CMD Symphoony, About CMD Corporation - Creators of CMD Symphony, the standard for Process Management systems

CMD Corporation

CMD Symphony

CMD Symphony is the first comprehensive Methodology product suite that is built inside Microsoft Office Project 2003. CMD Symphony allows organizations to leverage industry best practices or their own methodologies by making them available with their project tasks.

CMD Symphony™ is an easy to use comprehensive web enabled Process Content Management™ product suite that is built inside Microsoft® Office Project 2003. Organizations can now create, customize and publish their methodologies from within Microsoft Project – capture and leverage the skills and knowledge of your organization.

Establish Enterprise, Departmental or Project level methodologies and Best Practices to support all types of projects within your organization: Marketing Campaigns, Product Development, Process Maturity (CMM, Six Sigma, etc.), Software Engineering (IT) and Event Management.

CMD Symphony Suite

Symphony Process Manager

Process Manager is built inside Project Professional and includes facilities for authoring and customizing best practices, generating project plans from the best practices library, creating and maintaining shared standard work product examples and templates (stored in Windows SharePoint Services), defining and maintaining Roles and Responsibilities, and managing project deliverables.

Build your Best Practices Library

Process Manager’s powerful Process Asset Library (PAL) capability allows you the flexibility of building your Best Practice assets in a manner that best suits your organization and budget. You can either purchase off-the-shelf Best Practices from CMD or another vendor or build the knowledge base that reflects the best practices of your organization. Process Manager enables you to create project based methodologies either by defining them from scratch or by simply selecting all or parts of the Best Practices lifecycles - processes from the PAL. Managers or staff with the appropriate permission can edit, move blocks of information, or add lessons learned easily.

Extend Enterprise Templates - Eliminate disconnected islands of information

Now there is no need to store your methodology information in external documents or on disconnected web pages. CMD Symphony ensures that all narrative information about a task including inputs and deliverables documents, roles and responsibilities, and references such as policies and techniques is available for the tasks in your project right inside Microsoft Project. Easily attach documents to Project or Enterprise Template tasks from WSS.

Symphony Insight

Insight is built inside Project Web Access and allows all project stakeholders to view the methodology, roles & responsibilities including examples and templates for their assignments over the web. It includes: best practices views across multiple projects and assignments, task specific roles & responsibilities, reference materials and deliverables across tasks and projects.

Using Web Access, stakeholders have access to all the methodology content as well as any reference information needed to accomplish the task objectives – such as a techniques manual, policies, etc. Navigation enables them to view multiple documents without leaving the Web Access portal. They can see their specific role on a task and view roles that others are playing. They can review examples and templates before completing project deliverables.

Symphony Server

Symphony Server is built as an extension of Microsoft Project Server. It enables access to all the knowledge content for methodologies, and documents associated with enterprise templates including policies and procedures.

Benefits CMD Symphony Brings

	Increased Productivity
	Easy to build knowledgebase of best practices from successful projects
	Meet organizational or other standards: CMM, ISO, Six Sigma, PMI’s - PMBOK
	Easy to provide task specific guidance to all Project Staff

CMD Symphony based Methodologies actually get used!!

Who uses it?

Project Managers use Symphony’s Process Asset Library to easily create a comprehensive list of Project Defined Processes with attached examples, templates, task specific roles & responsibilities and schedule very quickly – achieve 90% to many fold improvement in productivity.

Process Managers and Project Office – use Symphony for Process Content Management - building a knowledgebase of best practices or a framework that reflects the best practices of their organization with lessons learned from past projects.

Team Members use Symphony to get all of the information they need to do the tasks right the first time.

Have your previous attempts to introduce methodologies been less than successful?

Often organizations buy large methodologies from vendors with the expectation that since these are “industry best practices” they will be accepted by their organization. This is followed by a “cultural” change expectation. What is wrong with these expectations? They don’t address two factors we have learned over 15 years:

	Ease of Accessibility – methods, documents, & roles and responsibilities must be available and visible with tasks and assignments. If users have to click twice to navigate to find content, you will see a dramatic reduction in use.
	Relevance – methods must reflect the realities of the project and organization and not be generic or voluminous. The Project Manager must be able to easily customize the content to give clear project related guidance where necessary.