Project Management

Project Management 2.0

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New technologies, concepts, and Web 2.0 tools are popping up everywhere. How can you use them to help your project team collaborate, communicate - or just give your project an extra boost? [Contact Dave]

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Eliciting Requirements... Creatively!

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8 More Templates to Save You Time

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Record Every Thought...

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Situation: You want to improve your "not so photographic" memory...

People used to "suction-cup" note-pads to the inside of their windshields, so that if they wanted to jot down a note ... (well you get it)

Jot, a new free service on the web accomplishes that for you in a really effective, easy to use way.  Yes, you're using your cell phone, but at least youre not trying to write while driving.  The idea is that you dial an 800 #, talk into the phone and hang up.  Everything you say is transcribed and sent to your email account.  Messages can also be sent via text message to your phone OR to a distribution list.  So if you are running late for a meeting, you could pick up the phone, dial Jot's #, and say "team - I'm going to be 20 minutes late" .  A text message then goes to each of your team members letting them know what's going on.  How efficient is that!  

I've really got to say I'm excited about this one.  I'm constantly looking for easy ways to remember the thousands of things I need to catch up on every day.  I'm sure many of you feel the same.
Posted on: February 16, 2007 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pain Free Presentation Training

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Situation: Your public speaking skills could use a little polish...

Who knew training in public speaking could be anything but a nightmare?  I was reading the WSJ last Tuesday and ran across this article, "Improv Troupe Teaches Managers How To Give Better Presentations".  It's not just any Improv Troupe either --- these are the folks at Second City!  It looks like it's actually affordable and held several times a year.
Posted on: February 10, 2007 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Integrating MSP Desktop, SharePoint, and/or Groove...

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Situation: You need to bridge MSProject Desktop, SharePoint and/or Groove

John Milan, Senior Architect and Founder of Team Direction recently sent me a message regarding a new software add-in they've created for MS Project.  I asked him about some specific value points - sort of a "this would valuable to a company if..." angle.  Here are his responses.

TeamDirection would be valuable to a company if they...

1. Already have MS Project 2003 licenses for everyone on projects.

TeamDirection does not require licenses for everyone on projects. What you saw in the demo is the ability to publish and synchronize tasks from MS Project (2003 and 2007 supported, btw) to a SharePoint Task List (again 2003 and 2007 supported). Team members can then participate in the project via their browser. Since SharePoint services ship with Windows Server 2003, this can be very cost effective.

2. Already have SharePoint or Groove licenses for everyone Yes. Again we work with the SharePoint services shipping with Windows Server 2003, or we work with hosted providers running portal and SharePoint 2007. And, if you're an enterprise MS Office customer, Groove will be available.

3. Want to sitck with Tools they already have in house and are used to. Though its difficult to describe, rather than changing the process to fit our software, our software adapts to a company's process. For example, we also have a product that integrates with Mindjet MindManager and publishes topics to SharePoint and Groove. We also have another rich desktop that people can deploy so any user can see a rich gantt view of projects. And our features try to anticipate user needs to communicating in order to complete projects-- integration with Windows messenger for example.

4. Do not want to take on a big implementation effort.  MS Project *Server* 2007 is built on the SharePoint platform, but you have to be willing to jump into that IT/Consulting pool to get to it. MS Project standard does not give you Project Server/SharePoint capabilities, you must use Project Professional. MS Project Professional out of the box does not talk with SharePoint, you must purchase Project Server. And even then, MS Project does not work with Groove-- the third leg of Microsoft's collaboration group.  We work with MS Project Standard, Professional, SharePoint and Groove right out of the box.

Posted on: February 09, 2007 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MS Project 2007 - What's User-Driven?

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Situation: You want to know which of MS Project's new features are MOST LIKELY to be what you need...

I recently spoke with Irwin Rodrigues, Global Director for Microsoft Office Project and asked "which of the new 2007 product updates are directly the result of user feedback?"  He said that customers wanted a lighter, web-based version of Project, more visibility, and scalability.  Here's what he specifically said about:

A Web Version
 
“One of the bigger pieces of feedback about Project Server 2003 was that customers wanted to do more planning through Project Web Access and have less of a reliance on the full blown Project Professional desktop client. While we still expect Project Managers and Resource Managers to utilize the full power of  Project Professional on the desktop, we added a number of features to Project Web Access such as the ability to capture proposals, the ability to track activity plans, and the ability to make resource allocations that do not need to be tied to specific tasks in a plan.”

Visibility
“Customers wanted more visibility and insight into their detailed project plans. With this in mind, Project 2007 introduces many enhancements on the desktop to help customers understand changes that are being made to their plans. Cell highlighting and task drivers are good examples of these. Multi-level undo was also introduced to help customers not only back-out of multiple levels of changes, but to also enable interesting what-if analysis.”

Scalability
“Performance and scalability was a big focus area for the 2007 release of Project Server. We made significant investments to move the scheduling engine to the Server, to improve the communication between the desktop client and the server, and to enable the product to scale to tens of thousands of users in a manner that just was not possible in the previous release. The early results from customers who have large scale deployments in production has been very positive.”  

 

Posted on: February 08, 2007 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the Office Couch

Categories: Time Killers

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Situation: You lay away at night wondering what kind of MS application you most resemble...

I got this in an email from one of the Microsoft folks.  Kinda  cute...    www.ontheofficecouch.com

Posted on: February 08, 2007 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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