The University of Connecticut School of Business students used Pie in their Business Analytics and Project Management (MSBAPM) program course. The students worked on a real project for LIMRA, the program's corporate partner. The students objectives were to predict customers who will buy life insurance and forecast the growth of the life insurance market.

Managing the research process required learning and executing good project management best practices. In doing so, they chose to use PIEmatrix to run the team projects.

One of the students said, "In general, Pie is much easier to manipulate than Microsoft Project, and I love the idea of different Pie “recipes” (project templates). Every time when I look at the dashboard, I can simply know the current process of our project, as well as issues and risks. Besides, the user-friendly interface is also very impressive for me.

The combination of schedule, people, issue, risk and task in the project tab is good for me to manage all at one time. Moreover, I would get a notice message immediately when any changes are made by other team members."

Sudip Bhattacharjee, Associate Professor, said, "The tool has been a great success from the student and instructor (project sponsor) viewpoint. It provides us with a snapshot and dashboard view of each group’s progress. It also allows us to create fine-grained interlocking process steps, which helps us to monitor a panoply of project and course requirements."

This was our first pilot with students using Pie in the classroom. We are pleased to have received report of such great success. I look forward to helping other school programs.

Written by Paul Dandurand, Pie CEO/Founder