Other Posts Archives - Page 3 of 21

How to get technophobes into the online groove: project management tools

Ah, Seth Godin. If you're involved with marketing, branding, or life online, his blog is required reading. Seth has a very inspiring, no-nonsense way to think and express ideas.

In an interview he gave for the Spark 97 podcast, he was talking about how to get from living life offline to getting on the bandwagon and become present online. His point of view was quite interesting: being online is now required. Period. No ifs. No buts.

Then he said this: "Online project management tools force people to use the tools. Because
if you don’t, then you don’t know how to do your part of the project."

The challenge of moving to a collaborative project management system is also its strength

If you and your team choose to use an online project management system like AceProject, be prepared for the culture switch. The team goes from depending on the project management to know what they need to do, to sharing the responsibility of communicating with the rest of the team. Project […]

By Daniel Raymond|2010-01-11T13:52:00-05:002010-01-11|

Smarter structure for the new year

Structure is good. Structure helps us make sense of our projects. Structure guides us.

But does structure have to be so darn inflexible?

Nouveau Variation from Syntopia

I vow that in 2010, we put some smarts on our structure. That we walk away from rigidity and embrace a more intelligent way to structure our projects.

Let us be open to suggestions from others, even if they know nothing about project management.
Let us be open-minded about changing the way things are done now.
Let us walk away from "just because" as a reason to do things a certain way
Let us examine our processes and structure with a fresh, open mind
Let us have the guts to change something, even if it means walking away from tradition.

What are your resolutions for the new year?

Have you made a list? Chosen just one? Or already abandoned them all? 🙂

By Daniel Raymond|2010-01-05T15:45:00-05:002010-01-05|

Technology happens

Software bugs by FlapJack

Last week we held our Q&A webinars. The idea was simple: we wanted to answer everyone's questions about AceProject. Also, we had put together a little surprise for our attendees: screen shots of the upcoming cost tracking features.

The first webinar went well and people we really happy with it! We were delighted at were looking forward to the second one.

And that's when technology happened.

As people were logging in the second webinar, we lost audio. Not just some attendees. Audio was down for everyone. It was bad enough that after 15 minutes, I gave up an rescheduled the webinar for this week (December 16, 2pm EST). I felt awful about having to strand everyone who showed up to get their questions answered. After all 60+ people showed up for the webinar, and I couldn't get it to work!

I was pleasantly surprised to see how supportive the messages were during my failed troubleshooting. People told me not to worry about, that technology happens, and […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-12-14T14:08:00-05:002009-12-14|

Leaders: do you take mourning into account?

Change by David Reece

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a conference on leadership. The part that stuck with me was about change management and mourning.

We tend to see resistance to change as stubbornness. Sometimes we even see it as bad faith. People who resist change (and we've all been there) have very bad press. Maybe we would gain from trying to understand resistance to change?

In order to start something new, we must give up the old. We are attached to our old ways. Giving them up, in a way, includes a mourning component. Maybe, if we give ourselves time to accept that the old ways are not longer viable, it will be easier to welcome the change?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-12-07T14:29:00-05:002009-12-07|

Vote for AceProject on Killestartups!

The blog KillerStartups reviewed AceProject, calling it: "highly effective for keeping track of all your tasks."

Please go to KilleStartups and vote for us. Even better, add your two cents to Killer Startup's review with your own comment!

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-30T13:57:00-05:002009-11-30|

Internet Explorer 6: the support dilemna

Microsoft will officially retire Internet Explorer 6 in July of 2010. The browser was originally released in late 2001. 9 years is not a bad run for a piece of software.

In the last year, there has been a growing movement to stop supporting IE6 for websites and web applications. There's a good reason for that: IE6 creates a lot of extra work for web designers and impose limits on application developers. With AceProject, since a good portion of our users still use IE6, we need to keep supporting it. However, we're thinking about our strategy next summer, when Microsoft will drop support for IE6.

One one side, if the manufacturer does not support its own product, should we support it?
On the other side, can we force our clients to upgrade their browsers? Organizations that use IE6 tend to be on the large side, with strict IT policies that are difficult to bend.

What are your thoughts?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-24T15:27:00-05:002009-11-24|

Why control is more illusion than fact

There is a lot about control in project management books and best practices: we need to control scope, budget, schedules, quality, etc.

It's expected of project managers that we have control over the project. But what about the uncontrollable? What about people?

People are not as easy to plan around as machines or supplies. When we put a printer on a table, we don't expect it to call in sick or start printing badly because it's having troubles at home.

But people do.

How much control do we really have on our projects?

I think we have as much control as our team gives us, as long as luck is on our side.

What do you think?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-16T17:56:00-05:002009-11-16|

The walls in our projects

Todays is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For almost 40 years, a wall divided Germans and on this day twenty years ago, the wall was taken down and the reunification of Germany was initiated.

During reunification, there was much difference how people on both sides of the wall had changed since 1961, when the wall was put up. When people loose contact and live in their own separated worlds, they tend to evolve apart.

A parallel can be made for the silo effect we often see in bigger companies. People are regrouped along their department: research and development, administration, management, marketing, sales, etc. While we would expect people to work together to achieve a common goal, in bigger teams, sub-teams form and have a tendency to work independently. After some time has passed, the whole project teams reunites and the project manager is confronted to two team whose idea of the project may not be compatible.

These social walls – where hermetic teams are created and function independently from the rest of the […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-09T17:52:00-05:002009-11-09|

In honor of International Project Management Day: Sponsor Buy-in

Today is International Project Management Day. I bet there will be quite a few posts on project management as a profession and a methodology.

I would like to talk about something that is to often forgotten in projects: the importance of the sponsor in the project.

No project without the sponsor

If no one wants the product or end results of the project, there will be no project. The sponsor is not only the initiator of the project, she is the reason for the project to exist. The sponsor is not just the flag-waver in the race to deliver the project on time and under budget. The sponsor must be involved with the project at many levels:

At project kick-off. It's a communication issue that is too often glossed over: the project team should understand who is initiating the project, and why it's being done. This should be learned from the project sponsor directly. The project manager saying "the sponsor told me" just doesn't have the same value, or the same credibility for that matter.
For all major changes to the […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-05T18:53:00-05:002009-11-05|

Project Management is a craft

Jorge Domingez asked the question: is project management science or art?

I agree with Jorge that project management cannot be reduced to only art or only science. Rather, I see project management as a craft .

Wikipedia defines craft as "a skill, especially involving practical arts. It may refer to a trade or particular art."

Project management is about skills

Project management is being able to put people together, to organize work and to motivate the team to achieve the objective. While some are from the art world and some from the science side, these are all skills.

Project management is about the practical world

Project management is about achieving a defined goal. Projects are not theoretical endeavors.

Project managers are craftsmen and wormen

Project managers must bring together skills from different, almost opposite worlds (art and science) and work with their team to deliver something tangible at the end of the project.

What do you think?

Do you see project management as a craft?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-03T12:53:00-05:002009-11-03|