5pm and SpiderScribe.net

I think we’ll see more and more software companies do what 5pm has done and incorporate links to other products, rather than try to be all things to all people. The team at 5pm has added the ability to connect to SpiderScribe.net for mind mapping. SpiderScribe.net is from Disarea, the same company that make 5pm, but instead of trying to incorporate mind mapping into 5pm they have produced a separate tool. That way, if you want it, you can have it. If you just want mind mapping, you can just have SpiderScribe.net.

5pm now integrates with Google Apps and has a free iPhone app, so you can stay connected to your projects wherever you are.

LiquidPlanner

You have to love LiquidPlanner. They have taken social software to the extreme with LiquidPlanner 3.0. “There is a social design revolution going on in business software,” says Charles Seybold, co-founder and CEO. “Just like we learned to design cars around drivers, we are learning to design collaboration software around teams. This effect is accelerating as a new generation of project managers who prefer Facebook and iPads over Microsoft Project start to gain more influence in the workplace. LiquidPlanner 3.0 is focused on social project management – it’s about people working together to get things done.”

The new release includes drag n’ drop for priorities and projects, the ability to ‘shuffle’ tasks like on an iTunes playlist, and posting integrated comments and documents.

Clarizen

Just a few days ago Clarizen launched version 5.3 of their tool which includes their new InterAct centre. This “promotes the next level of maturity and success for organisations by allowing users to manage initiatives, projects and tasks within Clarizen all via email.” Unstructured email communication now becomes the focus for action. It works with all email clients and doesn’t need any plugins or additional interfaces. This will make Clarizen easier to use for non-project managers, as it moves the conversation into the software.

There is lots of other new stuff including a timer feature. It’s also now compatible with single sign on technology.

Mikogo

Mikogo is a free (for now) web conferencing and desktop sharing tool. It’s now available for Linux, which means you can use the product to collaborate online even if the team uses a mix of Windows, Mac and Linus computers. After a period of beta testing, Mikogo Version 4 was released.

The company’s mission was always to provide a free product, but they do need more than a pat on the back to pay the bills. Consequently they are introducing a paid-for model for businesses. Mikogo will stay free for private use.

The team are currently working on mobile apps and hopefully these will be released shortly.

Projectplace

Mattias Hällström

The gamification of project management continues, with Projectplace introducing a ‘Like’ feature. The company believe this will “stimulate project commitment through positive reinforcement” and “boost productivity”.

“Since many Facebook users have really embraced the Like feature we decided to implement a similar function in Projectplace’s Conversations tool,” says Mattias Hällström, founder and head of R&D at Projectplace. “With this feature the Project Manager has a well-recognised and powerful tool to encourage desired behaviour in the project to improve performance.”

AceProject

AceProject is going through a major revamp and the new version will soon be in beta testing if it isn’t already. The team has added a global search box (think searching Outlook in Windows 7). There is also the added feature of being able to have multiple projects open at the same time, which is a definite step in the right direction for busy project managers. The whole interface looks a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.

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General information

Name: UnleashPM

Vendor: Nucleus Group, Inc.

Hosting options: Web hosted version. The website says they also have an option for you to self-host it, but there are no prices for this

Cost and plans: Free for 1 project and 5 users. $40 per month for up to 5 projects and 25 users. $85 per month for unlimited projects and users including access to all modules. I couldn’t see how you know which extra modules you get for this. One year free support and upgrade comes with paid plans

Languages: Not clear, but I think it is English only.

Currency:  It looks like it is currency agnostic as you enter the budget amount without the currency symbol.

Basic features: building projects

I don’t know how easy it is to manage projects in UnleashPM because I couldn’t set one up.

You have to populate a lot of other fields first like ‘designation’, whatever that means (it looks like a list of people and their job descriptions). I couldn’t set up a project without creating a client, and I couldn’t create a client without entering a fax number for them. Even when I entered all the information required, I still got the message “Error: Client not created” but with no clue to what I had done wrong.

The error message on trying to add a client

I should say at this point that while the website’s news feed says that the beta version was launched in June this year, it is not clear if UnleashPM is still in beta. There is nothing else on the website, or in the press release, that implies it is not a fully-featured, finished version ready for release to the public.

Meetings

Instead of creating a project, I created a meeting. You have the option to add the host and cohost, so again you need to have created your users beforehand. You select from a drop-down list, so if you have a lot of users this could be unwieldy.

You can add agenda items to a meeting which is a useful touch. You can also upload documents. I didn’t have much success with creating agenda items. They seemed to save but then they disappeared from the meeting page.

Creating a meeting

Reporting features

I got an XML error when I tried to load a report. This is probably because I had chosen to generate a report on a month that contained no data, but it was a very unfriendly warning. A better approach would be to either show a message saying that there was no data to display, or generate a blank report.

In summary…

I could overlook grammatical errors like “have wonderfull experience” in my welcome email and “Easy for Every One” on the company’s website. But I can’t overlook the amount of bugs and errors in the free version of this software.

Some of my concerns are small things: they send you a temporary password so you can log in for the first time but when you use it, you are not prompted to change it. Most systems will force you to change a temporary password into something you select yourself and this is better practice for user authentication and system security.

There is no help button or support information. I couldn’t find a user manual or any resources. There is an online demo that shows you round the dashboard. The website does have email addresses for support purposes, but I did not contact them to ask my questions. I didn’t think that a user would do so.

The paid for versions may be a lot better, but if buyers are making their decision based on the free trial, the Nucleus Group is not doing themselves any favours.

The free version of UnleashPM is not mature enough for a project management team to use. It might evolve into something better (when, for example, they actually put some useful resources on their Useful Resources page) but for the moment my experience of UnleashPM was far from “wonderfull”.

I would be very happy to hear of other people’s experiences with UnleashPM to see if my experience was atypical.

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Software September continues with a look at iPad applications for business.

Last year, I got an iPad. I didn’t choose to buy one: it was the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards prize. I wasn’t expecting to win it, and I’d only ever seen one before. The people with me that evening were ecstatic at the prize. I hadn’t even got a bag to carry it home in. I spent the journey home wondering what an iPad was really for.

Ten days later, No Starch Press offered me a copy of My New iPad by Wallace Wang. Suddenly everything was clear. I have lived with my iPad for nearly a year now…and I love it.

The book that explained the iPad

My business colleagues are sometimes sceptical. I travelled overseas for work recently and I took my iPad as well as a laptop. Yes, it’s another device to carry around. But I can read on the plane. I can write blog posts at the airport. I can write a project management book review without having to carry the book or a pad and pen. I haven’t tried getting my boarding pass on it, but it works on a colleague’s iPhone so I don’t see why it shouldn’t work on an iPad.

That’s all great, but how good is it for office work? I talked to Wallace to find out what else I could do with my iPad.

Business apps to get you started

One of the difficulties of using the iPad for business is that the office environment is often Windows based. You can read Word documents on the iPad, but there can be interoperability issues. “One of the most interesting apps I’ve seen is Parallels Mobile,” says Wallace Wang. “This app is free and connects over the Internet to your Macintosh. Parallels lets you run multiple operating systems so it’s possible to run Windows on your Mac and then Windows remotely from your Mac using your iPad.”

Wallace points out that many things you can do via your PC are also possible via the iPad. “Another interesting business app for the iPad is GoToMeeting,” he says. “It’s another free app that lets you attend webinars.”

If you use Kanban or make use of sticky notes for project planning, try iCardSort. The Lite version is free. “iCardSort mimics a desktop where you can place index cards,” says Wallace. You can type notes and colour code them. Now you can slide these notes around to arrange them by position or colour on the screen.” They do appear rather small, and it isn’t the same visual impact as a team Kanban board, but for personal projects and individual planning and note taking this is a good application.

Organising sticky notes with iCard Lite

Doing what you do on a PC

“My personal favourite business productivity app is Pages,” says Wallace. “It is similar to the Pages word processor on the Mac. By using Pages and the virtual keyboard on the iPad, I can type complete documents just like using an ordinary computer.” Pages is the application I use for my documents. I used to use the Notepad, but I like Pages more.

I am also using Keynote, which is a version of the Keynote presentation tool (the equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint) for Mac. The iPad version has been reworked to make it suitable for use on the iPad screen without a mouse. The controls take some getting used to, but the slideshows you can create are fantastic. I have also bought an iPad-to-projector cable so I can broadcast directly from my iPad during meetings.

And of course you can get email and websites. Google has just recently changed the default setting so that the Google homepage on the iPad reverts to the mobile version of the website – not a good choice in my opinion, but I am researching ways around it.

Learning

Sysop, a training firm which runs ITIL courses, provides pre-course work and training manuals pre-loaded on to an iPad which is yours to keep. I haven’t seen any project management training companies doing this yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t happen in the future.

You can annotate training manuals with your comments. You can add bookmarks to your favourite pages. You can complete worksheets and exercises on it. You can carry it around far more easily than a big fat folder. The only downside is that I doubt they will let you take it into the exam room, so it wouldn’t be any good as a solution for PRINCE2 Practitioner exams.

I’m not an early adopter of technology, but I have come to love and rely on my iPad. I’m sure with time I’ll find even more business uses for it but for now I can say that it has revolutionised the way I travel for work. What are your experiences of using an iPad at work?

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This is a guest post by Curt Finch, CEO of Journyx.

Despite the myriad advances made in project management technology in recent years, project failure rates continue to be through the roof. Each year, the CHAOS Report findings that are published by The

Standish Group are dismal. The Standish Group’s 2011 CHAOS Study shows that 66% of projects are either “challenged” or downright failures, leaving just 34% of projects to be considered successful.

Worse than that, Prosci Research’s “Best Practices in Change Management Report” states that in the USA alone, between 1990 and 1998, about 91,000 contractors’ projects failed leaving almost $23 billion in outstanding liabilities. Does this mean that technology and software solutions designed to improve project management are just a waste of time? What are we doing wrong?

Project management software can make companies more successful than ever before, but it is only as good as the processes that support it. Too many managers believe that they can install a solution and leave it at that. The only way to enable such a solution to work is to also evaluate and address the root causes of project failure in your organization.

How much do your projects really cost?

People dislike tracking the time spent on each task of a project for a number of reasons. Some believe that it wastes time that they could be spending on more important work, while others are suspicious that management does not trust them. If team members do not know what the time data will be used for or why it is being tracked, it can be difficult to get them on board.

Yet time data is crucial if you want to understand your true cost on a per-project basis. If you do not know how much time your team members are spending on various projects, you do not really know how much the projects cost. A project that is a large resource drain can be much more expensive than the numbers in the budget indicate. Not only that, but if you are asked by senior management to cut the project budget by 10%, how will you know where to cut? You do not know where your profit lies.

Having team members track their time by project – and more specifically, by task – gives you the knowledge necessary to make the right decisions. A software solution will only help you to accomplish this if you obtain widespread employee adoption.

Usually, you can get people on board by explaining how the data will help the company. Some managers opt to create a rewards system for time reporting. The methodology is up to you but if you achieve widespread time-tracking adoption, the knowledge you obtain from the data will be priceless.

Who is available to work on your projects?

Curt Finch

Tracking time for payroll, government compliance, billing or project accounting alone will not provide the data you need for successful project execution. If anything, it will force employees to track time in a number of different systems, which is inefficient and bad for morale. If, however, you have all of your time, project, billing and vacation data in the same system, you can understand who is over- and under-allocated, who is behind on their work, and who is available to work on your project next month – all important issues for a project manager to know.

A software solution that also enables you to conduct “what-if analysis” before assigning work to resources is the best choice. Project managers can then see the impact of their projects before scheduling them, allowing them to avoid unnecessary risk and take the guesswork out of planning.

Actual remaining work

Everyone has the same answer when asked about the status of their tasks: “I’m 90% done.” Updates based on percent complete do not give accurate information on how much longer it will take or whether or not it will be late. Rather, a project management system where employees track time against tasks shows project managers, at a glance, how many actual hours of work remain. The data will then flow back into your project plan, updating it accordingly. This improves project estimation for the future by verifying the accuracy of previous estimates.

A project manager at a large beverage corporation recently told us that though his company had purchased a large project portfolio management solution, people were still entering their time in multiple systems. This left them unable to feed actuals from different departments back into the central project plan for up-to-date status and improved estimation. After spending a significant amount of time and money on a PPM solution, they were not getting any of the promised benefits.

This is just another example of how software will not magically fix project issues without the right processes in place to support it. When choosing a software solution for your company, ask the vendor what type of training comes with the purchase. Onsite training with your employees, using real projects in the system, will ensure a much higher success rate and guarantee it was money well spent.

Clear communication

Managing multiple people and projects across departments, companies and time zones is one of the hardest aspects of project management. Everyone has their own methodology, technology system, culture and work style, and you, the project manager, have to account for all of it. Microsoft SharePoint and other collaboration tools like it can help, but in the end, communication is a human problem and must be addressed as such.

Jonathon Cummings, professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, agrees: “Although technology can tremendously improve productivity, [...] live communication [...] is still critical for a distributed team’s success.” The bottom line here is that you must use the software to enhance your management processes for getting the team on board regardless of location, but never underestimate the power of live communication.

Balancing the Triple Constraint

Most project managers are familiar with the triple constraint: scope, quality and timeframe. One or more of these factors must generally be compromised in order to optimize the others. Technology alone cannot do this for you. It is a subtle, complicated process that requires market research and an understanding of your customer base.

Though project management software provides us with functionality beyond our wildest dreams, it takes effective processes and management skills to solve the project execution problem. Technology will only be the answer when it has the right people driving it.

About the Author:
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Since 1996, Journyx has remained committed to helping customers intelligently invest their time and resources to achieve per-person, per-project profitability. Curt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 1987. As a software programmer fixing bugs for IBM in the early ‘90’s, Curt found that tracking the time it took to fix each bug revealed the per-bug profitability. Curt knew that this concept of using time-tracking data to determine project profitability was a winning idea and something that companies were not doing – yet… Curt created the world’s first web-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offerings in 1997. Curt is an avid speaker and writer. Learn more about Curt at http://journyx.com/company/curtfinch.

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General information

Name: TeamworkPM

Vendor: Digital Crew Application Developers

Hosting options: Web hosted version only

Cost and plans: 30 day free trial. From $12pm for a personal plan to $149pm for enterprise plan.

Languages: 24 languages including Norwegian and Indonesian.

Currency: Has a long list of standard currencies.

Basic features: building projects

Creating a new project in TeamworkPM is easy. You can create your first project by clicking on the big green link on the first page you see after creating your account. Creating more projects can be done from the Dashboard/Add Project menu.

Start by creating milestones. Enter in your fixed dates for milestones and then you can create a task list and link that list to the milestone. Once you have a task list set up, you can then add tasks to it. Tasks can have resources, dates and priorities.

TeamworkPM: Project overview tab

The missing Gantt chart feature

One of the key things for me for any project management software is the ability to display tasks graphically in a Gantt chart. TeamworkPM doesn’t do this. You can’t link tasks to milestones. You also can’t create tasks with a duration of more than one day which is very strange, given that you can create dependencies.

You can link tasks to each other to create dependencies. It’s not immediately obvious how to do this, but there is an option to ‘show more’ when you create a task and one of the extra options is setting up predecessors.

There is a sort of Gantt chart option which is enabled from the Dashboard once you have more than one project with start and end dates. But it is so basic that you couldn’t use it for anything more than to show your manager what was currently on the go.

Project Chart View

You can, however, export the information from TeamworkPM into a format that is compatible for importing into MS Project. Why you would want both products is not clear. The only advantage would be because MS Project has far better scheduling capability than TeamworkPM. MS Project is not as user friendly as TeamworkPM, but the project managers in the team, who need a good scheduling tool and the ability to stay in touch with their team members through messaging, file sharing and task allocation, would then need to use both. They would have to tweak the schedule in MS Project and then manually change all the dates in TeamworkPM. Still, the option of exporting is there if you want to work like that.

Calendars and people

There is a calendar view which shows you what is happening on each day, and there is the option to switch between the corporate calendar and your own personal calendar, which is useful.

It is easy to add people to tasks. You can give people individual photos and they can set their own status. Used at enterprise level it could be confusing if you have to scroll through a long list of users to find the people you want to add to this project.

I thought it was interesting that TeamworkPM makes a distinction between ‘Resources’ and ‘People’. It’s nice that People are not lumped together in the same bucket as GoogleDocs or the projector.

Time-tracking and billing

Web-based project management software developers are seeing integrated time tracking as a good additional feature, and TeamworkPM has it too. You can start a timer, track your time and decide if it is billable time or not. I like the option to do this but during my time using it I failed to remember to do it at all. You really have to be disciplined to make this clocking in and clocking out approach work.

Once time is tracked you can then add it to invoices, along with expenses. The software is not designed to replace your own invoicing application, but it does allow you to export invoice information into Freshbooks or other accounting software. This is a good feature to show the team how much time they are adding up on the project and how this equates to money. You can set rates for either the project or an individual, so if you have people who are charged out at different rates you might want to keep this information private.

Time tracking in TeamworkPM

TeamworkPM will send out email reminders to team members, and it also has integrated messaging. It stores the history of messages related to the project in the Project information, so you can track the evolution of conversations.

Reporting features

The reporting features are not that great. There are task reports but they are basic. The time reporting page allows you to export time tracking data, but again, it’s basic.

I wonder if the reporting features of TeamworkPM (and ApolloHQ) are so light because you are expected to use the Dashboard instead of formal reporting. Reports are only useful if you have something to do with them and maybe the manufacturers believe the information in web-based systems is all there for everyone in a user-friendly format, so reports are unnecessary.

In summary…

It’s well designed and continually updated, as you can see from the product roadmap page. I like TeamworkPM. It’s like a more fully-featured version of ApolloHQ. I would still like to see even a basic Gantt chart view for tasks. I think that using TeamworkPM for large companies could be tricky, but it’s a medium-priced option for medium needs.

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