The role of project manager or project leader is vital to any project. Not having a designated project manager can mean disaster. A project manager oversees all aspects of a project from start up to completion. That person doesn’t have to be a certified, trained project manager. But they do have to have some important skills.

So, what makes a good project manager?

A good project manager needs to have exceptional time management skills. They have to remain detail oriented and highly organized to maintain all aspects of a project. Meeting deadlines is vital to any project. The project manager’s main task is to complete the project on time and within budget.

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It seems like the privacy features in IE8 could pose a threat to Google’s ad revenue. With the ability to hide where a user came from prior to arriving at a website will this impact Google’s ability to track click-throughs? If users choose to keep this on, will it limit the usefulness of the data collected by Google’s web-analytic’s suite, Google Analytics or related tools used to optimize ad spending?

If so, the launch of Google Chrome might be more than a bid to take market share from Microsoft or offer a Google-based platform for the web as OS -it might be a first defense against protecting their main revenue generator -Adwords.

Adobe has formally launched the program it announced a few of months ago:

ColdFusion Enterprise will now be available for free for educational use.

You can read more about it on Ben Forta’s blog,  Kristen Schofield’s blog or get the exact details at Adobe’s FAQ on it.

Procrastination: the American Heritage Dictionary defines procrastination as “to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness; to postpone or delay needlessly”.

We all have a tendency to procrastinate. It’s seems to be a part of human nature. We tend to think we have plenty of time to get everything done or we think we can do it later. And when the time comes, we just can’t seem to do it. The sad fact is, the more you put something off the harder it is to get it done.

So why do people procrastinate? Well, for several reasons:

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Part of good time management is setting goals for yourself.  But your goals need to be S.M.A.R.T. What does that mean? Well, let’s look a little closer. S.M.A.R.T stands for:

Specific: Detail “exactly” what you want to achieve. You have to be specific when setting your goals. The clearer you are the better direction you will have in how to get there.

When you say “I want to raise money for diabetes” is that specific? Some would say yes but the answer is no. Yes, you want to raise money for diabetes but is that it? Again, the answer is no. Clarify, be specific! Being specific would be: “I want to raise $5000 dollars to support diabetes research by December 31st”. Can you see the difference? The first goal was not clear about exactly what you wanted to do whereas the second example specifically lists what you want to do. It becomes a goal you can actually work towards with clearly defined steps.

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For CF9 -Centaur, we’ve put together an unofficial, fan shirt as a fun project. 

http://www.centaurshirt.com

We think they’re pretty cool.  Hope you do too.

“I’ll do it later.”

“It’s not due until tomorrow.”

“It would have been done on time but other things came up.”

“I can’t find anything.”

If you have ever said any of those things or even something similar, then you could benefit from better  time management. Learning to use your time wisely will go a long way. You can have more time for work, for family and for yourself -if you plan it. Planning is essential to time management. Plan your day, your week; even your month or year. 

Here are some easy steps you can take to start planning your time.

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Do you know that your stress levels are greatly affected by how you manage your time?  The way you manage your time can influence the type of day that you will have.

Poor Time Management = Stress

It is estimated that most people waste at least 2 hours a day. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot when you’re considering a 24 hour time frame but you can get a lot accomplished within 2 hours. Some signs of poor time management skills are:

• Messy office. This can include a cluttered desk. You know …files everywhere!
• You can’t seem to find anything. You know it’s in there somewhere but the question is…where?
• You miss appointments. This is embarrassing enough but then you have to turn around and reschedule them.
• You are late for meetings or you arrive unprepared.
• You can’t seem to focus or concentrate on what needs to be done.

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You can now export Basecamp projects to PDF with a free trial of ExportReports.com version 1.0.

We’ve officially launched version 1.0 of the popular Basecamp add-on.

New features include:

• Project list sorted by company;
• Information about any attached files in Basecamp if a comment has attached files and;
• Customizeable page size to accomodate European Basecamp users, other non-US sizes and attornies using Basecamp;
• These are US Letter, US Legal, A4, A5, B4 and B5.

And in honor of the official launch we are offering your first PDF report for free.

Your first export of a Basecamp project is now free with ExportReports.com!

All of these features came from feedback from our Basecamp users. Please let us know what you’d like to see by adding a comment here.

Ben Forta, the uber-guru of Adobe’s ColdFusion product and author of numerous how-to computer programming books is giving away copies of his books to schools, educational institutions and students.  First come first serve basis.

The topics include: ColdFusion, SQL, MySQL, SQL Server, CF/Flash and CF/J2EE.

You can read more about his offer and get his email address to request at book at his blog.

We use ColdFusion to build and deploy Vertabase project management software.