existing skills development plans, and other project skills and methodology training.”