March 2008 - Posts

• AceProject as a means to keep clients in the loop

  Ron, from Digital Creations, in Louisville, Kentucky, is using AceProject in a very interesting way. Ron does not outsource his work, but he does feel the need to keep his clients in the loop. With AceProject, he can let his clients know exactly how far along the wedding video editing is, and even let them see how many hours is has worked on their video, up to date. Ron explains it all in this blog post. For Ron, AceProject is a great customer service tool. He uses AceProject to let his clients peek in on his work and to automatically notify them when he's beginning work on a new film sequence. Ron and his newlywed clients can even exchange documents, ask questions and provide feedback right in the system. Now that is outstanding customer service!  If you'te in the Louisville area and planning your wedding, be sure to check ou Ron's services. Posted Mar 31 2008, 07:59 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, customer service

• What about when you're done?

  In many ways, a project is like a relationship. It starts out shiny and new and exciting, a lot of time and effort is invested in it, and when it has run its course, it leaves no one indifferent. Just like relationships, there are 5 main ways to deal with the end of a project. Say it ain't so! You liked that project so much, you don't want it to finish. Or, uncertainty about the next project makes you want to stretch out this one. In any case, you start looking to unfinished business, insignificant details to keep working on the project. Get over it. There are many more exciting projects in your future, and you can only sart them by letting go of this one.  Thank God it's over Not all projects go well, even with the best team and the best intentions. When a hellish project comes to a close, the first thing most of us want to do is forger about it. Never speak of it again. If we could erase any record of the project ever existing, we would. Get it over with. The more you stress about that project after it's done, the more harm you are doing yourself. Just give it a good night's sleep (or two) and move on to the next thing. It can't be as bad as the last project, right? Memory lane Sometimes, when a project is over, we want to go back in time and take a look at what was done. Basically, rehash the project's fond memories. Learn from it. There's no point taking that trip down memory lane if you're not going to bring back a souvenir. Analyze this Beyond the debriefing, it may be interesting to understand how the project went. What worked well? What didn't work in the project? Was everybody on the team working as well as they could or should? Were resources adequate? Was something missing? Make it brief. No need to remember how there were too few donuts at the third meeting. Focus on areas that could benefit and can realistically be improved. Back to school In the end, none of the above is worth it if you don't learn from the project. How can you improve what didn't work in the project, and duplicate what did work well? Experience is worthless if it is not leveraged to improve the future. Learn your lesson and put in practice. Don't try to apply too many changes at once. Focus on one or two things to improve.  Get back in the saddle Just like relationships, the best way to move on... is to move on! Each new project is an opportunity to be better than the previous one.    Posted Mar 28 2008, 08:02 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management

• Bedsite manners matter

  There is much outrage these days on the Internet, against Apple no less. Apple decided to use Apple Software Update to send its Safari browser to Windows computers. What people are angry about is not that Apple is offering Safari to its iTUNES users. It's the way Apple is offering it. Basically, it looks like Apple is trying to trick users into getting the new browser. Safari is listed among the other iTUNES and QuickTime updates, with no way to tell it's a new software and not a simple update on software already on your computer. One could argue that it's up to the users to review the updates before installing.  I think that's a weak argument. Companies may not be legally bound to be crystal clear in their dealings with their clients, but it is still the right thing to do. The way a company interacts with its clients affects its reputation, and that can make a break it.  Your reputation precedes you in your market. Being a well-perceived company brings many benefits: first-time meetings with clients are smoother, existing clients are proud to be doing business with you. On the other hand, a bad reputation is hard the rehabilitate. In the long run, doing the right things pays more than tricking clients.   Posted Mar 26 2008, 07:43 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: business, customer service

• Ten ways to fail at project management

  Are you tired of being too succesful at project management?  1. Don't give details It’s important to give very telegraphic instructions in the tasks, so that your team has to guess what you really want. 2. Communicate on a need-to-know basis And when your team asks questions about the project, don’t give clear answers. In fact, your collaborators don’t even need to know what the project is about and what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s not like it would help them do their job! 3. Be an optimist Assume everything will happen as expected. Your planning is perfect, the way you created tasks exactly follows the way things should be. And what should be is definitely how it will be. Murphy’s Law does not apply to project management, after all. 4. Leave no margin for error in the timeline No one ever gets sick, leaves the company or needs to take time off unexpectedly. And your team is so great that they are never late in their tasks, in fact nothing ever takes longer than planned with your team. 5. Take no suggestions from your team It’s not like they know anything about the project, right? After all, you didn’t tell them anything about it. 6. Live in an ivory tower Since you don’t need to inform your team and they have nothing of value to add to the project, no need to talk to them, or even sit in the same room with them. 7. Stick to project management Managing a project is a very important task. This is why you should do nothing else in the team. There is no need to manage your teammates; this is why there is an HR department in your organization. 8. Rely on assumptions and your own guesswork Only you know what the project needs. Don’t listen to any feedback from your team, simply take your guesswork for reality. 9. Rely only on your project management software to know how your project is going There is nothing more to the project than the sum of its tasks. As we said earlier, HR can take care of the rest. 10. Believe in perfection Once a project is completed, everything is finished and there will be no need to corrections and improvements. There are no such things as bugs    Happy Easter eveyrone! Posted Mar 21 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, humor

• Marketing and journalism: one and the same

  I have a bachelor's degree in journalism.  If I met my former classmates, they would frown at my career in marketing, thinking that I had gone on the dark side of force, so to speak.  I think they're wrong. In my mind, journalism and marketing are not quite different. What changes is the audience and the product. Let's face it, the more papers a story sells - or the more viewers a TV newscast gets - the more successful the journalist seems to be. And if a newspaper does not have enough readers, the content is the first to be blamed. Marketing and journalism are about reaching out to people For the marketer, the audience is  the clients, actual, and future, for the product we are selling. We want our clients to know about our company and our product, or at least interest them enough so that they will check it out.  Journalists want to reach their market as well, except they call it an audience. They're still the same humans, and what they provide is information and opinion. Journalists want to reach people so that they will read the next paragraph or stay on the TV channel during the commercial break. Good marketing and good journalism have strong ethics Both in journalism and marketing, there are dishonest people who will manipulate their audience into a specific frame of mind, to form the desired opinion. However, both good journalists and good marketers will achieve this without hiding the truth or presenting opinions as facts. A marketer who believes in her product doesn’t need to fabricate facts to convince her clients to buy her product. The same way, a journalist who believes in fair and balanced reporting is not out to promote an agenda and will publish her article, even if the facts are not how she expected them to be.  Marketing and journalism are about selling It's pretty obvious that marketing is about selling: selling a product, selling sympathy to orphans in the third world, selling an idea. If there is nothing to sell, there would be no marketing. Now, not everything is bought with money. In politics, marketers are trying to get people's votes, not their money. On the other end, it's not always obvious that journalists are also selling something: their media. Let's face it, without newspapers sales and advertisement sales, there would be no news.  Posted Mar 19 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: marketing

• From users to fans

  You know when your user base is turning into fans when people start making tools to improve your product. They are so committed to your product, they are willing to improve it themselves.  To the creator of the product, this is one of the most rewarding gestures a user can make. Jason Skowronek has been using AceProject for a long time, and, as he explains on his blog, he needed to be able to reuse user licenses. For example, when someone leaves the company, he would need assign that user license to someone else.  Currently, in AceProject, Jason would has the following choices: Rename that user (and keep the former employee's history attached to the user) Delete the user (and loose all the time sheets, discussion forums posts, messages this user created), and create a new user for the new employee Increase his user license to be able to create more users. It turns out Jason wanted none of those choices. So he wrote this nifty SQL procedure that "In a nutshell, will re-assign all relevant data to a new user account, then delete the actual user record from the database." This is very useful to keep within one's user license. More than that, it shows that Jason liked working with AceProject so much he was willing to pitch in and make a tool for AceProject. We've always been open to our clients making changes to their AceProject system, whether it was by having us customize their account or by doing the work themselves on their Source Code package. We're very happy that Jason made his procedure, and even happier that he chose to share it with us. Thank you, Jason! Please note that this script is owned by Jason. We did not test this script, so it may not work with versions of AceProject other than 4.4, or it may not work at all for your database. Use at your own risk. If you run into problems using it, contact Jason. Websystems is not responsible for tools created for AceProject by third parties. Posted Mar 17 2008, 02:02 PM by Karine with 4 comment(s) Filed under: product management, custom work, customer satisfaction

• Master projects and templates galore

  Since we are in the final testing stages for AceProject 4.5, I thought I would show you how easy it is to work with project templates in AceProject.  Once we start using a project management tool, as more and more projects are created and completed, a need arises for project templates, also called master projects. It's very useful to be able to import another project's structure into the new project: no need to reconfigure task groups, statuses, priorities, etc. However, once we have that, wouldn't it be nice to also be able to import the template project's documents as well? And what about tasks? For repetitive projects, it saves a lot of time if you can avoid recreating the same tasks. Once you've imported the template project's tasks, you may want to adjust the task date according to the project dates, so the first task starts on the same day as the project, and so on. That was the easy part.  Now comes the real challenge: it would be interesting to be able to dinamically connect a project structure to its template. This way, if you change a task status in the project master, it's also changed in the projects attached to that master. But what if you want to disconnect the project from its master? And what if you want to start from a project template, and adapt it to that specific project? This whole project template business is becoming sophisticated. The easy way out would be to make project templates complicated and hard to use. Project templates with AceProject In AceProject, we've made project templates quite simple. Any project can be a template, simply by checking a box called "Project Template" in the project configuration page. There is nothing else to do to make a project template. Once you want to use this template, you can choose how much of the template you need to import: only the structure (task groups, statuses, types and priorities), the project documents, and tasks. Again, a simple checkbox will tell AceProject to adjust task dates based on the new project's dates.  With AceProject 4.5, we introduce parent/child project relationships. Do you want your new project's structure to be dynamically linked to its Parent project? Then simply check the box called Link with.    When you change something in the parent project, it will be reflected in its child projects automatically. This helps you maintain a standardized way to manage and structure projects. Change your mind? Now all is fine and good, until you realize you want this project to work differently from the Parent project. Maybe you want to add task groups that are specific to the new project. Disconnecting a child project from its parent is just as easy as it was to connect it in the first. You simply click a button called Remove Link... and you're done!   That's what I call easy templates No hassle. No complicated wizard. Just a project template. AceProject 4.5 is coming out in April 2008, and I can't wait to show it off :-)   Posted Mar 14 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, child project, parent project, project templates

• Do you taste your own medicine?

  Our colleague Jason from 37signals had a very interesting blog post lately. His post was elegantly summarized in this sentence: "By building products we want to use, we’re also building products that millions of other small businesses want to use."   Getting a taste of one's own medicine can be an very humbling experience. Granted, not all products can be used by their makers (think industrial products). Nonetheless, both the creators and the sellers of a product would benefit from using their own stuff, if only to understand how easy (or how hard) it is to use it. In the software business, we often see interfaces that were built by people who never actually use the system. The way the system works is logical, but it simply doesn't make sense from a usability point of view. For example: confirmation pop-ups (are you sure you want to close this window?) are more a nuisance than anything else. Honestly, how often do you actually read the text of those windows? Those things are so annoying we click on OK as fast as we can, to make them go away. If you are trying to create a truly user-friendly product, you should: Enjoy using the product yourself. Listen to your user's comments about the interface very closely. Pay attention to what new employees have to say about the product: they are not assimilated in the culture yet, and they are looking at the product with fresh eyes. A lot of traditional marketing will prefer to focus on the market. Who is the market? Is it someone? Is it something? Is it a global entity? Does it have a personality? A market is a vague group of people that have varied ideas, tastes and needs. Who can really say what the market wants? Who can really build a product to fit a market's needs? What we do at Websystems is build a system that works well for us, listen to our fans and users, and deliver the best product we can make.   Posted Mar 12 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: software development, product management

• Due dates and release-ready

  Presently, the team at Websystems is in the final stages of getting AceProject 4.5 ready to release. We are testing the new system as much as we can, so we can release as bug-free a system as we can. However, we also know there is a one-month period after the version release, where we will be correcting details dug up by our users. As much as we know AceProject and as much as we test it before release, there is nothing like thousands of users to find a few bugs we overlooked.  In the end, it's the calssic case of being too close to the tree to see the forest. There are as many ways to use AceProject as there are users, and it is simply impossible for us to replicate how each user navigates the system and uses the features.  The whole release process is very impredictable. At Websystems, we never committed to a specific date for a new release version. Sure, we have an idea of when the new version will be released. It usally starts with a season. For example, for AceProject 4.5, we knew we would release it in the Spring of 2008. As the process of developing the new version gets closer to the end, we can narrow it down to a month. For AceProject, we are confident version 4.5 will be out in April. However, we never decide on a date before the actual release is published.  So much can happen between the day we choose a date and the due-date itself. Someone can get sick and thow off the schedule, a new feature can be trickier to  implement, or a bug could take longer than expected to diagnose and fix. When is the last time you saw a company release its software on the planned date? It seems to me setting a specific date is inviting problems. It all comes down to what is the most important: being on time, or being ready?  Posted Mar 10 2008, 08:16 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: software development, product management

• Customizing software

  Ever since AceProject has been on the project management software market, we have been receiving request for cutomization. Most organizations will shy away from custom work because they find it too complicated or too time-consuming. However, in the project management industry, I have yet to see two companies managing their projects the same way. Or track time the same way. We have seen the custom work business grow steadily over the last 3 or 4 years. In our experience, it's been a great way to build long-term relationships with our clients. We work closely with them before, during and after the work is completed, to make sure they get what they pay for. On their end, our clients get exactly the software they want. On our end, we get to be inspired by the features they ask us to add to their AceProject account. Sometimes, we decide to add the feature to the standard system and the client gets a rebate on the development costs. Sometimes, we'll implement the feature later on in the standard system, with an improved interface. For Websystems, the custom work aspect of our business is an opportunity for growth. It's becoming a differentiator for us in the market. Because we are a samller orgnization, we are more flexible and it's easier for us to change how we allocate our resources, to accomodate a client request. Now, our challenge is to keep a balance between the custom work and developing the standard system. While we don't like refusing a contract, we can't allow AceProject to be neglected because of custom work. Some would say this is a beautfitul problem :-)    Posted Mar 07 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: software development, customer service, product management, custom work

• The never-ending spreadsheet

  Spreadsheets are very useful: they can contain formulas, sort data and have all sorts of bells and whistles to them. Spreadsheets can hold a lot of information, in a relatively small space. Spreasheets are convenient. Say you want to organize an event at your organisation. You make a list of everything you need to do, with due-dates for each task. The spreadsheet works, it helps to make you feel in control of the situation. Now you need other people to help you with this event. What should you do? Add a column to your spreadsheet with the name of the person assigned to the task, and send the spreadsheet to everyone involved, so they can see what they need to do.  This is where it becomes tricky. As each person updates the spreadsheet, multiple versions of this spreadsheet exist. Who has the latest version? Is there even a latest version of it? The spreadsheet sarts being emailed around between the different members of the team. They add status information on their tasks, questions, requirements. The spreadsheet grows. Soon enough the spreadsheet is a mess. Who knows what and who needs what is unclear. Logistics become complicated. And meetings become required to sort out the information in the spreadsheet. Argh. You should have used a project management system. With project management or task management software, there is one central place where eveyrone can log in to get their tasks and updates on their tasks. Eveyrone can be notified when something changes or a deadline is approaching. And no more neverending spreadsheet making the rounds in everybody's  email inbox...although if you really want it, you can export your information to a spreadsheet ;-) Spreadsheets are great for simple projects that involve only you. As soon as you add other people in the project, the limitations of working with one file show themselves.   Posted Mar 05 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, spreadsheets

• Renting software: peace of mind for a monthly fee

  It was not so long ago that web-based software was not deemed trustworthy. What if the Internet service was down? What about the files, would they be safe? I remember disliking Hotmail because it was web-based only. My inbox size was limited, access was not always possible and there was so much spam!  Ten years later, I'm in love with Gmail, because it's web-based: I've got more inbox space than I could ever need, it's always on and the spam filter is amazing. What changed? From web-based distrust to a growing interest and need for web-based applications, even the business world is getting onboard. There are several reasons why software as a service is becoming so popular: No need to maintain software on users' workstations. This takes a huge load off the IT team's work. Software on user workstations requires permissions to be managed and needs to be updated regularly. When the hardware is upgraded, it also takes time to reinstall all the software. With web-based software, all the IT team has to worry about is the Internet browser and the user's access to the Internet. Web-based software is maintained, upgraded and supported by the supplier. No need to manage file servers. When all one's files are in a web-based application, the organization doesn't need to maintain hard drive space on file servers, it becomes the supplier's problem. This turns into savings in hardware and time for the client. No need to manage databases. With a project management system like AceProject, the database is hosted on the supplier's servers and the client doesn't need a database administrator on staff. All database management and maintenance tasks are performed by the supplier. Backups at the client's discretion. Since the supplier takes care of backups and sometimes even provides a garanteed level of service, it's up to the client to decide if they want to make their own backups of their web-based sysem's data. Let's face it, software updates are becoming cumbersome and time-consuming. Network security is only getting tighter, making it harder to access our own data from outside the network. The planet is getting smaller everyday. Having secure access to software, regardless of where you are in the world, easily, makes more sense. It makes so much sense, in fact, that organizations prefer renting or subscribing to software rather than buying it. At AceProject, we offer both a hosted solution and an installed solution, and 90% of our customers prefer the hosted solution.  Posted Mar 04 2008, 03:00 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: software as a service, SAAS, hosted software, web-based software