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MAKING IT IN THE BIG WORLD OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT.

Go Ahead, Manage

The life of a small company in the great world of project management software: from marketing to product management, software development... and project management, of course.

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Fake emergencies ruin it for the rest of us

It's part of my job at Websystems to reply to email enquiries about AceProject. I get asked all sorts of questions, from pricing to features to integration with external systems (via CSV files). I enjoy replying to these emails because they give me a good idea of what our clients are looking for in a project management system. I try to reply to all email within one business day, usually faster. 

Every once in a while, I'll receive an email with the red question mark (!), or URGENT in the subject line. Obviously, I'll look at those emails first, in case there is an actual emergency with this client. Most of the time, there isn't. The sender simply thought she would get a faster response by labeling her message as urgent. She did succeed in grabbing my attention. However, a request for our pricing hardly qualifies as urgent, especially considering that the information is actually available on our web site. Often, once I've replied to those "urgent" emails, I won't get a response from this person for a few days, further proof that the emergency was not real.

I've also encountered these fake emergencies in person. I had a colleague who would mask her poor time-management skills with emergencies. A rerquest for pricing (RFP) would sit on her desk for a week of more, and she would bring it to my attention only when the deadline was just a few hours away. She lived in a constant state of emergency. The problem was, when she actually had an urgent request, no one would believe her.

This ruins it for the real emergencies

How can I trust that messages marked URGENT are actually emergencies, when 90% of the messages labeled URGENT really aren't? How can I trust someone telling me something is urgent, when ALL they ever deal with is urgent?

It's the business world version of crying wolf. 

Published Jun 27 2008, 08:23 AM by Karine
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About Karine

Since my graduation from Concordia University in 1998, I have worked in technical writing and later marketing at various technology-driven companies. Now Director or Marketing for Websystems, my goal is to achieve better visibility for the company and its product, AceProject. I believe that AceProject is a great, intuitive project management system and I want to convince as many people as possible! I am part of a passionate team that believes in doing the job right, with the customer in mind.
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