AceProject V4.6
- Active and Inactive Project Templates – AceProject now has both active and inactive project templates.
- An active template is a project you can use as both a template and a project to work with. Its entire structure can be copied. Its tasks are displayed in task lists, such as “My Tasks”.
- An inactive template is a project you can only use as a template. Its entire structure can be copied. However, it cannot be used to work with as its tasks are not displayed in task lists, such as “My Tasks”. No email notification is sent for inactive templates.
- Document Management Enhancements – There have been many improvements to the documents feature.
- File Attachments are now Task Documents Same function, new name. We wanted to make AceProject more uniform throughout its interface. We simply renamed File Attachments for Task Documents.
- Public Documents – AceProject now allows you to share a document with someone who is not logged in to AceProject (even non-users). When you […]
PITAs and projects
PITA is for pain in the a**. People who are PITAs really put a dent in any
project.
How can you detect a PITA?
He/She focuses only on the negative aspects of the projects. What's going
wrong, what's late, what hasn't been done correctly, etc. However, the PITA is
not interested in solving those problems. All the PITA is interested in is to
whine about the problem, and possibly blame somebody or something.
A PITA also tries to get attention like children do: by throwing tantrums,
bullying and manipulating others around him or her.
When you habe a PITA in your team, it can be a weight on everybody's
shoulders. It can significantly impair the project's progress.
How do you deal with the PITAs in your project team?
You must remember that PITAs are trying to get energy from you. Their
screaming and crises and drama and blaming are all about getting people to feel
sorry for them or agree with them or follow them in their blaming mission. As
long as you're playing along, you're encouraging this behavior from your PITA.
Now, if the PITA is the project manager, […]
Are you proactive AND reactive?
When working on a project, do you try to think about what could go wrong or do you wait for the problem to manifest itself before fixing it?
When looking back on your career, did you try to see or create opportunities for yourself and yor organization, or did you trust life to send you the right challenges?
When managing a product, do you try to anticipate where your users will have issues, or do you fix those issues as they are reported?
Does it have to be either/or?
Think ahead: be proactive
There are numerous benefits to being proactive. It avoid problems down the road. It minimizes the damages a problem could cause. It makes you, your team and your business look good. It's very trendy to be proactive. After all, it makes sense to solve the cause of potential problems before they spawn actual problems.
However, sometimes being proactive makes you spend too much energy on a potential problem which may not have the estimated impact. Sometimes, by trying to look so hard into the future, you […]
Harness your team’s disgruntledness
Often disgruntled teams are seen as a negative thing: people are unhappy, their productivity is low and they won't be willing to go the extra mile for their project.
A nice bag a lemons, don't you think?
How about turning those lemons into lemonade, then?
Disgruntled workers are great agents of change. They are unhappy about they way things are now in the project. This means they will be more open to new ways of working.
Maybe they are unhappy because they feel isolated and not informed about the rest of the project. A project management tool where everyone can contribute and know what's happening can be presented to the team as a way to get the information they so crave.
Maybe the team feels overworked and thinks management is insensitive to their needs. With a project management tool's time tracking features, they will be able to prove how much they are working on their projects. They can even track how accurate time estimates are to complete their tasks.
On the one hand, you have a team working […]
Make meetings shorter
Most of us have been in meetings that drag on forever: it seems nothing useful is said, and instead people are just repeating information everyone knows already. It seems like a waste of time.
Everybody dreams of having meetings that focus on the important stuff, what requires attention and decisions that need to be made. Especially in time-sensitive projects (aren't they all?), no one has time to waste in meetings.
Harness the power of reports
Instead of listing everything that needs to be done on the project, why don't you simply focus on what needs to be discussed? Late tasks and tasks that have been worked on in the last week, for example.
On order to do this without forgetting a task, simply 2 reports in AceProject: tasks with a due date in the past, and tasks with a last update in the same week.
With those two reports, you'll be able to only see the tasks that need attention. You can export these reports to Excel, print them or simply display AceProject on the conference room's projector screen. […]
It’s not about the mistake, it’s about how you fix it
In life like in project management, stuff happens. People make mistakes.
While some mistakes are stellar and go down in history, what most people
remember about a mistake is how it was fixed.
You screwed up: admit it
In the end, the sooner you and your team can admit to screwing up, the
faster you will get back on your feet. With a good strategy to correct the
mistake and a plan to prevent it happening again, you are ready to get over the
problem and move on.
…and get on with your life
When a problem occurs, one should react quickly and take control of the
situation. One way to achieve this is to answer the questions below:
- What exactly happened?
You should understand the sequence of events. If people are arguing over
what happened, you need to come to an agreement before you can get to the
next step. - Why did it happen? This
is not about blaming someone of something. It's […]
How do you stand out in a sea?
In the project management business, our market is the world. However, so is our competition. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of project management software products on the market. Every week, I find a new competitor.
Project management software had become a sea of products. There are desktop software products, web-based products, open-source products, free products, very expensive products and everything in between. Ruby on RAILS was even invented to develop a project collaboration software. There are so many project management systems available it becomes overwhelming for those people who are tasked with the mission of choosing a system to manage their projects.
So, how can AceProject stand out against its competition? What makes AceProject remarkable, as Seth Godin writes it?
- Us. What makes AceProject remarkable is the people behind it. We believe in giving great customer service, before and after the customer has given us money. We believe we should make a product that people what to use. And we eat our own dog food: AceProject is also our project and […]
AceProject 4.5 is out! Now what?
It's finally online: you can use AceProject 4.5 online now! What's new? You can read the release notes here, but in a nutshell:
- New, cooler, shinier Gantt charts
- Dynamic templates
- Easier time sheets
- Better custom reports
- Skins
AceProject 4.5 took about 6 months to make, and we are very proud of it. I think it makes AceProject nicer to look at and easier to use, and that translates in happier customers.
Now that it's out, I can stop talking in the future tense when I give demos to future clients. A new version release always boosts my pride in AceProject, puts a spring in my step and my voice 
.
Now what?
On the development side, we get the great question: what do we do now? Which features are we going to develop? What's the next big step for AceProject? On the product management and marketing side, this is an incredibly creative period, where I feel anything is possible. It feels awesome.
I can't wait to see what we will put in AceProject 4.6, which […]
Training: the best usability test
Today I'm going to give a training session at an insurance company. I always enjoy giving training, because it shows me, in real time, how easy it is to learn to use AceProject. I like to see how new user navigate AceProject, where they click, how they make sense of the system.
Here's why I like to give training:
- It's great to be able to observe how our users really interact with AceProject.
- It's inspiring to see which questions the trainees ask.
- It's eye-opening when they can't fingure out something we thought was simple.
When I get back to the development team, I can share this experience with them and we can focus what needs improvement, at the interface level and at the usability level.
After all, we're making a tool for people to use. Giving training is a great source of user input.
AceProject V4.5
- Gantt Charts Got a Major Makeover – We have implemented new Gantt charts, which are actually in Flash format. Our customers will be glad to notice that:
- They are now quite easy to print. They can be either shrunk to fit the paper size, or be printed in full size with your preferred printing tool.
- They can be saved as a jpg image, which can be emailed.
- Task dependencies are now clearly identified. Actually, progress bars are linked with dotted lines when the corresponding tasks depend on each other.
- A “Daily View” is now available at both the project and the administration levels.
- A month and a year drop-down have been added in order to let you move back and forth in time more quickly.
- Parent/Child Project Relationship – Project templates are now more convenient to use thanks to the “Parent/Child” relationship. It lets you create a parent project which can have several child projects that are linked with it. This way, […]