Wow, another year ahead of us. 

2009 will bring its load of challenges. The economic situation forces everyone to take a fresh look at expense. The idea is not to spend less, but to spent smart.

This is good for online software. Online software removes the burden of hosting, maintaining and upgrading both computer hardware and software. Take AceProject: for 99$ per month, all your staff gets access to a project management systems that also doubles as a time sheet system. For the price of one or two desktop software licenses, you'll give project management software access to your entire staff for a year.

Using online software is not only cheaper, it's smarter: people use the software with their favorite Web browser. It doesn't matter anymore if the graphic design guy uses a Mac and the administrative assistant uses a PC. As long as their Web browser is fairly recent, the software works and the work gets done.

And because the system itself is not on the user's computer, there is less demand on the computer's hardware, like hard drive, RAM, processor, etc. 

Think about how smart you could spend the money from those software licenses and computer upgrades.

AceProject will be closed for the holidays, between December 24th and January 4th, 2009. We will still be monitoring the servers and the support email inbox, so if you have an emergency, write us at support@aceproject.com.

Everyone here will take this time to relax, recharge our batteries and have some quality time with our families.

We wish you the same :-)

The short answer: no one.

When we are not the person who has decided the change, it automatically creates uncertainty. There are very few people who like uncertainty in their life.

When project managers decide to change their methods, it creates uncertainty. This uncertainty shows up as resistance to change: in you project team, your organization's direction and your client.

As the project manager, it's your job to communicate the change well:

• Why are you changing your methods?
• What is expected to be gain with this method?
• What is the impact of the change on the team, the direction, the client? 

• Are people "getting with the program?"
• Is resistance getting stronger or weaker?

Moving a brochure from an idea to a layout to an approved proof to a box of printed copies is no easy task.

With AceProject, printers can move files from one process to the next, and make sure that all the approvals are given before the file goes to the next process.

At most printers, there are workstations near the presses. Those are not necessarily assigned to specific users. If you want to create a workflow that doesn't depend on who's running this part of the workflow, simply create users based on the process.

However you'll need to make sure there is an email associated with this user, so they can receive email notifications.

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Involve your clients

If you often work with the same clients, you can even give them access to AceProject, with limited rights, so that they can upload files, request quotes, or approve work before sending it to press.

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Set Finish-to-Start dependencies

In AceProject, if you link two tasks together with the Finish-to-Start dependency, it's not possible for the second task to start unless the first one is completed. This prevents jobs from going to press before the client has approved the proof, for example.

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Use the History Trail to keep track of approvals

When working with client-focused projects, it's important to be sure that a task was approved by the right person. It's also a good idea to keep a log of everything that was done, to avoid misunderstandings. With the History Trail, all changes to a task a kept, along with the user and the time stamp.

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Take advantage of project templates

Templates are very good at two things:

1. Save time when creating a new print job
2. Make sure all projects are managed the same way
   

Simply setup a basic project, with the steps that must be done for each project. You can also setup task dependencies. Then, have all the workstations assigned to the project template and create a workflow to reuse whenever you have a new print job.

When you create a new project from this template, AceProject creates the whole project, adjusts dates based on the new project start date, and emails everyone about the new tasks.

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Keep an eye on your presses workload

It's important to deliver your print jobs on time. It's even more important to make sure your presses are not over-allocated. If you setup your presses as users that can't login in AceProject and assign them work hours, you'll be able to know, with the Workload report, the press time required for one day is over its capacity.

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Keep on top of due dates with Task Reminders

Every day, AceProject sends an email to the list of things to do. Set up the Task Reminder to send an email 2 days in advance, and you will receive, every morning, what needs to be done on that day and the following day. (click to enlarge)

Know which jobs you've done for a client

Create your clients in AceProject, and associate each client to a print job. Then, at the end of the year, you'll be able to know how many projects were completed for this client. It's also a good search tool, if a client wants a reprint! (click to enlarge)

Last week, we saw how AceProject can help consultants ensure their budgets stay on budget.

This week, we’ll see how teachers and schools can improve communications with their students and keep track of all their classes in a central location.  For workshop-oriented classes, AceProject can make your class like a project team.

One project, one class
AceProject helps prepare your materials for your classes. Simply setup each class as a project.

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Then, you can create a task for each thing that you need to do to prepare the class, such as your class presentations, exams, or handouts. You can also create a task for each important event when you give the class, such as exam dates and paper due dates.

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Not only can you upload all your documents to the task, you can even keep several versions of the same document right there in the task.

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Once your class is all setup, you can keep it as a template and recreate the project for each term that you teach it.

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Get your class in on the action
As you give your class, your students can become part of your project team, with restricted access. For example, you can give them read-only access only to certain tasks. This way, they won’t be able to see everything you put in the project (like answer keys). They will only see the tasks that you assign them.

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Once your students are assigned to a task, they will be able to see and download the documents that as in the task. For example, they would be able to download supplemental materials for the class.

Share documents with your class
You can also choose to simply share documents with your class. You can do this by emailing them the link to public documents. Public documents in AceProject can be opened by anyone and do no require a login and password.

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Send announcements
Once your students are AceProject users, you can send them messages without having to keep their email address list, and without them knowing your email address. This is also a great way for them to ask questions from their teacher!

You can send a message via the message center, and choose All members of a project as the recipient list.

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Get reminded
AceProject will tell you when something is due in the next few days, or late. Moreover, if you work with another teacher on a class, you’ll receive an email whenever she adds content to a task.

How do you do it?
How do you manage classes and students? Add a comment or send me an email at karine.simard@aceproject.com.
 

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 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 is not logged in to AceProject (even non-users).
• Two new email notifications settings are now available: You can turn on email notifications if you are the creator of the task. You can also request email notifications when you can start working on a task that is part of a dependency chain.

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:

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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 being a consultant. Time Types are configured in Administration > Configuration > Time Types:

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Once Time Types are set, when you fill out your time sheets, you can record Billable Time in your time sheets:

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Recording time on tasks and projects

AceProject lets your team record time three ways. 

With the traditional time sheet, in My Office > My Time Sheets > My Weekly Time Sheets:

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With the IN/OUT module, a timer that fills out the time sheet automatically when you close it. You can open an IN/OUT via the task itself or My Office > My Time Sheets > My IN/OUT:

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Directly on the task with the Add Time button:

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Tracking time budgets

When you create a task, you set a time budget in the Estimated Time field. As people work on your project, they will log time. The task will show, in real time, how much of the budget is spent, in the Actual Time field, and the percentage ratio, in the Actual % Done field:

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At the project level, you can even see this data in a table, directly in the Incomplete Tasks page, for all tasks. It makes it even easier to know which tasks are in trouble:

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You can also see this information globally for the whole project, in My Office > My Assigned Projects, and compare it with your other projects:

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Reporting on performance

At reporting time, you can produce reports by client. For example, you might want to see all billable time for the last month for the client:

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Or, you might want to see a list of all incomplete tasks that are over budget:

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Billing the client for extras

Time reports are great to extract billable time information. You get all the information: the person who did the hours, on which task they worked, and when they did the work. Once you have that report, you can simply send it directly to the client with your invoice.

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How do you do it?

How do you manage client-focused projects? Add a comment or send me an email at karine.simard@aceproject.com.

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!

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.

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 keep offering a simple and efficient project management software.

I wanted to explain things in a way that couldn't be clearer. I wanted to add images, screenshots, show every field, etc. I wanted it to be more visual. When we discussed the general idea with Michel, our graphic designer, he brought some interesting concepts. I had great expectations and Michel finally came up with something that I had never seen. Plus, it was so original that I couldn't have dreamed about it. I give Michel two thumbs up for coming up with this awesome design. We are proud to bury our old help pages which, I think, were not reader-friendly enough and lacked visual elements.

You can see some examples by following the links below:

For your information, these new help pages will be available in version 4.6.

Thank you for your interest in AceProject.

Sylvain Traversy
Customer Service and Documentation

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.

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 would create the task, the move to the assignment tab to choose who will do the task, and then come back to the main task tab to put a comment. This was time consuming. With AceProject 4.6, you will be able to put comments in the Assignment tab as well.

Dates reports without math logic

This was one of my pet peeves. I can't think time with logical operators. For me, it was very difficult to think if a start date was smaller or bigger than another date. I always had to think about things like "Start Date > 25/03/2008," before I could say that it meant that the start date is later than March 25th. I am certain that I was not alone in this predicament. With AceProject 4.6, <, >, and = have been replaced with real words, which makes it much easier to understand. 

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.

It seems I made a mistake in the link for my last post, here is the correct link:

Project Processes INs and OUTs