Risk management is hard to do well, as things can become chaotic quite rapidly without discipline.
To help organizations get that discipline, Altova, perhaps best known for its suite of XML tools, has released MetaTeam, an online integrated system for managing projects and team collaboration and performance.
(Related: What else is in MetaTeam)
One of the key benefits, according to Altova vice president of cloud services David Kershaw, is the ability MetaTeam provides for collaborative decision-making. “There is a substantial set of functionality in this area” in MetaTeam, he said. The tool offers configuration for voting on tasks and projects, groups decisions by deadlines or owner, and offers ways to prioritize work.
For team management, MetaTeam offers a place to describe, define and assign roles and responsibilities. The service also enables managers to align tasks with decisions, then assign them based on roles and responsibilities.
Kershaw noted that Altova is not trying to compete with PPM tools, including Microsoft Project, which he estimated more than 90% of project managers use today. “It’s a great scheduling engine, with Monte Carlo simulation and PERT planning,” he said of Project. “We’re not a PPM tool. We have support for most aspects of those tools.”
Where MetaTeam shines, Kershaw said, is for organizations where people are “thrown in” to decision-making and managing roles and responsibilities. “We’re not an IT executive’s tool.”
MetaTeam offers a method of templating for Scrum, risk management and activities, with terminology that matches up with Scrum. There is currently no support for Kanban.
