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RELEASE
ANNOUNCEMENT |
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Release Type: |
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Functional Enhancement(s) |
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Maintenance Update |
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WhatFirst Community Request(s) |
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Effective Date: |
October 1, 2011 |
New Features
and Benefits |
Accelare continues to demonstrate its commitment to delivering value to its customers with the launch of WhatFirst™ 2010, Release 5.6.
The enhancements featured in this release include new Business Intelligence functionality—along with numerous enhancements to WhatFirst capabilities that support core activities like project management, capability modeling/
viewing, resource management, and data importing and exporting. Here are some highlights from Release 5.6:
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Your team can communicate critical operating performance facts using the new Dashboards function. |
New Capability: Dashboards
One of the most significant new features in WhatFirst Release 5.6 is the Performance Module’s new Dashboard capability. This enhanced “run the business/performance management” component lets WhatFirst users easily communicate critical operating performance facts to an audience as appropriate. This helps your business operations staff understand the importance of business architecture in improving the Strategy to Execution process by making business capabilities relevant to business operations. Dashboard views take very little time to design, and are fully configurable—giving your team total control over how your data is presented to stakeholders.
Key Dashboard Features
• Enhances your ability to augment capability qualitative assessments with operational facts.
• Includes a top level metrics dashboard as the Enterprise Dashboard that can be created in less than 5 minutes
• Allows you to import metrics from operational systems
• Allows you to design and publish a dashboard for every capability model
Benefits From Using the Dashboard
1. Strategy to Execution is enabled by performance measurement
2. Increases collaboration and improves the organization’s culture by aligning business and IT on critical success metrics defined for the strategy
3. Increases transparency which improves data quality which ultimately improves business investment decisions
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The new Measures function lets users track and view performance data from multiple sources. |
New Capability: Metrics
WhatFirst Release 5.6 introduces a new capability called Metrics. This feature set—accessed through the Performance Module—allows your team to import, enter, view, and export metrics that help key stakeholders more clearly see the drivers that impact revenue, cost, quality, volume, etc. The Metrics capability can be fine-tuned to deliver information targeted to your requirements.
The Metrics tool is extremely powerful and highly configurable:
• View and track data from multiple sources in a variety of formats
• Enter metrics values manually or import from an Excel spreadsheet
• Use the Dashboard to display various graphical views of your data
• Link metrics to Capabilities as KPIs and rank their importance
• Associate a metric to a measure |
View performance measurements by capability and filter the view to meet your needs. |
New Capability: Measures
When your key stakeholders need an overall view of how you are performing based on a specific capability measurement, WhatFirst now enables you to see a graphical view of your performance by measure. This function is accessed by selecting Business Architecture > Capability Models > Enterprise Summary View. The view can be filtered by capability model, family, and/or level to create a broad or precise view, depending on your needs. And, to simplify things, we made printing a one-click operation.
The new Measures function calculates and displays important information like
the customer/strategic impact of your capabilities, as shown above. |
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WhatFirst Release 5.6 makes
it easier to monitor and
manage resources. |
New Capability: Manage Resources
Nimble resource management can rescue a stalled project, and we’ve made it easier to monitor and manage these assets using the Content and Administration module of WhatFirst. Here are some notable improvements: |
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• A streamlined interface for easier navigation and data entry
• Resources can be viewed in a grid or a detailed list
• Accelerate your work using the new “Add New Resource” function
• Relate SharePoint items to specific resources
• Assign resources to specific projects
• More granular descriptions of a resource's current health
• Import human resources from an Excel files or a SharePoint database
• Attach photos of people assigned to your projects
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WhatFirst now allows you
to import a capability
model from Excel. |
Additional Enhancements in WhatFirst Release 5.6
In addition to the new capabilities described above, this release also features a number of enhancements to the tool that address requests we’ve gotten from WhatFirst users for greater functionality and ease of use.
Importing and Exporting Enhancements
• Export a capability model to Excel from the Model Editor
• Import a capability model from Excel
• Export your measure values to Excel, modify them, and import the changes back into WhatFirst
• Import your projects or resources based on their Reference ID
Project Page Enhancements
• The Project interface allows quicker creation of multiple projects
• Users can now edit details about a project directly in the project grid view
• Changes are now automatically saved when you’re working in the Financials and Resources tabs
Capability Page Enhancement
• The capability page now displays the full detail of the capability’s owner
(including picture) |
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For more information about WhatFirst™—or to learn more about the other products and services Accelare offers—visit our website or contact Matt Burke via e-mail or phone (512) 415-3477. |
Copyright © 2011 Accelare, Inc. All rights reserved. |