This newsletter comes to you at the end of our most successful half-year to date. We feel particularly proud of this achievement since it follows a protracted period of development work to meet the needs of some of our key customers. Equally, the next six months looks very promising with our entry into new markets and new partnerships. Please keep an eye on our web pages for more information as the details become available.
We are delighted to welcome Bradford MDC's Housing Division to our user list following a major upgrade to Bradford's installation.
Having attended the Working Well Together national conference in Birmingham recently, I can report that the 'Revitalising Health & Safety in the Construction Industry' programme is underway and providing some food for thought here at Ai Solutions. Having spent many years in the armed services, I remember one of the first presentations I went to about managing change. The presenter said words to the effect that the biggest problem in the services was communication. Some years later having left the services, I attended a CBI presentation about strategic management. The presenter said words to the effect that the biggest problem in all organisations was communication. In our view, the same is true of CDM; the biggest problem in our search to reduce accidents is communication. So we all have a common problem: where is the solution?
The Working Well Together programme is well set up to deliver that solution and, in our own small way, so are we. I hope to tell you more about our plans in this direction next month.
A recent case study into the London Stansted Airport collaborative project led by John Laing identified that the route to successful implementation of new project management software was training, training and training. The speaker went on to say that you actually need three things: a project champion, several bites at the training budget and the ability to work as a team.
This study is all about change management. It is a subject that exercises us greatly as large organisations seek to employ modern software to save themselves time and money. Unfortunately, this cannot be done at the flick of a switch; we have to account for all the people involved and in particular the users. We particularly need to identify the older and more experienced users who have succeeded previously, using less up to date methods. For them, new methods are seldom 'better'; at least initially. The trick is in managing the change so that they can quickly become acclimatised and more efficient using better tools including our own. Please see our web pages for a downloadable document with details of our new Change Management Option.
We have now released our latest software to all our CDM ToolKit™ 2000 customers through SR4 and to our version 3 customers through an update. If you are a user and find that 'Help, About CDM ToolKit' does not reflect these updates, please contact us so that we can contact your Administrator to check your installation.
We are about to release a new piece of software for some of our corporate users who want to run the network version across several sites. The Multi-Site Option can now be administered through a new Windows NT Service Option. This Option is designed to make the setup, scheduling and maintenance of a number of distributed, synchronised databases easy and to save a lot of administrative time. It puts us even further ahead in the corporate market with our unique management information system for CDM.
Systems Management Server is a Microsoft module within NT4 that can be used to distribute the CDM ToolKit™ 2000 application 'on demand'. This means that if setup correctly, information systems managers do not need to visit each workstation to setup or to upgrade our software. If you need information on how to do this, please contact us for details of our SMS Option.
The next user Forum is scheduled for Thursday 28th September 2000 at 0930 in Milton Keynes. We plan to include e-commerce and client contracting on the agenda and are currently looking for contributors on these issues. Please contact us if you can help put our agenda together.