LiquidPlanner: Move over Microsoft Project?

I’ve been holding off writing a review of LiquidPlanner, a project management tool that is destined for greatness.  The reason is that, although they had already implemented a paradigm shifting solution, it had a flaw that I just couldn’t get past:  No dependencies between tasks.

I’ve been saying for years that project planning and management tools needed a top-down rethink, and the LiquidPlanner team has done just that.  The rest of their solution addresses my wish list very well, but, when I came to creating a plan, I couldn’t do it with just priorities; no matter how hard I tried, dependencies between different people’s tasks seemed necessary.  So I had a teleconference with them a month ago (mostly to find out where I was wrong – they seemed to be so innovative), and discovered that they were ‘coming soon’.  In fairness, their tool is still in ‘beta’.

So I’m delighted that, today, I received a notification that they have been implemented, and I now think that it’s probably the best tool out there!  Now that dependencies are implemented, I’m going to use the tool ‘in anger’ and see how it performs – I’ll post a review when I can make an authoritative comment.

Let me know what you think!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project+management+tool, LiquidPlanner

LiquidPlanner: Move over Microsoft Project?

I’ve been holding off writing a review of LiquidPlanner, a project management tool that is destined for greatness.  The reason is that, although they had already implemented a paradigm shifting solution, it had a flaw that I just couldn’t get past:  No dependencies between tasks.

I’ve been saying for years that project planning and management tools needed a top-down rethink, and the LiquidPlanner team has done just that.  The rest of their solution addresses my wish list very well, but, when I came to creating a plan, I couldn’t do it with just priorities; no matter how hard I tried, dependencies between different people’s tasks seemed necessary.  So I had a teleconference with them a month ago (mostly to find out where I was wrong – they seemed to be so innovative), and discovered that they were ‘coming soon’.  In fairness, their tool is still in ‘beta’.

So I’m delighted that, today, I received a notification that they have been implemented, and I now think that it’s probably the best tool out there!  Now that dependencies are implemented, I’m going to use the tool ‘in anger’ and see how it performs – I’ll post a review when I can make an authoritative comment.

Let me know what you think!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project+management+tool, LiquidPlanner

Project Management & Leadership Search Engine

A while back we put quite a lot of effort into this custom Google search engine, and while the traffic has been steadily increasing, it can still be improved...the more people use it, the better feedback we get, the better we can make it!

The link for the search engine home page is here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011867071513363012666%3Atbng4tlbkso

The code for adding the search box to your web page is at:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fcoop/api/011867071513363012666/cse/tbng4tlbkso/gadget

If there are topics under-represented, or sites that you feel should be included, please leave a message in the comments.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Google, Custom, Search, Engine

Project Management & Leadership Search Engine

A while back we put quite a lot of effort into this custom Google search engine, and while the traffic has been steadily increasing, it can still be improved...the more people use it, the better feedback we get, the better we can make it!

The link for the search engine home page is here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011867071513363012666%3Atbng4tlbkso

The code for adding the search box to your web page is at:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fcoop/api/011867071513363012666/cse/tbng4tlbkso/gadget

If there are topics under-represented, or sites that you feel should be included, please leave a message in the comments.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Google, Custom, Search, Engine

On-line Project Management Tools

I recently started a question on LinkedIn:

On-line project management tools - what is the state of the industry?

There's been a recent serge in the on-line project management tools available, and web 2.0 seems to be making them more user friendly. I'd like to evaluate industry awareness, so without doing research, which on-line platforms do you know of?

Also, if you've experienced using them in earnest, which ones, and what was your experience?

I’d appreciate your responses posted on the LinkedIn site (though posting here will do fine too).

If you’re not a member of LinkedIn, why not join? It’s free – and I will accept your link to get you going.

— Philip Greenwood

P.S. Beaufortes (www.beaufortes.com) is NOT affiliated or sponsored by any supplier organisation. Please note your affiliations (if any) in your response.

Tags: Project+Management, Software, On-line, Tools

On-line Project Management Tools

I recently started a question on LinkedIn:

On-line project management tools - what is the state of the industry?

There's been a recent serge in the on-line project management tools available, and web 2.0 seems to be making them more user friendly. I'd like to evaluate industry awareness, so without doing research, which on-line platforms do you know of?

Also, if you've experienced using them in earnest, which ones, and what was your experience?

I’d appreciate your responses posted on the LinkedIn site (though posting here will do fine too).

If you’re not a member of LinkedIn, why not join? It’s free – and I will accept your link to get you going.

— Philip Greenwood

P.S. Beaufortes (www.beaufortes.com) is NOT affiliated or sponsored by any supplier organisation. Please note your affiliations (if any) in your response.

Tags: Project+Management, Software, On-line, Tools

The Big Idea 2007

You can be happy at work.

(Just in case you haven’t heard.)

Unfortunately it’s not my idea, but it is being popularized by Alexander Kjerulf, who calls himself the Chief Happiness Officer.

Mr Kjerulf has written a book on the subject, called “Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How To Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work”, and also “The Happy at Work Manifesto” (free down load).

Apart from the fact that I agree with him, I’d like to point out ‘policy’ 11:  “I do my best work when I’m happy – When I’m happy I’m engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse, more service-minded and more productive”.  Does this sound like something you want for your team?

Great!  But not so fast, slick.  Here’s another recent book:  “Stumbling Upon Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert – an extraordinarily well informed study of how we deceive ourselves about happiness.  My three line synopsis:

1) We’re not very good at remembering what made us happy, so

2) We’re not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and

3) We often pretend we were happy when we weren’t because of societal norms.

So you’re not going to get much insight about nurturing happiness from your team’s answers to your questions about happiness.  But, according to the Hawthrone Effect, the act of asking may just inspire them to be more engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse and more service minded.

Sound familiar?  It turns out that the Big Idea 2007 has its roots in the Big Idea 1932.

— Philip Greenwood

wikitags : [[wiki:beaufortes:happiness]]

Tags: Hawthorne+Effect, Happiness

The Big Idea 2007

You can be happy at work.

(Just in case you haven’t heard.)

Unfortunately it’s not my idea, but it is being popularized by Alexander Kjerulf, who calls himself the Chief Happiness Officer.

Mr Kjerulf has written a book on the subject, called “Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How To Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work”, and also “The Happy at Work Manifesto” (free down load).

Apart from the fact that I agree with him, I’d like to point out ‘policy’ 11:  “I do my best work when I’m happy – When I’m happy I’m engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse, more service-minded and more productive”.  Does this sound like something you want for your team?

Great!  But not so fast, slick.  Here’s another recent book:  “Stumbling Upon Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert – an extraordinarily well informed study of how we deceive ourselves about happiness.  My three line synopsis:

1) We’re not very good at remembering what made us happy, so

2) We’re not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and

3) We often pretend we were happy when we weren’t because of societal norms.

So you’re not going to get much insight about nurturing happiness from your team’s answers to your questions about happiness.  But, according to the Hawthrone Effect, the act of asking may just inspire them to be more engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse and more service minded.

Sound familiar?  It turns out that the Big Idea 2007 has its roots in the Big Idea 1932.

— Philip Greenwood

wikitags : [[wiki:beaufortes:happiness]]

Tags: Hawthorne+Effect, Happiness

The Dirty Wiki

Jason Bates wrote about The Empty Wiki in a previous post, but I’d like to point out another problem with wikis (those that aren’t empty anyway):  The power of the special interest group…

The Dirty Wiki

Jason Bates wrote about The Empty Wiki in a previous post, but I’d like to point out another problem with wikis (those that aren’t empty anyway):  The power of the special interest group…

The Dirty Wiki

Jason Bates wrote about The Empty Wiki in a previous post, but I’d like to point out another problem with wikis (those that aren’t empty anyway):  The power of the special interest group…

Reductio Ad Absurdum?

This question has been playing on my mind:  If stories are the most effective tool of influence, but are an inefficient way to communicate facts, what kind of communication style is most effective in today’s “attention deficit” business world?  So for an experiment, let me try out a communication style:  The “reduced” story line.

MindJet Project Management JetPack for MindManager 7

The good people at MindJet have allowed me early access to their MindManager Project Management JetPack.  As I read that sentence I realize that many readers won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, so let me explain:

MindJet is the company that produces the MindManager application.

MindManager is, at its heart, a brainstorming and mind mapping software tool.

Mind mapping is a knowledge management technique for generating, organizing and communicating ideas or concepts. (Go here for more info)

Change Management Isn't a Methodology!

A few years ago I worked on a project with a client (global, ~140,000 people) that had an in-house change management methodology.  I expected that this would make the job easier – after all, they must recognise the value of change management and know how to use it, surely. 

I was astounded to discover that very few people in the company knew how to apply the methodology – I found nobody who even knew where to start!  After hours of studying the methodology I figured out why:  There was no starting point. I was just a cluster of loosely connected tools.

Project Management & Leadership Search Engine Enhancements

We’ve significantly enhanced the Google Custom Search Engine for Project Management & Leadership:  We’ve focussed it on content rich sites, and the number of selected sites is up to 46.

We’ve also been experimenting with how to get the best results from including or excluding general search results – trying to get bad matches from Wikipedia and other mega-sites out of the search results, while maintaining their valuable good matches!

The link for the search engine home page is here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011867071513363012666%3Atbng4tlbkso

The code for adding the search box to your web page is at:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fcoop/api/011867071513363012666/cse/tbng4tlbkso/gadget

If there are topics under-represented, or sites that you feel should be included, please leave a message in the comments.

— Philip Greenwood

 

Tags:  Google+Custom+Search, Search+Engine, Custom+Search+Engine, Project+Management, Project+Leadership

Why Project Leadership Books Suck!

Seeking inspiration for this blog, I’ve been re-reading all the books in my library on Project Leadership, Project Management and Leadership.  I’ve come to a few startling conclusions:

• There are surprisingly few books specifically on the subject of Project Leadership.  I find this odd because Project Leadership is a practical application of leadership.  Perhaps it’s easier to write about leadership in an abstract way than deal with the practicalities?
• There’s even less content than you might expect in those books on Project Leadership that do exist – a lot of duplication, and a lot that is impractical. Specifically:
• There’s an awful lot of writing about character types. Although it’s interesting, in the real world it’s an irrelevant distraction. You never get the choice of your own behavioural inclinations, and you rarely get enough choice of team members to select on this basis. (Caveat for clarity: You always get the choice of your own behaviour and any suggestion that you don’t is sheer manipulation!)
• None of the books talk about leadership from the perspective of enhancing team behaviours and performance.
• Their treatment of how to deal with organisational politics is feather-weight!
• None of the authors on Project Leadership have been prepared to level criticism at traditional Project Management.  The strongest criticism I’ve found is that it is necessary, but not sufficient.

My main conclusion is that you can’t learn Project Leadership from any of these books!  It’s like trying to learn to swim by reading about dolphin behaviour and hydrodynamics.  Maybe we need to start writing!

Perhaps, dear reader, you can tell me: What do you think needs to be included in an effective Project Leadership Development tool?  What form should it take?

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project, Project+leadership, project+management, book+review, Leadership, Management, team, teamwork, teaming, team+behaviour, team+behavior

Dealing with the Doomed Project

Yesterday I was asked this question by a member of the Project Leadership Network – it’s such a good question I wanted to share it with everyone:

“When you work for a software consultancy SOMETIMES there isn't much choice over which project you take-up. Sometime we get so-called 'doomed' projects wherein the customer has tried his level best and when the deadline was right in his face, decided to cry for help to a software vendor. In such situations, what are the things we need to do to safeguard against failure of the Project?”

Here are my thoughts – I’m sure that there are many other prespectives too, so please feel free to comment:

When projects are managed too tightly

Errol Flynn, the swash-buckling actor, was once asked about the correct way to hold a sword. Flynn replied:

“one should imagine holding a small bird rather than a sword. If you hold too tightly the bird dies and the life is lost. If you hold too loosely, the bird escapes and flies away, and you’re left with nothing”

Whether it’s a sword or a project, when you want to keep control, holding too tightly is tempting… and you know, the world is littered with failing projects that have had all of the life squeezed out of them.

– Jason Bates

Tags:  project+management, project+leadership, Errol+Flynn

Explosive Changes in Open Source

Sourceforge.net has just launched a global marketplace  for buying and selling services for open source software.  Sourceforge.net is the biggest platform for managing open source projects, with over 100,000 projects, and 1,000,000 subscribers.  This is a big deal.

Say, for instance, you find a piece of software, but identify a piece of functionality it's lacking.  You can write up your requirements and get it added - that's nothing new.  But until now, you either had to code it yourself, or put it out to tender - usuallyon another web site, hoping and praying that someone out there has experience with the code base and the other necessary technologies to be able to fill your needs affordably.

What has changed?   Alignment.  You can now search for projects with services, and for services for projects.  As I write, the Marketplace is in beta testing.  Only one project has services, and no services are offered, but I can see this facility being absolutely exlposive.

Why explosive?  Because most of the licenses of open source software allow you to take the source code and adapt it, so long as you retain the freedoms and restrictions of the original license; you can branch the project into another project and you don't need the original author's permission (though it is nice to ask).  This means that ANYBODY can become a project leader - all you need is a vision of what needs doing, and an ability to communicate.  I believe that this will allow a much higher degree of "value based coding" - that is the pursuit of features according to their value, where previously much of the coding was technologist led.

How explosive?  It will change the nature of the Open Source movement; it will put a new lease of life into old, dusty, half forgotten projects that were created during some coder's slack period.  It will develop a whole new generation of software project leaders, who will utilise global networking tools to manage their ad-hoc teams.  And coders will finally start getting remunerated properly for their open source efforts.  Furthermore, if you change the nature of the Open Source software movement, through competitive forces, you also change the nature of the Closed Source software industry.

Well done Sourceforge.net; what a master stroke.

-- Philip Greenwood

Reframing - How Perception is "Reality"

A while ago, when I worked for a big consulting firm, there was a phrase that people kept using: “Perception is Reality”.  The mantra was spouted by Subjectivists (people who believe that what they perceive is just one perspective on reality) and irritated the Objectivitists (people who think that what they perceive is Reality – “and there’s no two-ways about it”).  I believe that the Subjectivists have a more powerful approach in the long term.

I was reminded of this difference by my Google Quote of the Day:

“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” – HL Mencken

Which is a classic “reframing”, and reminds me to work with the most powerful “frame” I can create.  And then by a curious coincidence, the Google Buddhist Thought for the Day seems to relate to this subject as well:

“While the Tathagata (Buddha), in his teaching, constantly makes use of conceptions and ideas about them, disciples should keep in mind the unreality of all such conceptions and ideas. They should recall that the Tathagata, in making use of them in explaining the Dharma always uses them in the semblance of a raft that is of use only to cross a river. As the raft is of no further use after the river is crossed, it should be discarded.”  – Buddha

Which reminds me to let go of the frame when it is no longer useful, and find a more powerful one.

P.S. If all this talk about frames and framing is confusing to you – or you’re wondering why I mention it on this Project Leadership Blog, then I’d strongly recommend downloading the “7 Secrets of Project Leadership” document from our web site.

– Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project+Leadership

6 ways to stop project management from killing creativity

Have you ever made the head of a programme manager spin around? I recently told a client that his team didn’t need anymore ‘creativity training’, and that what was holding them back was too much project management...Woah!

Aghast, (well I had just killed a sacred cow in his office)… he wanted to know more. Could the way he was brandishing PMBOK and PRINCE2 across his programme really be preventing his team from performing at their creative best?

Calming him down, I told him that his beloved methodologies were of course important in making sure this large and complex programme was well co-ordinated, managed, and monitored... but there were 6 changes he would have to make if he wanted the team to be creative as well!

From Brainstorm to Gantt Chart in One Step

I started mindmapping too long ago to admit, but I found it cumbersome when using paper.  I used to find that thinking about the organisation of the mind map either got in the way, or conversely – and at different times – it inspired further thoughts.  I wanted to be able to be able to get the ideas down in a blaze of creativity, and then use structures to fill-in the gaps.

These days I love mindmapping with software because it de-couples idea generation from idea organisation.  Now I can quickly re-structure the map as many times as I like, I get the best of both worlds.

For seven years I’ve been using versions of Mindmanager from MindJet, which is probably the market leading tool.  There seems to be no end of uses for this software, but one really clever extension application is

Project Management and Project Leadership

Whatever your specialist skills, I’d recommend spending a little time researching on-line search terms…I’ve found it very enlightening.  The numbers below are relative, based on Yahoo searches per month:

The top search terms are currently “myspace” and “google” with 19 and 18 million searches respectively, while the old web perennials “porn” and “free porn” receive only 3 million and 1.4 million.

With 98,018 searches in February, the term “project voyeur” was twice as popular as the term “project” on its own.  Project Voyeur is, inevitably,  a porn site.  But who searches for just the word “project”?  It’s such a vague search term, surely nobody finds what they want.

If you searched for “project management”, you would have created one of 29,235 searches for that term – being about 1/3 less popular than “playlist project”, which is social music tool for creating playlists for web 2.0 sites like MySpace, hi5 and Blogger.

More popular than either of them were the search terms “science project” and “science fair project”.  I think this is a fairly clear indication of the internet demographic.

Coming back on-topic, “project leadership” gets 1.7% of the number of searches of “project management”…but why?  Time for a revolution, I think.

And here’s a new interesting topic I found: “Essence of Decision” – which is a term borrowed from the title of a book on the Cuban missile crisis.  It documents how decisions are influenced by organizational process as well as organizational politics – how decisions in large organizations are rarely rational.  Based on my own experience, I concur.

Philip Greenwood

Tags: Decisions, Project