November 2008 - Posts

• A New Version, A New Help System

  As the help pages writer for AceProject, let me talk a bit about our new help system. I'm actually a musician and one of my main influences is the rock group Kiss. I love their musicianship, their music and their stage show, of course, but they also taught me great things in life. They often said in interviews that they built the rock band they had never seen and always dreamed of. I realize that this is exactly what we do at Websystems, in the project management software business. We built the tool we had never seen and always dreamed of. Our new help pages are based upon the same motto: This is the help section I have never seen and always dreamed of. Personally, when I look at help pages in general, I'm unsatisfied most of the time. It looks as though help is something that must be provided, but the time spent on its writing should be minimal. That's not our philosophy. We want to provide quality support, and quality help files, in order to keep offering a simple and efficient project management software. I wanted to explain things in a way that couldn't be clearer. I wanted to add images, screenshots, show every field, etc. I wanted it to be more visual. When we discussed the general idea with Michel, our graphic designer, he brought some interesting concepts. I had great expectations and Michel finally came up with something that I had never seen. Plus, it was so original that I couldn't have dreamed about it. I give Michel two thumbs up for coming up with this awesome design. We are proud to bury our old help pages which, I think, were not reader-friendly enough and lacked visual elements. You can see some examples by following the links below:         For your information, these new help pages will be available in version 4.6. Thank you for your interest in AceProject. Sylvain Traversy Customer Service and Documentation Posted Nov 26 2008, 09:36 AM by Sylvain with no comments Filed under: AceProject, help pages, version 4.6

• Project management and communications

  It's easy to get swallowed by project management tools. It's easy to feel that we can get all the information we need from a piece of software. But it's not true.  If you want to know how well a project is going, take your team to lunch. They will tell you more about the project than any statistic. While you're sitting at the table with your team, take a look at their non-verbal behavior. Are they happy to be together? Are they talking to each other? Are they just sitting there, waiting for lunch to end? How your team interacts together will show if they are getting along and where there might be personality clashes. Moreover, the general mood of the team is a good indicator of the project's status.   Posted Nov 25 2008, 08:13 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork

• More AceProject 4.6 peeks!

  AceProject 4.6's development is going well! We are progressing much faster with the agile development method. Overall, this method makes AceProject 4.6 always ready to be released, because we test and document each iteration, instead of waiting at the end to find and fix the bugs. This turns out to be much more efficient. Thanks our great development team, I can show you more of AceProject 4.6.  Task History Many clients love our Task History feature, which logs all changes to a task automatically. Unfortunately, this option was not enabled by default in AceProject, we everyone had to remember to always check that little box. Well, not anymore. Task History will now be enabled by default when you create a project:   Google Chrome support AceProject already supports Safari. Since Safari and Chrome use the same Webkit, it wasn't a big challenge for us to support Chrome. Plus, the ability to make application shortcuts is a nice way to have AceProject on your desktop! Task comments in the user tab It used to be that you would create the task, the move to the assignment tab to choose who will do the task, and then come back to the main task tab to put a comment. This was time consuming. With AceProject 4.6, you will be able to put comments in the Assignment tab as well.   Dates reports without math logic This was one of my pet peeves. I can't think time with logical operators. For me, it was very difficult to think if a start date was smaller or bigger than another date. I always had to think about things like "Start Date > 25/03/2008," before I could say that it meant that the start date is later than March 25th. I am certain that I was not alone in this predicament. With AceProject 4.6, <, >, and = have been replaced with real words, which makes it much easier to understand.    Posted Nov 21 2008, 01:23 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: features, software development, AceProject

• Go Ahead, Manage contributes to PM Hut

  We've published an article on PM Hut, one of the web's leading blogs on project management: 10 Signs That You Should Give Up on Your Project It outlines my ten things to look out for in failing projects. I hope you enjoy it! About PM Hut PM Hut currently is highly praised in top Project Management blogs, and has the best Project Managers in the world as contributors http://www.pmhut.com/project-management-authors for a list of all contributors). PM Hut is currently the #1 Project Management Blog on blogged.com: http://www.blogged.com/search/project%20management.       Posted Nov 20 2008, 09:19 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: Blogging, project management

• PMP Study help

  It seems I made a mistake in the link for my last post, here is the correct link: Project Processes INs and OUTs Posted Nov 19 2008, 12:51 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: PMP, PMI

• Project management processes: a PMI study helper

  I've been studying to get my PMP certification this fall. The interesting thing about studying for the PMP exam is that good project managers will naturally go through most of the processes, so there aren't so many new concepts to grasp. However, there is a LOT of theory and terminology to learn! To help myself make sense of it and study it more efficiently, I've made myself and Excel workbook with all the processes inputs and outputs. I thought I would share it here, it may be helpful to you too: Project Processes INs and OUTs Happy studying! Posted Nov 19 2008, 08:04 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: PMP, PMI

• Presenting at DSI 2008

  Melinda Cline, a university teacher who has been teaching with AceProject, will be presenting a paper at next Sunday at DSI 2008: Using AceProject to Improve Student Learning in MIS Courses. If you are in Baltimore next weekend, be sure to stop at the Marriot Waterfront Hotel and go listen to her story. From the Decision Sciences Institute's Web site: "Everyone makes decisions. Members of the Decision Science Institute (DSI) approach decision making as a science. Our domain of application is not limited to a particular type of institution, industry, functional area, or discipline, but is all inclusive of decision making in general." A big thanks to Melinda who has worked very hard on putting that paper together!     Posted Nov 17 2008, 09:57 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: AceProject, white paper

• A sneak peak at AceProject 4.6

  We are entering out third and last cycle of development for AceProject 4.6. So far, the agile method has been working well, and we think AceProject 4.6 will benefit greatly from shorter iterative development cycles. Today, I want to show you three really nice improvements we've made to AceProject. No need to close the task to save your changes We were getting a lot of comments from our users about the inability to just Save a task in AceProject. Before 4.6, you need to navigate to another tab or close the task in order to save your changes. It was annoying and a waste of time. Well, not anymore!  We've added a new option to the Update button: Update + Keep Open.   Documents go public Another request we had from our user was about documents, that it woul be nice to permit some documents to be seen by people outside their AceProject team. We thought that was a great idea! Now, AceProject task and project documents can be public. When a document is public, anyone who has the link to that document can see it, without the need to log in to AceProject. This is a great feature if you want to show your client a screen mock-up, for example.  You'll know when you can start the work With AceProject 4.6, when your tasks are controlled by a dependency link, AceProject will tell you when you can start working on them. You won't need to check if the predecessors are completed, AceProject will do it for you and send you an email like this: Expect AceProject 4.6 for Christmas We're starting out last development iteration today. Our goal is to make it available in December for online accounts, and early 2009 for the Source Code package. Posted Nov 14 2008, 07:19 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: features, AceProject, product development

• How to find the hidden stakeholders in your project

  It's every project manager's worst nightmare: a stakeholder magically appears at the end of the project, and makes your life miserable. Here are a few examples: The project stalls at production because the IT team won't install software that doesn't meet their security requirements on their servers. The great new product is not being used, because the end-users feel it is to complicated and they don't need it anyway. At delivery, the client refuses the product because it doesn't meet an industry standard they forgot to inform you about. Is any of this familiar? In any project, you'll have the visible stakeholders and the hidden stakeholders. Visible stakeholders are easy to manage: they are vocal and they will make their opinions known on their own. Even if they are opposed to your project, they can be monitored and, in time, convinced that your project is good. Hidden stakeholders, however, are very dangerous. They won't speak up. Sometimes, they are simply forgotten by the project team. As Murphy will have it, these stakeholder will appear in your project at the worst moment. So, how can we find these stakeholders? Hidden stakeholders need to be found. Here are a few questions that will help you uncover them: Who will use it? End users can make or break your product. It doesn't matter how wonderful your new time sheet system is, if the end users don't like it, it doesn't stand a chance to last. Make sure they feel involved and have them try out your product early one, when the cost of changing something big is not so high. Who will make it?  This is your project team, or the production team in a manufacture environment. They can give you invaluable tips to speed up production, increase quality, and approach problems in a different angle. Who will implement it? These are the people who can make the introduction of your product at the client site smooth and easy. It's important to know these people's requirements early on. They are the guys who are concerned with standards, policies, security, and the like. If you don't know these things from the start, your project is a disaster waiting to happen. Who will maintain it? If only to ensure they have the information required to do their job well, it's essential to include the product maintenance team during the project. Who stands to lose? These are more political stakeholders, but they can still do a lot of damage if they go unchecked. If the project succeeds, will is impact someone's work significantly? Who never speaks up? People who will not speak in meetings then speak a lot in more informal settings. It's important to seek them out and get their opinions in a setting where they are comfortable. Practice makes perfect Believe me, you only forget to ask your IT team wether they have Apache or Windows servers once ;-) Posted Nov 12 2008, 08:34 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, stakeholders

• Don't kill your audience with PowerPoint poisonning

  I do a lot of presentations in my job: product demos and user training fall under my responsibility. I love it, because it's never the same. Each client is different, so I adapt my show based on their needs. I almost never use PowerPoint. Why never use PowerPoint? PowerPoint is too easy to abuse. When you abuse PowerPoint, it poisons your audience. PowerPoint poisoning is not pretty: people's eyes glaze over, some fall asleep, many will start doodling on their meeting agendas or fiddling with their phones. PowerPoint abuse happens when people put what they will say in the slides. When they give the presentation, they read their slides. The problem with this is redundancy. The human eye can read much faster than the human mouth can speak. So, by the time you even start reading the slide, your audience has already finished reading it. What interest should they have in you? All the information is right there on the screen, in the hand-out. And that's exactly when PowerPoint poisoning begins. The presenter talks and no one listens. Her voice becomes part of the background noise. Attendees feel that they are wasting their time, listening to a presenter who reads her slides. The presenter realizes no one is paying attention to her anymore. She gets nervous. She loses her motivation. In the end, it would have been faster to just give everyone the PowerPoint file and leave. 10 rules to prevent PowerPoint poisoning The slides should support your point, not repeat it. Pictures are good. Handouts are good - people like to take notes. Questions are good - your audience should be part of the presentation. What you say goes in the notes for the PowerPoint. If you need to read it, it doesn't belong in a PowerPoint presentation. It belongs in the handout. No more than 6 lines of text in one slide. No more than 6 words per line. No type smaller than 20 point. No feature lists - save it for the brochure. Posted Nov 10 2008, 08:35 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: sales

• International Project Management Day

  Yesterday was International Project Management Day. Surprised? Me too! I only found out at the end of the day, by chance. Having a day to promote project management is a good idea, it's a great opportunity to discuss project management and promote best practices. Already quite a few states in the USA have adopted International Project Management Day. However, it's turning into a project management week. Some states celebrate it on November 1st, others November 2nd, and yet another state has a project management week. The official date for International Project Management Day is the first Thursday of November.   Posted Nov 06 2008, 04:40 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, project management day

• What the client wants, needs, and asks for: it's up to you to find out!

  I'm sure most of you have had this situation when they deliver a product: Situation 1: What the client wants and what the client asks for are two different things Client: It's really nice, but that's not what I wanted Supplier: This product was built to meet the specifications you gave us. Client: Yes, but that not what I want. Supplier: ... Situation 2: What the client needs and what the client asks for are two different things Client: This product is great, but it's not doing what I need it to do. Supplier: We built the product you wanted. Client: I know, but it turns out I need the product to do something different Supplier: ???   What do you do? Now, you end up with a dilemma in these situations: should you rebuild the product so it does what the client wants/needs, at you cost, or at their cost? After all, you built a product to meet their specs, and it's not your fault if it's not what they really wanted. Or is it? What should you have done? As the project manager, you should have made sure you understood what the client wanted, needed, not just what they were asking for. See, the problem is clients often approach us with a solution: I want X feature added to your standard system. However, if you dig deeper, you'll find out what they really need is something else. Here are some questions to ask your clients: What do you want? - This question is easy enough to answer for them. Most of the time, you'll know what they want from the get go. Getting the specifics of what they want might be a little trickier, though. What the problem are you trying to solve? - This is harder to understand. The best way to get this answer is to have the person show you.  What do you need? - The difficulty in this question is to get a precise answer.   Here's an example: Client: I want a new report in AceProject. Supplier: OK, why do you want this report? (what's the problem?) Client: Your Time Report gives me all the weeks one by one, I just want a total for the whole period. Supplier: OK, and what do you need the new report to do? Client: Well, I would like the report to give me monthly totals for each project, and email it to all my project manageers automatically. Supplier: OK, so you want a monthly time report of all the actual time worked on each project, that is produced automatically every first of the month, and emailed to any user with Project Manager access to at least one project? Client: No! I want each PM to get the data only for their projects, not everyone else's! Supplier: OK, let me send you a detailed scope of work and a mock-up before we get started on the quote.   It's detective work It's not easy to get what the client needs, wants, and asks for. But if you don't do it from the get go, you'll end up spending a lot of time redoing your work. Posted Nov 03 2008, 10:31 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, scope