Daniel Raymond, Author at AceProject

Leaders: do you take mourning into account?

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a conference on leadership. The part that stuck with me was about change management and mourning.

We tend to see resistance to change as stubbornness. Sometimes we even see it as bad faith. People who resist change (and we've all been there) have very bad press. Maybe we would gain from trying to understand resistance to change?

In order to start something new, we must give up the old. We are attached to our old ways. Giving them up, in a way, includes a mourning component. Maybe, if we give ourselves time to accept that the old ways are not longer viable, it will be easier to welcome the change?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-12-07T14:29:00-05:002009-12-07|

Announcing AceProject Q&A sessions

Next week, I'll be hosting Q&A webinars. This is the perfect moment for you to ask any any question you've ever had about AceProject!

The webinar is not a sales pitch or a scripted demo. It's a simple chat with between our users and us, about our project management system.

For one hour, you can ask any question you want about AceProject.

Clarify how features work
Give feedback on the application
Ask about future development

Register for the webinar here:

There is also a webinar in French on December 10, 2009 at 9h30 Eastern Time.

I look forward to chatting with you and answering all your questions!

By Daniel Raymond|2009-12-01T14:45:00-05:002009-12-01|

Vote for AceProject on Killestartups!

The blog KillerStartups reviewed AceProject, calling it: "highly effective for keeping track of all your tasks."

Please go to KilleStartups and vote for us. Even better, add your two cents to Killer Startup's review with your own comment!

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-30T13:57:00-05:002009-11-30|

Internet Explorer 6: the support dilemna

Microsoft will officially retire Internet Explorer 6 in July of 2010. The browser was originally released in late 2001. 9 years is not a bad run for a piece of software.

In the last year, there has been a growing movement to stop supporting IE6 for websites and web applications. There's a good reason for that: IE6 creates a lot of extra work for web designers and impose limits on application developers. With AceProject, since a good portion of our users still use IE6, we need to keep supporting it. However, we're thinking about our strategy next summer, when Microsoft will drop support for IE6.

One one side, if the manufacturer does not support its own product, should we support it?
On the other side, can we force our clients to upgrade their browsers? Organizations that use IE6 tend to be on the large side, with strict IT policies that are difficult to bend.

What are your thoughts?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-24T15:27:00-05:002009-11-24|

Two Reasons for Creating Custom Task Reports

The Custom Task Reports feature in AceProject is a user-favorite, for two main reasons:

Save reports

Custom task reports are the only reports that can be saved and shared with other administrators and users with portfolio access. Administrators can see the entire report while users with portfolio access can only see the projects and tasks they're assigned to. Saving and sharing task reports is real time-saver as those reports can be accessed via a link. There is no need to ask all users to apply this filter, and this one, and this one, and this date range to view the report. You send them the link, they login to AceProject and voilà, here's the data.

Create very specific and targeted reports

Even though AceProject is loaded with reports, you may not find the one you really need. There may be a missing filter or two, and that will keep you from providing your boss with accurate data. That being said, custom task reports offer zillions of possibilities. You decide the fields to display, the sorting order and the filters […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-18T14:00:00-05:002009-11-18|

Why control is more illusion than fact

There is a lot about control in project management books and best practices: we need to control scope, budget, schedules, quality, etc.

It's expected of project managers that we have control over the project. But what about the uncontrollable? What about people?

People are not as easy to plan around as machines or supplies. When we put a printer on a table, we don't expect it to call in sick or start printing badly because it's having troubles at home.

But people do.

How much control do we really have on our projects?

I think we have as much control as our team gives us, as long as luck is on our side.

What do you think?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-16T17:56:00-05:002009-11-16|

Two Reasons for Setting Users to “Can’t Login”

In AceProject, users may be given two statuses: "Can Login" and "Can't Login". The default option is "Can Login", which means that the user CAN access the application. On the other hand, "Can't Login" means that the user CANNOT access the application. In other words, the user is blocked. There are a two main reasons why an administrator may want this:

Block employees who no longer work for the organization

Usually, when someone leaves the company or gets fired, their access to the corporate intranet and other internal systems gets revoked. If they don't belong in the organization anymore, they don't belong in the internal systems either. That's usual procedure.

If you need to keep an history of the user's activity in the account, you can't delete their profile as AceProject will ask you to delete all the user's data altogether. In this case, setting the user as "Can't Login" is ideal as they still exist in the account but can't access it.

Create non-human users (i.e. material resources)

We've seen clients who created user profiles for material such as […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-12T16:44:00-05:002009-11-12|

The walls in our projects

Todays is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For almost 40 years, a wall divided Germans and on this day twenty years ago, the wall was taken down and the reunification of Germany was initiated.

During reunification, there was much difference how people on both sides of the wall had changed since 1961, when the wall was put up. When people loose contact and live in their own separated worlds, they tend to evolve apart.

A parallel can be made for the silo effect we often see in bigger companies. People are regrouped along their department: research and development, administration, management, marketing, sales, etc. While we would expect people to work together to achieve a common goal, in bigger teams, sub-teams form and have a tendency to work independently. After some time has passed, the whole project teams reunites and the project manager is confronted to two team whose idea of the project may not be compatible.

These social walls – where hermetic teams are created and function independently from the rest of the […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-09T17:52:00-05:002009-11-09|

In honor of International Project Management Day: Sponsor Buy-in

Today is International Project Management Day. I bet there will be quite a few posts on project management as a profession and a methodology.

I would like to talk about something that is to often forgotten in projects: the importance of the sponsor in the project.

No project without the sponsor

If no one wants the product or end results of the project, there will be no project. The sponsor is not only the initiator of the project, she is the reason for the project to exist. The sponsor is not just the flag-waver in the race to deliver the project on time and under budget. The sponsor must be involved with the project at many levels:

At project kick-off. It's a communication issue that is too often glossed over: the project team should understand who is initiating the project, and why it's being done. This should be learned from the project sponsor directly. The project manager saying "the sponsor told me" just doesn't have the same value, or the same credibility for that matter.
For all major changes to the […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-05T18:53:00-05:002009-11-05|

Project Management is a craft

Jorge Domingez asked the question: is project management science or art?

I agree with Jorge that project management cannot be reduced to only art or only science. Rather, I see project management as a craft .

Wikipedia defines craft as "a skill, especially involving practical arts. It may refer to a trade or particular art."

Project management is about skills

Project management is being able to put people together, to organize work and to motivate the team to achieve the objective. While some are from the art world and some from the science side, these are all skills.

Project management is about the practical world

Project management is about achieving a defined goal. Projects are not theoretical endeavors.

Project managers are craftsmen and wormen

Project managers must bring together skills from different, almost opposite worlds (art and science) and work with their team to deliver something tangible at the end of the project.

What do you think?

Do you see project management as a craft?

By Daniel Raymond|2009-11-03T12:53:00-05:002009-11-03|

About Daniel Raymond