Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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A Simple Extranet to Use With Clients
| Situation: You Need a Very Simple Shared Workspace for Quick Documentation-intensive Projects Comindwork is yet another simple SaaS "project management" program. It allows you to manage requirements and issues in a fairly simple environment. It's also a centralized location to store documents or collaboratively create wikis related to your work. Documents can be versioned. There is also a blog capability  There is no gantt or pert charting. so it's not the greatest tool for visualizing anything beyond the most simple efforts. It makes a lot of PMs nervous to see how the terms "project" and "project management" are being thrown around these days related to just about any simple set of tasks. However, many projects are very important and very simple at the same time - and a structured approach is always a god idea. |
Posted on: January 30, 2008 10:38 PM
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Translations, Site Copying, and Virtual Copy/Paste
| Situation: You're curious about some of the latest Web 2.0 Gadgets... I've heard so very many people say, "it's the little things that count". So here are a few gadgets that do some interesting "little things". Easily make web sites available offline WebMynd is a service that records all of the sites you search to your hard drive, making them quickly available and available offline. So if you have a lot of online reading to do and have to catch a plane - this could be really useful. More details are avialable in this TechCrunch posting. Translate text from a foreign language The world still keeps getting smaller every day. So more of your business contacts probably speak other languages. Microsoft Windows Live has recently released a translator similar to Google Translate and Altavista's BabelFish. You can paste in some text or just point them at a web page and tada! - a fairly readable translation will pop out of the other end. Keep everything you ever cut and pasted For you data packrats out there, ControlC links up with your clipboard and maintains an encrypted online copy  of everything you "Ctrl+C" for later use. The idea is that its an easy way not just to keep things "just in case", but also a great way to bookmark specific content that you want to point others to - say through a link in an email.So there you go - mildly interesting online tools. Hopefully there's something here you can use. |
Posted on: January 30, 2008 04:48 PM
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IT Leaders Love Gantthead!
Categories:
Web-based Tools
Categories: Web-based Tools
| Situation: You love gantthead as much as George does... One of your fellow gantthead's gave us a nice little press hit this morning. In his IT Week Leader Profile, George Henderson listed gantthead as one of his favorite business sites. He also says some interesting things about challenging the status quo and going green. I love seeing this sort thing - so I thought I'd share. |
Posted on: January 22, 2008 10:18 AM
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Low Overhead Meeting Scheduling
| Situation: You Schedule Lots of Meetings and Want to Make the Process Easier Why would you want another tool to schedule meetings? You already have Outlook, right? Here are a couple of reasons: 1. Not everyone has Outlook (just almost everyone). 2. If your meeting participants are from different organizations or there are a lot of them, scheduling can involve a lot of back and forth - first in email, then in the meeting acceptance process. That last part is probably the best reason to try a tool like ScheduleOnce. It allows you to send all particapants a bunch of time range options. They then respond concurrently with preferred times and you pick the best time option for everyone. So to you its just two volleys of messages. Compare that to the back and forth you end up mired in otherwise. If you only schedule meetings once in a while, then this isn't the tool for you, but if you're constantly setting up meeting times, it's worth a look. |
Posted on: January 20, 2008 11:37 PM
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Do you ONLY do Project Work? (with a Borat accent) NOT!
| Situation: You Are Doing Some Thinking about the Future of PM Software... There are a few clear trends in the market today. The most obvious one is the movement toward very simple, easy to use, SaaS PM apps. The majority of these are great for giving some structure to simple projects, but they don't do a lot for you at the enterprise level. A lot software sales are being generated, based on this simple model. Probably a more important trend is the integration of project work and basic operational tasks - allowing management to judge the value of all work, rather than just looking at projects. In the real world, you have to hire people and pay them a full time salary. Some of that effort and cost goes torward your project and the rest gets used elsewhere. If you can't look at the whole picture, how can you really make the right resource decisions? In this posting, I wanted to bring out a couple of functional changes that software companies are making with this concept in mind. In my conversations with the Microsoft Project folks, Outlook task integration with Project is a huge step for them, directly addressing consistent feedback from users asking for a more integrated view of all work. In this way, users can organize both project and non-project work in the application they live in. It can be accounted for with integrated time tracking and viewed from a PPM perspective via their (acquired UPM) EPM tools. Daptiv is doing some very impressive things with Cognos and Pervasive Software (press release on this coming out tomorrow) that not only allow management folks to easily spin the data up in a thousand different (and very useful) views and reports, but gives implementation folks much easier ways to integrate Daptiv with popular enterprise software packages like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. Couple that with a push into functional areas of the business outside of IT (Marketing, HR, etc.) and you start gathering the data you need while granting access to it in a simple enough way that its really useful. There's a lot of power in that. Why am I bringing all of this up now? There's something here that makes a lot of sense. Too often we get caugh up in "here is what PM software should do" versus "this is what our organization needs". Take a minute to think about how this sort of "work-centric" versus "project centric" approach to resource management would be better for your company? What parts of it are important to you? - and how should that change your portfolio reporting and software purchasing decisions? |
Posted on: January 20, 2008 10:28 PM
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