Regardless of your experience in leading or participating in the delivery of projects and regardless of the stage your project we recommend all our users have a read through this brief  introduction to understand the HORIZON PPM approach to Project Portfolio Management.


Introduction

Firstly, welcome to HORIZON PPM.


Projects can be complex and the platform has been designed to help project teams with delivery execution.


Our fundamental principle at HORIZON PPM is Work Smarter, Not Harder ... with a particular focus on Actionable Intelligence.


These days everyone seems to be involved in projects of one sort or another. Projects are common in all industries, all geographies, and they are frequently encountered in our personal lives (such as home renovations, planning a wedding or building a custom motorhome) as much as in our professional lives. The system has been built and refined based on many years first-hand experience delivering projects for organisations from small start-ups, local and national government services through to major global corporations.


Design Concept

We believe structure is an enabler to creativity, effectiveness and efficiency. By applying the right operating structure, we help teams successfully deliver projects. We reduce time spent on navigation to ensure users can their time and effort focus on delivery.


The aims of HORIZON PPM are to answer three questions...

  • What's important?
  • What's urgent?
  • What's next?

Projects are complex things so HORIZON PPM makes it as easy as possible to get started whatever stage your project is at. A key strength of any project management system is in balancing structure with flexibility.


Balancing Structure with Flexibility

The Project Manager and project team are often balancing their time and effort on multiple projects or projects with other activities and an easy to use and consistent structure makes it easy to quickly navigate to the information they need with minimal fuss.


Flexibility

Every project is unique. (If it's not unique is it even a project?) And they way that project information is provided can vary significantly. In some cases there may already be a well documented brief outlining the objectives, approach, team, budgets, etc. But in a number (most?) cases, the Project Manager finds them self in a mobilisation or discovery phase with a range of conversations with the various project stakeholders. 


The PM Scratchpad (found near the bottom of the left hand navigation bar) is designed to be the electronic equivalent of the project manager's notebook providing an easy way to capture the unstructured information nuggets and notes before they are formalised into the project itself.

 

Getting Started

The steps below are a quick checklist to get a brand new user up and running with a new project ... 

  • Sign Up / Register

We employ a very simple registration process using LinkedIn allowing you to get going as quickly as possible. Just provide a few details and away you go. More details on Sign Up.

  • Verify Your New Account

You're new account can be used to look around straight away, but to make any changes the account needs to be verified. This is something we do. We take a look at the information provided to ensure you're a good fit. Most people are, but we've had a small number of undesirable elements trying to gain access. We get alerted for each review and accounts can normally be verified very quickly. Once it's done we'll send you an email confirmation.

  • Set-up Your Organisation

All projects must be owned by an Organisation. You get to define what an organisation is. It may be a small team, a department or an entire global corporation. We create the first one for you based on your registration details. More details on Organisations.

  • Create Your First Project

We create an initial project for every new joiner. Even if you're not going to be a project manager it can be a useful practice area to use. If you are a project manager you'll want to follow these simple instructions to customise this project and set-up any additional ones you may need.

  • Join Someone Else's Project

Alternatively, if you have been invited to join a project follow these instructions to accept/decline an invitation.


Tip: The system will have automatically create a project for you called My First Project and this will be set-up with using the Organisation you set at registration as the client. You can customise this as you see fit. It's a live project ready for you to use.