Shadow Project Work

  Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

In every organization, out of reach of Gantt charts or Kanban boards, is “shadow” work — tasks, emails and collaborations that are often unstructured but can have a huge impact on project and program results. How do you capture it all? Planview’s Patrick Tickle thinks a recent acquisition holds some answers.

There is project work and then there is project work. There is the formal project work — Gantt charts, Kanban boards, standups, post-mortems and much more. And then there’s all the project work that looks a lot more unstructured but is equally critical — tasks, collaborations, email. Lots and lots of email.

How do you capture the value of all that “shadow” project work? What planning tools can you offer teams that aren’t likely to ever need enterprise-grade solutions, or get in the way of Agile approaches?

Those questions were key drivers in Planview’s August 2014 acquisition of Stockholm-based Projectplace, a leading provider of collaboration tools. Projectplace was nearing 1 million users with its user-friendly cloud product and provided a clear niche that could sit comfortably aside (and within) traditional portfolio project management and Agile solutions.

Now that the two companies have had a chance to meld a bit, we took some time to chat with Patrick Tickle, chief product officer at Austin-based Planview. The …

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