Today is a proud moment, as we launch Rockr in private beta. We regularly work on large and complex projects, from digital transformations to change management initiatives. We found that, despite a seemingly infinite choice in project management tools, it is still extremely difficult to deliver projects effectively. In fact, research has shown that the majority of big projects fail.

While there are many reasons why projects fail, we have found that available software to manage projects has primarily focused on task management and individual teams. But trackers and kanban boards aren’t sufficient, nor do they address the core needs of bigger projects. Managing accountability across business units or even organisations, a clearly defined sign-off process, digital audit trails and knowledge management have been thoroughly ignored, but often form the backbone of successful deliveries from an operational perspective.

We developed Rockr, to address the needs of organisations facing these challenges. Below are several use cases where Rockr excels:

Just to name a few examples.

Consistency and repeatability

As an organisation you should strive to develop blueprints for how you can consistently deliver projects and programmes successfully. Rockr allows organisations to create project templates, which are essentially pre-defined milestones and key activities that projects should deliver each time. This helps organisations to create playbooks and best practices, insights which are often lost after projects.

Accountability & sign-off

It is notoriously difficult to track accountability on big projects and stakeholders are often left asking about who is responsible for what (especially when things are not going to plan). No matter if projects use Agile, Waterfall or other methodologies, ownership is critical.

Rockr allows organisations to identify responsibility for key activities. Key activities in Rockr aren’t tasks, but rather areas of responsibility. Project managers may still use typical task management tools or task boards to break activities down into digestible actions for team members but they are tracked and signed off in Rockr. Each activity allows you to assign a person for sign-off which can be from within your organisation, a client or another organisation.

Removing information silos

An information silo is when different parts of your project don’t communicate. They often lead to inconsistencies, incompatible processes and systems and a plethora of other costly problems which results projects not delivering expected outcomes.

We built an AI-driven information discovery engine based on BERT, which automatically analyses projects in real-time and identifies and recommends information created across a project to your project team when they need it.

In practice this works as follows: Imagine Richard, a member of you project team in London creates a “data security requirements” deliverable. The next time Lauren, who recently joined a different part of the programme as a data specialist in Birmingham, works on an activity related to “data security”, Rockr will start recommending Richard’s “data security requirements” to her to ensure she is aware of it, so that information across your project is joined up.

Summary

As we are making Rockr available to more organisations, we hope to transform and improve the control and governance during the deliver of complex projects and help our customers achive the outcomes their projects set out to achieve. As project become more complex and workplaces become more distribute through remote work and multiple locations, there is a need, more than ever, to infuse clarity, control and oversight to ensure complex projects. The role of AI and machine learning is not just to make pretty charts, but to support teams in an integrated manner. With Rockr, we are making the first step on a journey to re-imagine project delivery.

For more information about Rockr visit https://rockr.ai.