The Empower User's Group is an annual event, with this year's event held at the beautiful Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort in Miramar Beach, FL. This was such a fantastic location to host an event, word through the grapevine is Encore Analytics might host the event here next year as well.
Attendees were diverse and increased significantly from last year, with about 131 total attendees that represented 53 organizations and 4 government organizations. There were even about 4 Pinnacle clients in attendance. One of the great benefits of attending the EUG is that it offers PMI PDUs for certified professionals, as well as demos of the latest tools and techniques offered in breakout sessions.
This year's presentations were varied as they were not pre-screened by Encore Analytics, which allowed for more diversity of content. They were oriented towards DoD, NASA, and DOE contractors with a leaning toward DOE this year. It was clear that the focused improvements to the tool were to meet DOE audit needs following last years conference.
The technical training at this year's event included Basic User, Administrative and a new offering; Advanced Configuration. All the training sessions were well attended highlighting the desire for more information on efficient use of the application. The new addition of Advanced Configuration underscored the desire by the users to customize. The addition of coding language may have been intimidating to some, but I found that the class flowed really well.
Presentations showed an advanced use of Empower™ that I didn’t see last year. Empower™ is quickly gaining ground on the current wInsight™ user community with the adoption by NASA, DOE and the DOD. And surprisingly, Microsoft Project seemed to be making a resurgence as a scheduling tool among users. But Primavera P6 is still the predominant scheduling application being integrated with Empower™.The role based positioning of the application seemed to be extremely well received, so hopefully this model will be repeated at the next workshop. The Earned Schedule Metrics were an interesting addition to the standard gold card formulas and are fully supported by Empower™.
Vendors with complimentary integrated applications were allowed to present and host breakout sessions. These included:
If you attended the event, what did you learn?