AceProject Archives - Page 17 of 17

Making status meetings fun is possible – yes, I promise!

Regular status meetings are boring: everyone
goes around the table and rehashes what they did in the last week or month. No
one really cares. If the project dates are slipping, the team wants the meeting
to be over with so they can get back to doing something useful.

But status meetings can be fun!

Yes, I know, it's a strange concept. But I've
seen it happen. I was doing documentation on a software development team. The
team was implementing agile development practices, and they were planning to do
a release every month. This meant a big meeting with marketing, sales, the
whole development team.

It was important for the project lead to
include the whole company in that project. She felt that it would bring the two
worlds of development and marketing/sales together, that it would help people
understand the other side.

Since everyone had things to do in the
project, I suggested that we make something visual, like a board, to monitor
out progress. The rest of the team thought I was crazy, they humored me. So I
built this huge board and pasted a giant photograph on […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-20T13:44:00-04:002008-08-20|

How to lose a sale, now and forever

At Websystems, we have IP phones that forward our voicemail messages to our email addresses. This is very convenient, since we can forward the message to the appropriate person easily. The voicemail notification also contains any special information entered by the caller, such as confidential or urgent.

Naturally, when I saw a voicemail marked urgent in my inbox, I listened to it right away. It could be a client with a problem that is keeping his team from working.

It wasn’t.

About 20 seconds into the message, I realized the call was not an emergency; it was a sales pitch, for an outsourced sales call service. I immediately stopped listening to the message and deleted it.

My only regret is that I didn’t catch the product’s name. If I had, I would have made sure I never buy that product or any product from that company.

Leaving a fake urgent message to make sure I listen to it is disrespectful. It’s bad salesmanship. While it did get me to listen to the message, it had the opposite effect. It convinced […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-18T13:00:00-04:002008-08-18|

Dates, Dates, Dates

Spore is the computer gaming world’s most anticipated release. Well, it was in 2005, and in 2006, and 2007. It should be released this month. Wired has a nice recap of the release dates’ evolution.

Two whole years late. Spore has been set to release “in a few months” for the last two years. How does that happen? While it’s perfectly understandable to have problems and delays in the development of such a groundbreaking game, I am curious to know what made the game so late. When the creators demoed the game at the E3 conference in late 2005, they expected the game to be finished and ready to ship. And yet, we are almost 3 years later and it has not been released.

Is this a good example of bad project management, or a yet better example that, no matter how well the project is managed, sometimes Murphy weighs heavily in the balance?

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-15T12:39:00-04:002008-08-15|

The Defining Moment

I imagine every company has a moment like this, where its founder decides to take a leap of faith. Faith in himself, the product, and the promise of success.

For Websystems and project management software, this moment happened in the Fall of 2001. Back then, Daniel worked out of his two-bedroom appartment, and AceProject was called FreeTaskManager.

Daniel and I met when we both worked at Multitel, and lost our jobs in the post-9/11, dotcom crash layoffs. I was a technical marketing coordinator and he was a software developer. Daniel had put together AceProject’s predecessor, FreeTaskManager, and I was working with him on the interface terminology and documentation.

So it was that we both ended up jobless. The logical course of action would be to look for another job, and keep FreeTaskManager as a sideline. Or was it?

This is when the leap of faith happened. As we were working on FreeTaskManager, Daniel stopped, thinking. He said:

“Karine, do you believe in FreeTaskManager? Do you think I should focus on growing my business, instead of looking for a job?”

This was […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-02-14T13:00:00-05:002008-02-14|

Welcome to the First Post

Hello everyone!

It’s finally here: AceProject’s community site. Not just a blog, but a user forum too. Not only do we get to talk to you, you get to talk back as well.

A Blog
In AceProject’s blog, we will talk about everything from project
management, software development, product management to marketing in a
Web 2.0 world. In essence, we want to talk about our life as a small
team making it in the great big industry of project management.

We will also have product announcements, where we will let you know what’s brewing at Websystems.

A user forum

The forum is for you. What do you like most about AceProject? What do you
dislike about AceProject? How would you like to see the system evolve?

More than that, it’s a good way for all of us (users and creators alike) to
get to know each other and share our experience and knowledge.

Tell us what you think!
We are looking forward to hearing from you. Don’t hesitate to drop us a note.

About Websystems

Websystems is the creator of AceProject. Founded in 2001 […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-02-12T15:00:00-05:002008-02-12|