Choosing the best project managemnt & Collaboration program

The days of using MS project are over. You need a cloud base collaborative project management program.In this blog I will show you why I believe there is a hidden gem that needs to be discovered  and is called binfire.com. To show you what I mean,  I will compare Binfire against a well known program, namely basecamphq.com.
Basecamp has both free and paid versions, like binfire. Basecamp provides simple to do list and calender. You can connect your account to highrise (a separate chat program from 37 Signal) to be able to communicate with your teammates.This is what you get for free from basecamp and Binfire.

                                                BaseCamp                    Binfire
Projects                       1                                     2
Storage                        10MB                            2GB
Chat                             No                                 Yes
Whiteboard                  2   (*1)                              No limit
PDF markup                 No                                 Yes
File version                   No                                 Yes
Task(WBS)                   No  (*2)                             Yes
Gantt Chart                   No                                 Yes
Status reporting             No                                 Yes
Instant updates              No (*3)                             Yes
WEB 2.0 features         No                                 Yes

Even if you buy the most expensive option from basecamp, you will not get any of the advance features Binfire offers for free. Binfire paid versions give you more storage, projects and users per project. It is not feature vs. feature which makes Binfire a much better options, but the way every function is tied together using web 2.0 features to make a intuitive, simple to use online program. As an example you can Star a file or a task. By doing so, you will follow the file or the task and get notified any time they are changed. Another feature is the capability of placing comments throughout the site.

Binfire offers task management based on WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) recommended by PMI, plus interactive Gantt chart. These are features found in only more advance products. On the other hand, Basecamp offers simple to-do list and small storage. Binfire in addition project management is an online project collaboration site.


(*1) Basecamp offers only a message board and not a real whiteboard, in contrast Binfire has a full fledged interactive real time whiteboard where you can write, draw and paste images and everybody in your project can participate and collaborate.

(*2) Binfire offers full task management with dependencies and WBS structure. It lets you breakdown a complex project to tasks and then each task to sub-tasks and so on. In addition you can use the interactive Gantt to view, modify plus report  your progress. PMI recommends this process. Basecamp on the other hand only offers just a to-do list.

(*3) To make a project collaborative, web 2.0 features are required.Binfire offers several collaborative features to make managing a project simpler. They include object starring, comments and instant updates.

References:
http://www.binfire.com
http://www.basecamphq.com

Happy Collaboration
PM Coach

Ten characteristic of a good project manager

It is not easy to be a project manager. To be a really good one is even tougher. The good news that you can learn from great project managers. Remember, the number one goal of a project manager is to finish a project successfully on time and budget. So what good program manager have in common? I have listed 10 characteristics the you need to be  a project manager

1. Communicate; you should be able to clearly communicate with your team, customers and upper management. Failure to communicate is number of reason for project failures.
2. Plan; you need to be organized, plan and document everything in your project. This is not for covering you back, but to have information available to all team members at all time and establish accountability.
3. Negotiate; You need to be a good negotiator. A major portion of your job is to negotiate between varying requirements, time constrains and your team ability
4. Solve problems; You need to be a problem solver. I don't mean to help a programer solve his / her coding problems, but being able to understand a problem and bring expert help.
   
5. Listen; You need to listen. What your team, your customer and you bosses tel you are important and you need to remember and correlate all data you get.
6. Honest; A leader needs credibility and you need to be see as an honest broker
   
7. Lead; You need to be a leader. You need to be firm but fair
8. Tenacious;You can't give up. When facing problems you need to keep the team together and find solutions
9. Gracious; give credit to those that deserve credit. It is not just your project, it is theirs too
10. Flexible; Be ready to change if the circumstances change. A good commander goes to war with a plan, but is ready to adjust as new information becomes available.

These ten characteristics are fundamental in making you a good project manager.You also need to select the right tools to succeed. A good Project Management Program is a must.
Happy collaboration
PM Coach

Modern Project Management

The project management's job is evolving and changing as fast as the technology is changing. Most project management books or courses teach you that as a project manager you need to have weekly or even better yet daily meetings to review the project status with your team.  This sounds reasonable until you consider the cost. It is time consuming and wasteful, it is annoying to listen to somebody else complaining or giving detail account of their tasks  for an hour or more and the result you get from these meetings is questionable. Most people forget what was said in these meetings and with globalization not all team members are in the same building let alone the same country. The use of voice or video helps but does not fix the underlying problem of too much time wasted. Just imagine in a large project which has 25 team members, every one hour meeting cost 25 man hours. This means at average salary of $75 per hour the company is spending $1875 per meeting. Multiply that by 50 and the company has spent almost $100K for status meeting.
Now I don't want to make to give the wrong assumption that the status meeting or gathering the team together for binding does not have any value, because it does and every program / project manager should try to get his  / her team together at least once a week. The difference is that in the meeting you don't need to go around the table and ask for everybody's status. Why you ask! because the status of every task and every member should be know to everybody in real time. When the right software is used, the status of the project is known to all. In the meeting, only the problems are discussed and solved.
Reference:
project management Institute
Collaboration



PM Coach
Project Management Program

Effective status reporting

In projects large or small, a plan is made, tasks are defined and assigned. This is the easy part, what is hard to have a pulse on the project progress at all time whiteout taking too much time and resources and annoying the heck out of team members by time consuming and most often unproductive meetings. So what is the solution? I think we have found a great solution in online project collaboration software by http://www.binfire.com. The tools is simple but very powerful. It is designed around a secure tweet like tool resident in the application. Each project member reports his or her status everyday. What is unique here is that there is only 140 characters for this reporting. The user needs to be brief and to the point. What he did today, what he will do tomorrow and if he is  facing any issues. That is all. Every tweet and comment is visible to all, so it encourages collaboration and teamwork. Everybody can comment and all this happens in real time.

PM Coach
Project Management Program

Collaboration in project management

Most people who have learned project management using MS project have a big disadvantage. Due to nature of of desktop applications, the project management tools where used mainly by the project manager. The PM would make the plan, print out huge posters and put them on a wall. Then he would get the whole team in in the room (called Project room or some fancy name like Pegasus as project code etc). The team would spend countless hours to review the plan. The PM or his / her assistant would take notes and would go and update the plan based on the review.  This time consuming process would go on week after week. No wonder most project end up late and over budget. The worst part is to update a plan, the PM needs to go around and ask for updates every week.
This is no way to run a modern project. New software like http://www.binfire.com makes collaboration an integral part of project management. It incorporates all tools needed to plan, track, update and collaborate on a project.
BTW, One of the project management blogs which I follow is by Glen Alleman. His herding cats blog is a great resource for new PMs.

PM Coach
Project Management Program