Empowering Customers with Kantata OX’s Latest Innovations

The professional services industry never stops evolving—the technology solutions professional services organizations (PSOs) and embedded services organizations (ESOs) use to address their unique challenges need to keep pace through constant innovation. Kantata’s open infrastructure solution, Kantata OX, sits at the vanguard when it comes to empowering growing businesses with the insights they need to thrive, offering a comprehensive suite of market-leading capabilities that align the teams and processes that drive the professional services lifecycle.

At Kantata we’re always working to build on that foundation of success, collaborating with our customers to uncover new opportunities to further enhance the way professional services teams work. In this blog, we’ll highlight a few of the many new features in Kantata OX that will transform your approach to project estimation, setup, and execution, equipping your business to streamline your workflows and enhance collaboration within your project team.

Kantata OX New Feature Roundup

Effortlessly Drive More Accurate Project Estimates

The Estimate phase of the project lifecycle plays a key role in determining project success—both for your business and for your clients. Getting project estimates wrong often leads to suboptimal outcomes like lower project margins, bloated project timelines, and dissatisfied clients.

Kantata OX enables you to create a phase-level project plan, quantify the required efforts for various resources, and gain financial insights that set the stage for project success. With new updates to Kantata OX, populating your project plan has never been smoother. A new spreadsheet-like interface for managing Estimates makes it easy to quickly type directly in cells, effortlessly create new tasks with a single press of the Enter key, and conveniently copy and paste data between cells.

A newly introduced duration column offers users the ability to quickly estimate timeframes without calculating start and end dates. And the new Update Task Estimates feature makes it simple to automatically synchronize estimated fees and hours with task-level budgets and hours, saving precious time during project setup. When the project is ready to kick-off, clicking the Start Project button moves your project from the Estimate stage to the Active stage. One more exciting upcoming feature to look out for is a new snapshotting capability that will enable users to take a baseline of their project and compare that baseline with current project data, highlighting any variances in timelines, effort, and financial metrics.

 

Accelerate Task Completion and Improve Team Collaboration with Boards and To Dos

Anybody who’s managed their project work in a Kanban-style Board interface knows the immense satisfaction that comes from moving a Card containing an important task from In Progress to Complete. For many, once they start organizing their work in Boards, they never want to organize their work any other way.

The question becomes how to give project team members the simple Boards experience they crave within a professional services context, where some assigned items users are managing can have a big impact on a complex Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with associated revenue and timeline implications. That’s where Boards in Kantata OX come in.

Our Boards empower your team to visualize and prioritize relevant tasks more effectively while ensuring that the impacts of task updates are tracked at the project level. This functionality offers multiple swimlane options, commenting capabilities, and the flexibility to distinguish project tasks from individual To Do items. 

Tasks Board: This board provides an alternative view of all project tasks originally found in the Task Tracker. Any modifications made on the Tasks Board will be reflected in the Task Tracker, and vice versa. The Tasks Board provides a card-based presentation of project tasks, mirroring the entries in the Task Tracker. Each project task is symbolized by an individual Task card, simplifying the visualization of your project’s workflow and facilitating the prioritization of pending tasks.

 

To Do Board: The To Do Board focuses on To Do items, which are project-related activities that can be completed independently of project tasks and the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). To Dos represent smaller, supplementary items and details that may arise as the project progresses. The To Do Board comprises individual To Do cards that can be repositioned to reflect the progress of specific To Do items. This enables team members to manage their work without impacting the project plan.

 

Where appropriate, To Dos can be associated directly with Tasks, and To Dos associated with a Task can also now be surfaced in the Task Details side panel. This enhancement offers a comprehensive overview of all associated To Dos for a specific task, presenting essential details such as each To Dos’ status, estimated hours, and due date. Users can effortlessly associate To Dos with a project task by selecting one from the Associated Task drop-down menu, and this linked task’s due date will be prominently displayed on the card for reference. This functionality allows team members to establish clear connections between a task and the additional elements that bolster its execution.

Optimize Key Resource Management Processes 

Consistent project success is impossible without efficient resource management processes. With the latest enhancements in Task Actions within the Resourcing tab, Kantata has redefined resource management efficiency for users. These updates, seamlessly integrated into the familiar Resource Center interface, empower users with enhanced control over tasks, offering a host of benefits including:

• Precise Resource Allocation: Users can now precisely edit estimated hours in the Est. column, tailoring resource allocation to match project demands with pinpoint accuracy.
• Streamlined Task Assignment: Assigning or reassigning resources to tasks has never been easier, ensuring clear accountability and effortless task tracking.
• Enhanced Flexibility: Users can conveniently unassign resources, whether from all tasks or selectively, providing unparalleled flexibility in managing team capacity.

Accessible to any team member with scheduling permissions within financial projects, the new Resourcing tab is entirely project-focused. It mirrors the comprehensive view provided by the Resource Center, offering insights into the project’s resources, timelines, budgets, and team member specifics, including roles and allocated hours. These innovations empower customers to manage their resources with precision and clarity, ensuring streamlined operations and optimized project performance.

Kantata: Your Partner in Navigating Digital Transformation

We’re excited about these new features and their potential to transform operations across the professional services lifecycle. The Kantata team is committed to empowering customers with the tools they need to thrive in today’s fast-paced business landscape. With these enhancements to Kantata OX, customers are better equipped to manage tasks, allocate resources, and gain deeper insights into their projects. 

Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue our mission to equip our customers with the clarity, control, and confidence they need to thrive. If you want to keep up to date on new capabilities we are introducing to Kantata OX as they come out, please visit our release notes pages to see our monthly releases.