a blog about project management...

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The Perils of Project Planning

The single biggest mistake I see planners make it to assume some aspect of “perfection” in their conversion of an estimate into a plan. Our estimates are not perfect; they need to encompass uncertainty. People are not peripherals: their performance is uneven and they can be distracted by many kinds of unplanned events.

Come an interesting article.

Opinion: The Perils of Project Planning
Opinion: The Perils of Project Planning
By John Parkinson

What’s the best way to plan for complex software development projects? Dynamically, if you can. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

In my last column, I wrote about the challenges we face when trying to create a useful estimate of the effort required to complete a software development project and the methods available to do so. As challenging as this is, it’s just the start of our journey to a predictable project outcome. Now we have to take that estimate and turn it into a plan that will allow us to “manage” (from a root word that meant “keep a hand on”) the work.

Let me start with a couple of important observations:

First, for small projects, and experienced, self-organized teams, a formal plan may not be necessary. Such teams have a good sense of how long it will take them to finish and are good at assessing what they can commit to. In these circumstances, formal plans may serve other roles (perhaps as a framework for collecting information about what actually happens or as a template for reporting progress). But they won’t enhance the project team’s work. That doesn’t mean that smaller projects don’t need to be planned for. More… »

BaseCamp alternative… I heard about these guys because they left a comment forme. I love anyone who leaves comments!

TeamWork Live - Project Management, Group Communication, File Sharing, and Collaboration Software
With TeamWork Live, working together has never been easier.

TeamWork Live is a web-based application that makes it easy for groups to communicate, collaborate, and share information with each other.

The service is hosted so there is no software to install or maintain. All you need to get started is a web browser and an internet connection.
start trial

Use TeamWork Live to…

Make information more accessible

• Centralize information
• Share documents and files
• Search content pages and uploaded files
• Access information while offline

Improve team communication

• Centralize discussions and feedback
• Plan events using team calendars
• Communicate contextually with others
• View recent team activity

Collaborate more effectively

• Assign and track tasks
• Author documents collaboratively
• Stay informed with alerts & notifications

http://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin/

http://www.primavera.com/

http://www.activecollab.com./

http://www.copperproject.com/

http://www.projectx.com/

Web Based Portfolio & Project Management Software Online, Resource Planning

PPM6 empowers project managers with advanced features to improve forecasts, quickly resolve issues, strengthen team member accountability, identify cross project dependencies and monitor project health. Color-coded Project Health Status Indicators make it easy to track project health.

NovaMind and Merlin

NovaMind gives you the best of Mind Mapping, visual planning and communication. Merlin gives you the best of project, risk and issue management.

The combination of NovaMind and Merlin brings a powerful extra dimension to project management, allowing much improved planning, staff buy-in and involvement in the whole process. One of the tenets of project management is the increasing cost of errors or omissions in the plans at each stage of the project. By starting the project with brain storming and Mind Mapping, project scoping is clearly defined early on, problems are resolved during the planning process, and the team is able to have input into identifying issues before they cost you a lot of time and money.

Couple NovaMind and Merlin with the resources of the Apple iPhoto, Address Book, and iCal applications, and you have a very powerful solution for the whole of the project from inception to delivery.

We have been working with the Merlin team since March 2004 to bring you this solution, and we will be continuing to increase the data transfer between the two applications in the new year. Both NovaMind and Merlin are built around the same principle of being simple for beginners but efficient and powerful for experts.

More project management software.

Mindjet: Software for Visualizing and Managing Information
Mindjet MindManager 6 is the market leading productivity software for visualizing and managing information, allowing individuals and teams to more effectively think, plan, and collaborate.

This is exciting news for all you Mac users out there. All the best web developers and project managers DO use Macs and not Windows, correct? :-)

I’m a huge fan of the Omni Groups other products, so I’m really looking forward to this Project Mangaer application! Of course, I don’t know what the icon is either….

The Omni Mouth

Brand New Secret Product no longer a secret

Project management has been called the ability to create the impossible, with the unwilling, against insurmountable odds, under budget and on time.

That’s actually a pretty good description of our process for creating Brand New Secret Product.

(Well…sort of.)

Introducing OmniPlan. Our brand new project management application.

(Totally not an inkwell!)

Please stay tuned, folks! We’re shooting to release a public beta of OmniPlan next Wednesday, July 26th.

I was talking with a developer this morning about a new TLA* for our requirements doc that I came up with. That conversation slid into talking about process and documentation and all that stuff everyone always complain about. This, of course, led to talk about the movie Office Space.

He made a great comment and I had to quote him. These are words to live by:

“Anarchy looks good from the outside but its no fun on the inside.” - Sean Rowe

*TLA = Three Letter Acronym

These are the things that I’ve learned over the years, but never said as well as Seth says them here. I can vouch that each of these are true. I have been in these meetings and had these discussions. This article will save you so much time and agravation. Embrace it all. Thank you.

Seth’s Blog

Why do some organizations look great… and get great results from their design efforts and ads… while others languish in mediocrity? I think it has little to do with who they hire and a lot to do with how they work with their agencies and designers.

Here are the things your design team wishes you would know:

1. If you want average (mediocre) work, ask for it. Be really clear up front that you want something beyond reproach, that’s in the middle of the road, that will cause no controversy and will echo your competition. It’ll save everyone a lot of time.
2. On the other hand, if you want great work, you’ll need to embrace some simple facts: more…

Yeah, not so much…

I’m using Basecamp for day to day project management and while most of it is juicy goodness, there are some areas that I really don’t like it. The “To Do” list is fine, as long as nothing has a due date associated with it. Yes, I know I can associate them with milestones, but they should be MILEstones, not “every foot stones”.

I also am not happy that I can’t have an internal schedule separate than an external schedule. I want to tell my developer that his part needs to be by the end of this week, so I can check it next week, but tell the client that this task will be done next week. How do I hide a task from the client?

It’s a nice system and does many things well, but it needs some time to grow up. It’s still a slacker teenage for now that doesn’t do everything I need it to. Get a hair cut.

Slacker Manager

I mentioned a while back that I was really liking Basecamp. I still am. In that previous review I mentioned using it to collaborate cross-country on a presentation. Well, we kept on collaborating and finished the presentation which was pretty well received. I can’t say that it wouldn’t have happened without Basecamp, but it sure made the whole process easier. For the presentation at least, the best thing was to be able to keep a revision history, with comments, on all our files. We used PowerPoint and MindManager as our main source files and when we updated them, we were able to make a note about what changed, and comment on the notes. Kind of a dumb guy’s SVN, or something.

I’m also still using it to juggle marketing projects at work. I’ve generally got two or three on the burner, with different players on each project. I can use Basecamp as my dashboard to see what’s new and what’s due. It’s been great for uploading proofs and commenting, brainstorming ideas, etc. I make good use of the Milestones feature, but I haven’t really used the To Do lists much. Not sure why…maybe because my role is more of an ‘executive producer’ for these projects and other people are managing the daily stuff and they aren’t using the To Do feature. I dunno. Probably should think a little more about that.

Anyway, still digging it. Anyone else have success stories to share? (I’ve noticed that there are a couple of potential competitors with ActiveCollab and Streber. Haven’t used either because I’m just too pleased with the hosted goodness of Basecamp)

OK, this is a long way to go to talk about Project Management and the first rule of blogging is that you should NEVER blog about your cat, but I can’t resist. I’m sorry.

My wife walks into the bedroom yesterday and the cat is looking very worried. He’s usually very laid back, so this was disturbing. My wife checks out everything, to see if he knocked something over or maybe something fell on him. Everything looks fine. The cat still looks very distressed.

She looks some more. She finds it. The cat threw up in her shoe. You know those odor absorbing liners? They obsorb everything…

What does this have to do with project management? I’ll get there.

There are always surprises waiting for you when you are managing a project. There will always be that developer that forgot to tell you about the little technical problem he had, so he ignored it and now you’re demoing the web site in front of the client. There will always be the client who forgot to tell you that you need to be able to export data into their ecommerce system and the site is due in two days.

Where will the cat throw up on your project and what will you do about it when he does?