Daniel Raymond, Author at AceProject

Sales and marketing in the same person is good

I’m in charge of both sales and marketing at Websystems. This is highly irregular: at most companies, sales and marketing are kept separate.

However, in a small company like us, it makes more sense to have one person do both sales and marketing. Since our business is online, I can do live demos and write a press release in the same day. I like to keep contact with our potential customers, because it keeps me connected to what people are looking for in a project management system.

It’s very important for marketers to know what their audience is looking for. And it’s very important for the sales team to understand well how marketing wants to present the product.

At Websystems, having both sales and marketing in the same person is beneficial. I get good contact with the market, and I can align my campaigns with current and upcoming trends.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-12-01T18:48:00-05:002008-12-01|

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 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-26T14:36:00-05:002008-11-26|

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.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-25T13:13:00-05:002008-11-25|

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 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-21T18:23:00-05:002008-11-21|

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.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-20T14:19:00-05:002008-11-20|

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!

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-17T14:57:00-05:002008-11-17|

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 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-14T12:19:00-05:002008-11-14|

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 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-10T13:35:00-05:002008-11-10|

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.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-06T21:40:00-05:002008-11-06|

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 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-03T15:31:00-05:002008-11-03|

About Daniel Raymond