AceProject Archives - Page 9 of 17

Webcom 2009: quotes

We are back from Webcom 2009 and Quebec City’s local PMI chapter meeting. A lot of speeches were heard, a lot of PowerPoint slides were squinted at, and we left both conferences with our heads filled with ideas.

Here my favorite quotes from Webcom 2009:

“Software is not about making money. Software is about changing lives. Giving people something they could never do before.” – Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics

“At the end of the day, marketing is selling.” – Darren Guanarcia, Sitecore

“Ergonomy = utility + usability” – Anastasia Simitsis, w.illi.am

“Authentication is not identification.” – Charles Nouyrit, MyID.is

“Facebook is a CRM for people. The days of the anonymous web is over. People expect more.” – Clara Shih, Salesforce

“The individual is the heart of the Web of the future.” – Sébastien Forest, Canoe

“Open is the new green.” – Sylvain Carle, Praized

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-15T13:10:00-04:002009-05-15|

Project archives: get out of the Project Manager’s head

Project management is a big world. With the PMI’s PMBOK running at 400 pages or so, it can be challenging to keep up with methodologies. Even more challenging is keeping up the practice of closing projects well. It’s easy to sign-off on the work and to do the administrative closure stuff, but building good, usable project achives is harder. It takes time, and the value of this time is not seen in the short term.

I recently attended a conference from Laurent Bellavance, the director of Rimouski‘s economic promotion society. His role is to facilitate the projects: he puts together the local governments, specialists and investors to create innovation and prosperity in his city. Bellavance has been in his post for about a year. One of his challenges is to get information on past projects. While the other directors who preceded him at the head of his organization can still be reached if needed, they are focussed on other goals and do not always remember the specifics of projects that […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-13T12:49:00-04:002009-05-13|

Webcom2009 in Montreal

We’ll be attending Webcom 2009 in Montreal on Wednesday. It’s refreshing to see an event with such interesting speakers close to home (Websystems is located in Quebec City).

An event like WebCom is a great source of inspiration. It’s a way to look at the world through other people’s eyes.

Here are the conferences I’m looking forward to attending:

If you’ll be in attendance, drop us a line and we’ll meet up in between conferences! info@aceproject.com

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-11T13:22:00-04:002009-05-11|

Competition or colleagues?

The world of project management is a crowded place. There are multiple profesional accreditation options, multiple project management methodologies and countless books, blogs and tools to manage projects.

This is a good thing. I have never talked to two organizations who managed projects the same way. It makes sense that there would a wide range of options.

In most markets, when you sell something, the other products that are sold to do the same thing as your product are called competition. The customer base is finite and the game is to win over the heart of a majority of those customers. When we talk about AceProject and the world of project management software, this feels wrong to me.

There are many, many, many project management tools out there. Open source tools, free tools, affordable tools, expensive tools, web-based and desktop-based. The Google search for project management tool comes up with 188 million results. With that many players in the race to win over users and fans, how can we even see it […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-08T13:23:00-04:002009-05-08|

The discipline of producing new, fresh content

Go Ahead, Manage is over one year old. I know, it’s young compared to most of the blogs out there. I’ve been writing the majority of Go Ahead, Manage’s content. After a year, I find that the greatest challenge is to have something to say.

This blog is not about my personal life, but about the life of the whole team here, the life of our product, AceProject, and the life of our field, project management.

When we began this blog, I had a lot of things to say, I even had a backlog! As time passed, I got through that backlog and now I find my inspiration a few minutes before I start typing the new post away.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned about blogging is that it requires discipline to produce new, fresh content three times a week. In the last few months, with Twitter taking the world of project management by storm, there is even more content out there about project management, project managers, and managing a business. It becomes a challenge to create content […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-06T13:24:00-04:002009-05-06|

Project metrics: earned value management with a 6-function calculator, part 2

Last time, we focused on how to get the basic project metrics without so much as a basic calculator. On the second part of this post, we’ll focus on estimates.

Estimates seem even trickier than variances and indexes. Because a lot of the original estimating process is fuzzy, it’s easy to assume figures like Estimate to Complete and Estimate at Completion would be hard to understand and hard to believe that – Gasp! – they can be computed with a pen and paper.

Just like last time, we’ll work with a 6-month fictional project with a 50 000$ budget. In order to compute Estimate to Complete and Estimate at Completion, we need the following figures:

Budget at Completion is your project’s total budget. This is (usually) decided when the project is approved
- With our project example, the Budget at Completion is 50 000$.
Earned Value is how much you’ve really accomplished in the project.
- Working with our 6-month project. Let’s pretend that you’re
  only 40% done with the project. That portion of your project budget is
  the Earned Value.
Actual Cost […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-04T13:39:00-04:002009-05-04|

More AceProject 4.7 news

Development is going well for AceProject 4.7. We are finishing phase 2 of development.

Eye candy

Here is some eye candy for mac users: a brand new skin!

Project templates

People love AceProject’s templates because it makes creating new project very easy. You simply copy an existing project, and you can even adjust task dates based on the new project start date.

With AceProject 4.7, we’ve added the possibility to reset task statuses, so you don’t need to create pure templates if you don’t want to:

Better time sheets

Time sheets are one of the most-used features in AceProject. With version 4.7, AceProject will automatically create time sheets at the beginning of each week.

To make it easier to fill out the time sheets, it will be possible to enter time worked in the hours:minutes format. AceProject will convert the hh:mm entry into a decimal number automatically. That will make time sheet more usable.

By Daniel Raymond|2009-05-01T12:41:00-04:002009-05-01|

Project metrics: earned value management with a 6-function calculator

Project metrics have a bad reputation. Things like Earned Value and Schedule Performance Index are presented as complex calculations that only experts can master.

Nothing could be further from the truth

Actually, most project metric calculations can be done by anyone with grade-school math skills. The challenge in project metrics calculations is not in the formulas themselves, but in mixing project management concepts with mathematical operators.

Still, these concepts are basic to project management. Every good project manager should understand them.

Start with the basics: Earned Value, Planned Value, Actual Cost

These three are not really formulas. They are the three figures project metrics use to create all the other ones, like the Cost Performance Index and the Estimate to Complete.

Planned Value is how much you were supposed to do in a given period of time.
- For example, let’s say you’re half-way through a 6-month project. Normally, you should be half-way done as well on the project. This means your Planned Value is 50% of the total value (or budget) of your project.
Earned Value is how much you’ve really accomplished in […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-04-27T14:22:00-04:002009-04-27|

A gutsy move in California

Last week, California’s CIO announced that state projects information would now be available on a web-based dashboard, for everyone to see. This is one gutsy move. It takes a lot of courage (and little fear of failure) to decide to put up a web page that shows whether projects are on time, and on budget, along with 15 more indicators. It takes even more guts to make this information clear and simple: the dashboard will display red/yellow/green visual indicators for each project. Anyone will be able to understand the dashboard.

How transparent are you?

News like this should resonate with every project manager. Project status is the one thing that everyone needs to know, and yet sometimes it’s the hardest piece of information to get. When a project’s status is unknown, people make up their own ideas of how well (or how bad) the project is going.

Furthermore, this news also highlights the importance of having higher management support a project. When the State’s Chief Information Officer makes transparency a priority, it becomes much easier for […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-04-24T14:44:00-04:002009-04-24|

Virtual teams make everything more difficult

Virtual teams are a fact of today’s projects. With outsourcing and increased mobility for the workforce, there is a higher proportion of people who either work in satellite locations, or simply work from home.

The project team becomes virtual. How can we keep up with everyone when we can’t see them?

A huge part of project management is getting a feel of how the team is doing

How can we do that without seeing the people we work with? After all, the biggest part of a person’s message is not conveyed with words. It’s transmitted via pitch and intonation of voice, the way she sits or stands, her facial expressions and hand gestures. These are all things someone can’t show in an email, a tweet or a chat window. And while video conferencing and conference calls can help getting a bit more from that team member, it’s still not the same as being right in front her.

Another issue is created by writing instead of talking. In writing, people have different personalities. When we write something, it’s not spontaneous. […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-04-22T14:42:00-04:002009-04-22|