Projector PSA has announced a new platform within its software to help educate, engage and empower its users. The new e3 Community platform delivers a combination of learning assets that users of the Projector PSA software can access easily.
Is this a learning management solution?
Education and training is one of the components of unbillable time that is advantageous to professional services firms. Projector has made it easier for users of its software to access educational material about both their role and its software. It is delivering training material on its platform with a variety of content types.
That content includes webinars, tutorial videos, articles and other training assets. Some of these are delivering best practices in professional services and others are functional training for Project PSA software. There are also playlists available within the e3 Community. Some of these are aimed at roles such as resource managers, with content specifically targeted and improving their efficiency and knowledge.
This is not however a full blown LMS (Learning Management Solution) that is personalised or can be varied by customer. Projector PSA are curating the content and deliver the same content to every user. They are eager to take feedback and improve the content within the solution though. The platform is accessed through the topics menu in Project Web or through the headlines feed on the Projector Home Page.
Greg Smith, Community Manager at Projector PSA: “We have put a lot of thought into which features would add the most value to our user community. I am confident that the choices we have made for this release provide our users with the most inclusive community and learning platform available for professional services automation software.”
The aim of the community is that it is a next generation of support platform. It will in time provide a forum for users to add comments and discuss content. Its intention is to enhance the knowledge of the user base both about using Projector and delivering services to their customers.
What does this mean
This is an interesting step to combine a community forum with a learning system and a software intranet. It is currently none of these and there is little indication of which direction it will go. In some ways that is deliberate and Projector are letting the users determine through their engagement.
There are other ways that Projector can take the community. Will they add gamification? Can users create their own playlists? Will companies be able to add content specifically for their users? Will analytics on usage be added? Is it available now for Projector to access and report on? Will areas of Projector become context sensitive, so that if there is relevant content on say resource scheduling a user can rapidly access that content when they require help?
How it develops over the next few months will be interesting to see. Projector will need to overcome the challenge of engagement and there is no indication of how they intend to do that. However, it will also be a competitive advantage when it demonstrates the software, especially if the content is as rich as the press release infers. There is no indication on how many learning articles, webinars and videos will be available though. Hopefully there will be more videos than the ProjectorPSA YouTube channel though, which currently numbers only 2 videos, both listed 7 years ago.
