OnePlan Solutions: Unlock Business Agility with Products and Services for Enterprises on the Microsoft Platform

How we organize and execute work is changing. The pace of change defines how products are created and sold and how services are delivered to the customer. This change requires a comprehensive response from businesses in how work is organized and executed across departments, creating a focus on the agility to increase reaction and response rates to changes in the business.

San Diego, CA-headquartered OnePlan was designed to realize this vision of flexibility and timely decision-making by including the ability to articulate strategy and link it to key investments and initiatives. This is complemented by capturing information to direct attention to areas of the greatest impact while supporting multiple project delivery methodologies and providing integration with popular scheduling tools, granting delivery teams the flexibility they expect. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, OnePlan’s team was awarded the Global Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year and finalist.

We recently interviewed Joe Larscheid, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OnePlan Solutions, to know more about the company’s innovative leadership in portfolio and work management. Read for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. Could you briefly tell us about the journey of OnePlan Solutions?

The journey of OnePlan started 20 years ago with a simple software product to help organizations see and manage their projects. Today, we help Fortune 500 companies not just execute their work, but strategically plan, prioritize and optimize their enterprise portfolios of products, projects, and operations. We help businesses connect strategy and execution.

As a startup, we saw an opportunity to help teams better collaborate. Our first product added value to the Microsoft technologies that enterprises run on. We have evolved to a product line for strategic portfolio management, grown our customer base around the world, and grown our team. Throughout this journey  we have kept to that original principle of partnering with Microsoft while sharing a similar vision for the modern workplace.

Q. What makes OnePlan Solutions relevant in today’s times? Could you give us some context?

There are so many challenges our customers are facing in their business today! Here are 3 which are top of mind:

The first is the old ways of doing business are being disrupted, so our customers are under pressure to innovate or make impactful changes to their products and services faster. The need for speed is driving a move towards more versatile and frequent company-wide planning. However, many companies today are still in the practice of annual planning, which makes it hard to change direction for a full 12 months. That’s a long time in the age of digital transformation.

A second trend is the competitive need to do more with less. Skilled human resources are in short supply, so it is critical to plan team and resource capacity so that people and capital can flow to the highest priorities.

Third, our customers have seen a proliferation of work management technologies across their enterprise. Some of these tools are problematic duplications, while others are welcome and valuable. The persistent challenge is that these tools often don’t talk to each other or they overlap, creating inefficiency and silos in what should be an end-to-end business process.

Q. How does OnePlan help streamline service delivery?

In response to the need for versatility and speed in planning and execution, the OnePlan product line supports our customers in shifting to a more agile and transparent update of their strategic planning. For executing work at the product or project level, our customers use OnePlan to shorten their delivery cycles and pivot more easily.

To address today’s resource and capital challenges, we provide technology, analytics, and visualizations to help with the complex job of planning and tracking.

Finally, our solution involves identifying and consolidating the tools which support the best flow of value throughout a business process. We have a great systems integration platform that allows customers to connect tools so that they don’t lose or duplicate data along the way. For example, an investment in a new program or service may evolve through many different systems: Sales, Marketing, HR, Product Development and Finance.  We help streamline the flow of work.

Q. How do you think is your company positioned in the marketplace?

I think one major area in which we stand out is our ability to deal simultaneously with the different needs, methodologies, and styles of working you will find in a typical enterprise. Some people call this a ‘hybrid’ or ‘adaptive’ state. This approach is boosted by the way in which our product roadmap aligns with Microsoft’s. Our growth has gone in parallel with the growth of Microsoft technologies such as Power Platform, Teams, and Azure, all of which can be fused with OnePlan.

Q. Could you tell us a bit about your partnership with Microsoft?

This has been a long relationship which is very important to us and our customers. It is fascinating to look back and see how OnePlan and Microsoft have learned and helped each other. In the history of our partnership, we have seen the transformation of the software industry from the desktop to the cloud, and an exciting new focus on business solutions.

Last year, OnePlan won the Microsoft Global Partner of the year award in the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) category. This was the second time winning this honor, and we are now also winning awards for other business solutions categories. Like any partner relationship, you must put in the effort, and these honors are a testament to how we work hard every day to add value to our partner and their customers.

Q. Could you tell us about the work culture at OnePlan Solutions?

What sets us apart is the great people on our team and how they listen and respond to our customers. We typically execute our work through small teams, which is a great model for fostering creativity, trust, and autonomy. We believe that the role of leadership is to help and support our teams every day, not to tell them what to do. It’s a demanding environment because we are constantly growing, learning, and adapting.

Q. What does the road ahead look like for OnePlan? Do you have anything new coming up?

You will see OnePlan innovations which support the enterprise on its agile journey – including ways of incorporating the business functions and industries. This means taking the most beneficial aspects of Agile and adapting them to areas such as strategic planning, operational planning, and the day-to-day work of the various departments in an enterprise. Another focus is on helping customers benefit from shifting their enterprise from ‘projects’ to ‘products’ and organizing ‘value streams’: lean principles for improving time to market and quality.

About the CEO

Joe Larscheid, Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Joe has been working within the industry for more than 20 years and has created multiple innovations and companies, culminating in today’s OnePlan Solutions. Joe is dedicated to paving the way for the company and works across OnePlan teams and customers to align on a vision for the future of work.

“OnePlan won the Microsoft Global Partner of the year award in the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) category.”