Project Management Scratchpad

Delivering Project Plans to Your Team

By Laura Bamberg – Global Sales Administrator

Recently one of our salespeople was talking to project managers on the trade show floor at a conference and discovered that many of them still print their project plans to pdf documents and distribute to their team and stakeholders.

If you prefer to use a program like Excel, it's important to note that this is not helpful for delivering project plans over the long term any more than printing to a pdf. What if the team members need to add information to your project plan? This is not at all feasible for them. This reminds us that Steelray Project Viewer  saves project managers time and prevents the hassle of trying to print plans to a pdf or strictly using Excel.

It would be simpler and faster to send an e-mail to your team, telling them where the mpp file is located so they can see it. The team can open it with our Microsoft Project viewer, and there will be no problem trying to get it to print correctly to a pdf or making sure everything exports to Excel perfectly. It is almost the same as if you had created it in Microsoft Project.

What are some of the other ways that our Viewer can help?

• There is no need to update to a third-party server - instead, store it on your server, and there is no need to create a new pdf.
• A pdf gives you one view - our Viewer gives you a sight-line to overdue tasks, incomplete, and tasks beginning this week, as well as tasks assigned to a person and more.
• Filter and navigate your view. Drill down to all parts of critical project information.
• A pdf file limits your zoom levels because you only have two options - bigger or smaller. Our Viewer allows multiple zoom levels with different timescales.
• The Viewer is also a navigator - it allows you to search in the same way you would use a search engine on the web.
• A team member can send a status update to the project manager's email inbox.
• If you like using Excel and feel comfortable with it, you can use one of our Excel templates that's included with our Viewer. You can also export tasks to Excel, as well as html.

What holds you back from using a better tool? Could it be that there are many products that cost a great deal of money out there, each vying for your attention and budget? Some companies charge a monthly fee, which actually costs you much more than the cost of our viewer.

We love to hear your feedback, so keep it coming! We’ve enjoyed our conversations with you on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Have We Given Up?

I can't remember the specifics of the commercials for the chain of drive-thru restaurants, only the slogan:  "You Gotta Eat."  My reaction, the first time I heard the slogan, was amusement.  Have they just given up?  No "Great Food", "Low Prices" or "Fast Service" message?    Expanded, what I get is this:  "Listen, you have to eat something, right?  So, why not get the food from us?  What message does this send?

Recently, I installed a copy of 64-bit Vista to make sure that our Microsoft Project Viewer runs flawlessly on Microsoft's latest software conglomeration, and I've noticed a peculiar new "feature".  Vista frequently warns me that someone is attempting to do something that might pose a security threat.  So far, in every case, that someone has been me.  I'm installing some software, or setting up a network connection.  Up pops the box, asking me to accept the security-intrusive operation.

I get the purpose behind the feature.  One day, I might be happily composing a blog entry or working on one of our exciting new products (no wimpy attitude here), and up will pop a window that someone is installing a plugin to Internet Explorer, and on that particular day this message will come as a surprise.  The someone is presumably an intruder.  Microsoft security feature to the rescue!

Still, I can't shake the feeling I got when I first heard the "You gotta eat" slogan: 
have they given up?  Expanded, what I get is this:  We're apparently unable to lock the doors to your building, but we will tell you that a criminal is running around checking doorknobs. 

That thought is followed by:  what is the Vista consumer user going to do when they get one of those messages, other than panic and maybe call 911?

Couldn't Microsoft have detected that I, the user, used my real mouse to double-click on the setup.exe program on my Desktop?  If I were an intruder, I'm going to click the "Allow" button anyway.

Have we just given up?

The Cheap Revolution

This article by Daniel Lyons on forbes.com "gets it."  The cheap revolution is upon us.

The cheap revolution is one of the terms used to describe how companies are changing their software usage to cut costs and find alternative, simpler solutions to expensive bloatware.

Coleman is one of dozens of new barbarians plotting the Cheap Revolution, the wholesale shift by corporate customers and techmakers to cheap chips and open-source (often free) software such as Linux. They are embracing simplicity, unlocking prodigious new power and cutting tech costs by up to 90%, threatening the Silicon Valley plutocracy: the proprietary gear, "closed" software, redundant backup systems and fat profit margins of incumbents like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, EMC and other blue-chip nameplates.

A lot of companies are using Steelray, our Microsoft Project viewer, to cut costs by as much as 90%, so I can vouch for the savings claims.  Check out this list of "cheap revolutionaries" for great ideas on alternatives to software you may already be using.

Of course, no revolution is without its own domain, and thecheaprevolution.com applies the principles of the cheap revolution to the entrepreneur, showing how they can "leverage and live" in the cheap revolution.

Like many past revolutions, these ideas won't seem so revolutionary once they become accepted.  If we go by our customers' experience to date, it won't be long before that happens.

GoToMyPC

I was listening to a radio talk show the other day, and the show was interrupted with breaking news: a small plane with landing gear problems was circling a runway at a Florida airport.  This was obviously a story in progress; there would be an ending, happy or unhappy.

I started thinking about this: the story was happening the very moment I was listening to it being reported, and even though I was hundreds of miles away, I was being informed of developments in the story.

Two hundred years ago, your only access to "instant news" was if you were physically present in the location where the news was being made.  Newspapers reported the news, and it took days or weeks to find out about important events of the day.  The obstacle was distance.

Today, the obstacle of distance has been destroyed by technology; laptops, wireless phones, satellites, portable video cameras . . . distance just isn't much of a factor any more.

For years, software and hardware solution providers have tried to overcome the obstacle of distance with work. We live at home. We work in the office.  There are times when we need to access something in the office, but we're at home.  Distance is the problem.

In the eighties, personal computers, modems, and terminal emulation software gave us some of the first VPNs (virtual private networks).  You could access your email from home. GUIs (graphical user interfaces) actually set us back a bit in this problem space, because the problem of running graphical applications on remote computers hadn't been solved for the masses.

Give the market a problem to be solved, and the market delivers.  Many companies released applications, frameworks, and software architecture to attack the problem.  We saw great products and technologies that made great strides in letting us access our PC at work from home.

The problem was that most of these products and technologies required a medium to large expense on the server end, or they required complicated software installations.  I wanted a simple solution, inexpensive in price, and (of course) secure.

The next generation of software arrived to solve the problem, and for the past few years, I've been using a package called GoToMyPC. 

What's not to love?

• You administer it over the web, which is a big plus for remote access software.
• Although it's pricier than most of the other solutions in its class, it's still a great value for the service it provides.
• great security.
• It just works.  Wherever I am, if I can access a web browser, i can get to my PC at work.  With a broadband connection, I can work almost as fast as if I were there.

I wake up a couple of hours earlier than anyone else in the house, and in those quiet early morning hours I'm able to transport myself to my PC at work without ever setting foot outside of my house.

I check in when I'm "on the road" just as easily, either from a laptop or the rent-a-PC in the hotel.  I've never had problems with compatibility, although I wish the client that downloads to the Mac had the same functionality as the one on Windows.

GoToMyPC removes the obstacle of distance from yet another problem, and this makes my life easier. 

If you're wondering about the small plane, they manually opened their landing gear and landed the plane safely, and news of the happy ending was delivered a few short minutes afterward through the speakers on my (now old-fashioned) radio.

Cool Moon To Do

Microsoft Outlook has really nice to do list functionality.  It has all of the bells and whistles you could hope for, and then some.  You can attach alarms to files and set up recurring tasks.  You can even assign tasks to other people. All without leaving Outlook.

And therein lies the problem. I can't use the To Do list feature in Outlook.  Why?  I need to keep Outlook running to use the to do list, and keeping Outlook running does serious damage to my productivity.

I hear the chime that says I have email, and I can't resist.  I try, I really try, but I just  have to see who the email is from and what it's about.  I tried turning off the chime, but Outlook (in it's infinite desire to be helpful) give you visual clues that there is email waiting.  The Inbox folder is bold.  The number of unread emails calling to me is bold, and in parentheses, taunting me.  (1) . . . (2) . . . (3).  I can't not look.  And when I look, it's even harder not to jump on and reply, take care of the request, etc.

Email comes in all day, and I've found that checking it only a few times a day keeps me focused on the tasks of the day, the ones I really want to get done.  When I get out of Outlook, I get stuff on the To Do list done.

So I wrote a small, simple To Do list program (Cool Moon To Do, http://www.coolmoonsoftware.com), and you're welcome to to use it if you'd like.  It's free, at least for now.  Cool Moon Software is one of my side projects, an outlet for the midnight engineering that I do outside of project viewers.The To Do program is the first fruit of that engineering.  Other ideas are in the pipeline.

Cool Moon To Do doesn't have the bells and whistles of Outlook or some of the other To Do lists out there, but it doesn't call out to me to interrupt what I'm doing and read my email.  So I'm happy, and more importantly, I'm getting more stuff done.

The Argument for Generalists

When you were a child, you may have thought about what you wanted to be when you grew up.  Back then, the professions seemed fairly abstract:  doctor, scientist, advertising executive, etc.  In 2005, none of those professions exist.  They have been replaced with two millions kinds of specialists -- anesthesiologist, new drug researcher, Director of Web Media.

Nobody answers "Scientist" when asked what they do for a living.

I remember running into one of my ex-professors at Siggraph in the late '80's.  He'd taken a job with Bell Labs (pre Lucent).  Bell Labs was the cool place to work if you were in the software business.  He said that they paid him to "sit with my feet up on my desk, stare out the window, and think of cool new things to do with software, and then try them out."

Most people in the real world are hard at work on the "D" part of "R & D."  They don't get much time (paid time, anyway) for the research part.  One of the reasons has to do with the trend toward specialization.  The farther you move into the specialty side of the spectrum, the less room there is for true exploration and innovation.

Suppose you're a software developer.  You know 20 different languages on five different platforms.  You are the "generalist" dream.  Then you go on a job interview.  They narrow the world down to the one or two key skills they are looking for, and you'd better sound like a specialist in those skills, or you're wasting everyone's time.

So market pressures (your need to put food on the table) force you to become that specialist they are looking for.  Suppose it's .NET.  With the next job, .NET is too general, so it's C#.  Then it's designing GUIs (graphical user interfaces) in C#.  Design GUI's in C#, and you're largely applying someone else's work to a real-world use.  You are the 'D' in R & D.

Now, I'm not saying it's not impossible to innovate and do research when you're designing GUIs in C#, but you're a lot more restricted than you were in your generalist days.  Some of the best and truly innovative ideas come from combining two elements from different disciplines, and it's hard to do that when you know everything about one element and almost nothing about everything else.

So my question to the software developers who are reading this is:  is the generalist a thing of the past?  Are research and innovation dead in our industry?  Does one have to do with the other?

MindManager

MindManager is a software application that''s a little hard to categorize.  Despite that fact, I think it's an amazing tool that should be part of your tool set.

I went to a sales seminar about three years ago, and one of things the presenter covered was Mind Maps.  Mind Maps are a visual diagram of organized thoughts and ideas, a way of breaking down a central theme into branches, smaller branches, twigs, etc.  The presenter showed us how to map a sales call into a Mind Map, and how it would make the call more efficient and to the point.

A year later I attended a ProjectWorld conference, and one of the exhibitors was Mindjet, the developer of MindManager.  I left their booth with a demo CD, and tried it the following week.  After about 30 minutes of use, I was hooked on the program.

I don't use it every day, but I've used it many times over the past two years.  When I'm interviewing someone, I do it with a Mind Map in front of me.  When I begin thinking about how to break a project down, I find it easier to do with a Mind Map.  When I'm brainstorming and recording ideas, I find the best way to record those ideas is in a Mind Map.

I won't go into all of the features or uses it has, but I'll provide a link to them if you want to try it out yourself, which I recommend:

http://www.mindjet.com

Let me know what you think!

Microsoft Project vs. Excel

We support creating project files in Microsoft Excel and opening them in Steelray, our Microsoft Project viewer.  Here's why . . .

According to a speaker I once heard from Microsoft, the most popular software for project management, the one more people are using for project management than any other, is Microsoft Excel.  More people use Excel for project management than use Microsoft Project. 

If I'm going to speculate as to the reasons, I'd say it's because:

1. Excel is ubiquitous; most PC users have it installed on their PC.
2. Excel is far easier to use than Microsoft Project.
3. For most people, Excel does enough.

I like Microsoft Project, but I find this phenonemon pretty interesting.  To me, Excel is the killer application for the PC.  Think about it:  Excel is used for both rocket science and bake sale price lists. I wonder if there are websites that discuss project management using Excel . . . .