September – Autumn on the way
It’s back to school and college for many of our young people. As businesses it should also be a time to reflect what lesson’s we’ve learned so far this year now we’ve arrived at Q3.
Take Stock
- Which of your projects are on schedule,
- Which of your projects are on budget,
- Which of your projects are not really being measured?
These are all questions that a good PM (Project Manager) should be able to answer quickly and succinctly. Unfortunately that’s not always the case. Dates and milestones were not clearly defined so schedule is difficult to measure. What part of the budget applies to what part of the solution is not clear so spend can not be measured accurately. How many Requirements have actually been split into System Requirements or Functional Blocks is not calculable.
Don’t Panic
Cradle’s features can offer assistance with these issues.
- Cradle offers the ability to link Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) items to Microsoft® Project allowing a direct connection between the Project Plan and packages of work related to designs, functions, tests etc. in the Cradle project
- If a Budget item is created in Cradle, it could be easily linked to other components of the project. They could then have a category of actual spend. Using Cradle’s calculation facility, these linked items can be totted up and shown in the parent item.
Aggregate Spend with Calculations - Dashboards are a quick visual aid showing your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) showing percentage of Requirements with System Requirements attached is a good way of monitoring progress.
Control and Relax
Move into Q4 with all the project knowledge you need to finish the year on a high.
Cradle 7.3
We trust you have all had your Security Codes for Cradle 7.3 and have successfully downloaded and installed the latest version of Cradle. If you haven’t received your Cradle-7.3 Security Code please contact the Support Department support@threesl.com
Banking Changes
There are some changes afoot for those that deal with 3SL financially.
In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the UK Government has decided that all major banks must protect their personal, retail and most business banking operations from their more risky, often speculative, investment banking and international banking operations.
Most major banks in the UK will do this by creating a new ‘ring fenced’ banking operation that is protected from future problems in the financial markets.
Most of the UK’s major banks will effect this change in April 2018.
For 3SL, these banking changes will mean that there will be a new BIC (bank identifier code) within the IBAN (international bank account number) of all of our bank accounts. In effect, all of the IBANs for our bank accounts will change in April 2018.
It is also possible that banking changes may effect another part of our bank account numbers, called the sort code (similar to the ATA, routing number or branch number codes in other countries’ banking systems). If there is a change to our sort code, the change is likely to occur in January 2018.
If you are an international supplier to 3SL, or one of our international customers, then it is possible that our IBANs will change in January 2018, and they will definitely change in April 2018 when the new ‘ring fenced’ bank in Barclays PLC receives its new BIC.
All of these changes are being completed in advance of the UK Government’s deadline of January 2019.
We believe that our current IBANs will remain available for 36 months after the change in April 2018.
We will provide more information as it becomes available. In the mean time, we apologise for the inconvenience that these changes will cause to our UK and international customers and suppliers.
Social Media
When we posted a suspect on Twitter in the Made In Britain (@MadeinBritainGB) #MadeInBritainHour we had quite a few people thinking about suspect items
Hints of the Month
Don’t want everyone changing an item’s category? This article highlights Category Skills
Many : Many, One : Many, Many : One, Cardinality Rules can be set on Cross References.
And one for I.T. a little help if things need a tweak or unfortunately go wrong.
You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog.