Teaching project management with AceProject
Last month, Melinda Cline gave a presentation about using AceProject to teach her students about management information systems and project management systems.
Here are her conclusions:
“Using AceProject, students have an effective tool to increase their understanding of planning, organizing, controlling, and monitoring projects in a global environment. It is a cost effective way for instructors of project management and other IT management topics to introduce students to project management software without having to buy Microsoft Project licenses, which may be very expensive. It also has the advantage of being a web based tool with 24/7 access by students and instructors.”
You can download her PowerPoint presentation here.
AceProject gets upgraded tonight
AceProject 4.6 is ready. We will begin the upgrade cycle tonight, with the free accounts, the Hosted-Standard accounts and the Hosted-Advanced accounts.
AceProject 4.6 was developed in 10 short weeks. We experimented with the Agile product development methodology: shorter development cycles coupled with complete product testing and documentation at the end of each cycle, instead of just at the end.
The results are amazing. We were able to release AceProject faster. More than that I believe testing at each development phase will give a higher quality product for you, our users. The more bugs we were able to find before the release, the fewer you will find when your accounts get upgraded to the new version.
Please tell us your impressions of the new AceProject!
What’s new in AceProject 4.6?
- We now have inactive project templates, project templates that exist exclusively
as templates. With inactive templates, users don’t receive email notifications
and task reminders to its tasks. Moreover, tasks that belong to inactive project
templates are not displayed in task lists and reports. - AceProject now allows you to share a document
with someone who […]
How to get the most out of AceProject, Part I: Consultants
AceProject is used by a wide variety of businesses, in many fields, from construction to health to marketing to product development, and then some.
In this series of articles, I will show you how AceProject can be adapted to a specific field of business.
Part I: Consultants
When you’re a consultant, time is money. Literally. What consultants sell is their time. So it’s very important for them to be able to track and manage their time accurately.
Moreover, when all your projects are client-related, it’s crucial to track billable vs non-billable time, and to respect the time allocated to the project.
Setting how time is managed
In AceProject, you can configure how you will track and manage time.
First of all, you get to decide how your week works: It can start on Saturday, on Sunday or on Monday. Week management is set in Administration > Configuration > Account Info:
Then, you get to decide how time will be categorized in your account. You’re not stuck with default values that have nothing to do with […]
A blast form the past: FreeTaskManager
Back in 2001, AceProject started out as FreeTaskManager. In fact, FreeTaskManager only became AceProject in 2003.
It’s fun to look at the old screen, they feel so…obsolete. And yet, a lot of what make AceProject powerful today was already there.
Here are a few screen captures. Enjoy!
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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!
