PI® - At the Center of Work in your Company

Often times people think of PI as being strictly a project management software company. Ah! but it's much more. Having its roots in software consulting, the tech team is rooted in consultative development... creating solutions to overcome process obstacles, gaps, and missing pieces.

Over the years, those "fixes", opportunities, and expansions have slyly turned PI into a true Enterprise Management Platform. Maybe our Marketing hasn't explained it as such, but PI customers are fortunate to have it at the heart of their businesses--if they so choose to do so.

Let me explain...

• In the past, project management systems would be monolithic, stand-alone software systems that would necessarily require EVERYONE to be a part of that system and work with that tool, however it was created
• Now people work in a highly disparate way: an application for this task, an app for that task, a portal for this content, a file for that customer. Long are the days of simply loading up Lotus 1-2-3 and that's all you did all day long. Now people are using Google, Office, Adobe--just to name a few

So where does PI fit in this work environment? Right around the Summer of 2016, Steve West (CEO) and I had a very fruitful conversation. While strategizing we came up with this idea of leveraging PI's API's in such a way that PI should connect to everything so people wouldn't have to log into PI. It seems counter intuitive, but after we talked it through it made sense. There are literally 1000's of apps out there and getting people to learn something new is like herding cats. So why not inject some artificial intelligence and capability into facilitating that.

The benefits are clear: work details that are important to managers tracking progress are brought into a system that can be easily reported, level set, and output to a financial ERP / program. That means if you're working in Trello or Jira or Visual Studio Team Services or SharePoint or Outlook Tasks... everyone in those programs can remain extremely productive leveraging the benefits of those programs... while sending the pertinent work data to our software. Thus, PI can aggregate work data in an unprecedented way: report it, share it, transform it.

So as you're building out tasks, maybe start thinking about PI in slightly different terms. My goal with this column is to help you understand the nuances, tips & tricks of surfacing all this PI-goodness moving forward.

Kevin