I read an interesting analysis comparing the permission settings of Facebook and MySpace and how the permissioning impacts

• the type of information people share and
• the adoption of the websites.

The article makes the point that people feel comfortable sharing meaningful information on Facebook because it has more controlled and tighter permissioning than MySpace. It also states that this is one of the secrets behind the increased adoption of Facebook.

Facebook, the article continues, has an “exclusive” feel, like a club or fraternity. You can decide your circle of friends and therefore who gets to see the information you post.  Because you can control the connections, you are comfortable sharing meaningful information. Because the information remains meaningful, you keep coming back to the website.

MySpace has the feel of almost any place on the web. It is less exclusive. Information posted on MySpace can be seen by a wider audience. This openness, the article points out, leads to people posting less meaningful information, fewer discussions and, ultimately, less participation by each person.

ROLES IN A PROJECT

People’s roles in a project are defined. They may be defined by the project plan, by a person’s skillset, an organizational chart or the formal relationship among the project team.  The connections are not made in public, as it were.  There is a relationship in place.

Good project management software (like Vertabase) can map these roles into specific access levels and leverage those roles to improve projects.

Like with Facebook, you can increase the value of the information shared on projects by

• defining the type of information people can share
• controlling who gets to see that information and
• defining how that information is shared.

This will drive adoption of the project management software as a whole, and keep ongoing participation in projects high.

Wanted to pass on some great feedback from a new Vertabase customer and their first-hand experience using the timesheets on the iPhone.

Feedback has been positive so far with regards to how simple and easy the system is to use. I even tested timesheet entry using Safari and our iPhones and it works great. I looked at many web-only timesheet/project management products and Vertabase has exceeded my expectations so far.

The company is a strategic marketing and research firm.

We released a minor update to the Vertabase Timer time tracking software today.

The biggest new addition is an auto-stop option which will automatically stop tracking time on an item when your computer is inactive for a specific period of time. You can choose if you want to use auto-stop or not and how long the Vertabase Timer should wait before auto-stopping.

This should be helpful for people who step away from their desk and the Timer was still running. Currently, you can edit the time afterwards, but this should help prevent accidental time being recorded in the first place.

You can read about the Vertabase Timer or click to Try or Buy the Timer directly.

As with all our features, this is a direct result of feedback from our users. Keep it coming.

A mid-level manager I know expressed concern that adopting project management software would give him less control of projects. He thought that if there were a plan everyone could see and update themselves, they wouldn’t need to contact him for instructions.  And thus, he would have less control.

I explained to him that, on an objective level, he would actually

1. Have more control
2. Identify people who aren’t performing more easily and
3. Could get more done.

He would have more control since he could objectively measure progress against the plan.  He could point to specific deliverables and deadlines.  Sure, their would be less politics -and fewer meetings, but he would still be able to direct people’s actions. Only this time, instead of it seeming like the random instructions of a manager, the directions would be part of a coherent plan to accomplish specific goals. In fact, politics could be further removed from the process by having upper management sign-off on the plan before it goes into execution.

Those same objective measures can help identify where people aren’t performing and make it easier to document.  If a manager continuously needs to harp on someone for them to get anything done, it might not be a good fit. Fingers could be pointed at either the manager or the team member. But if you can consistently show that someone is not meeting the stated objectives, the finger pointing becomes much less.

His team could get more done since less time would be reporting on what they were doing or waiting to find out what they should be doing.  Updates can be made and populated automatically in the software. There will be less time in meetings. More time would be available for people to get things done.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

Of course, their may be other factors at play within the organization that make this manager reluctant to put a plan on paper or in a collaborative tool. This is totally legitimate.  A huge percentage of managers still rely on a direct and personal authoritarian approach. It can be very effective.

The vision for a good implementation of project management software is a well-oiled machine. People doing their work and following a plan, following a process that sets-up a constructive feedback loop between management and team members.  While there will always be hiccups, project management practices and project management software can help overcome them quickly and efficiently.

Regardless of management style, collaborative project management software like Vertabase gives a level of visibility, control and accountability without the administrative overhead of having meetings to find out who is doing what.

An interview with me from CFUnited 2009 was released today from CF Conversations.

It spans a wide array of topics including:

• Making project management work in an organization
• Open Source software
• Managing a software business
• Railo, OpenBD and Adobe ColdFusion

It starts out with a brief intro from Brian Meloche on things that he’s been working on then soon after moves into the interview.

I’ve been talking to a number of people lately who don’t know what project management is all about and how it can help them. They tend to think of project management as something reserved for large engineering projects or specifically IT projects. Project management can be used on projects of all sizes and in almost any field. It is a way of organizing, tracking and managing resources.

At its most basic, project management and by extension, project management software, can help them:

1. Assign people to tasks
2. Keep all those task assignments in one place
3. Let people know when to start at task
4. Let people know when a task is due
5. Give managers visibility on where everyone is on their tasks
6. Keep all that information in one centralized place

It differs from creating simple tasks lists in that tasks here, are done in the context of completing a project.

That is, the tasks are a coordinated effort by individuals working over a period of time to achieve a specific goal.

Often, that goal has a defined due date and thus knowing how people are doing on their tasks gives you good information for knowing how likely you are to hit the due date or what may need to be done to get to that due date.

Project management software provides a framework for those tasks and the projects they roll up into. It makes it easy to what’s going on. The project owner or manager can track progress and make course corrections as necessary.

Project management software, like Vertabase, can also do micromanaging with automatic email reminders to managers or team members and notifications of when things change.

Here are simple steps you can take to have better visibility on resources and answer the question: “How much more work can we do?”. They are geared towards answering the question how much can we do this month. But the same principals apply if you want to look at it for a week, a quarter, a year, etc.

1. Break your project down into separate months.
2. Put in all the team members on that project (the whole project team).
3. Add in each person’s total availability to work for the month.
4. As you enter in tasks for that project, put in the estimated hours each person will spend on that task.
5. Keep a rolling sum of estimated hours per person for the month.
6. Subtract that rolling sum from total availability.

This will show you how much time each person has left for the month, based on current workload.  If you are considering adding on a new task, think about how much time it will take a specific team member to do that task. Then, see if that person has the availability left to take it on.

These type of calculations are automatically done by Vertabase project management software. Project management software also makes it far easier to see this information across all projects and to scale for large numbers of people with varying schedules (including holidays, sick days, etc.)

One of the first steps to getting buy-in for more project management is to make the need apparent.

The first step to achieving this transparency is to put together a list of every single project that’s being requested, match it with the departments or people involved in making that project happen, and matching it, as well, with the requestors.

This simple list will show you how many total projects there are on the table, how many projects are requested by each requestor and how many projects each department has to be involved with.

For an average size group the number of requested projects is generally in the 50 to 150 project range -with the lion’s share of the projects touching IT and/or a marketing or art department. Summarize these statistics and share them with key decision makers. It provides a simple but powerful view on everything going on within a group.

By seeing the amount of requested activity it should highlight the need to prioritize projects, really ask the requestors which are the most important projects to get done and to track the progress of projects by department so that the decision makers and key stakeholders can have visibility into how shared resources (namely IT, marketing, HR, procurement etc.) are being spent.

Project management as a practice and project management software as a tool can help facilitate this transparency and present it in a non-threatening way.

Prioritizing tasks is critical when you have limited resources. A traditional project management approach doesn’t work in most situation. I generally recommended a holistic approach to task prioritization.

The traditional approach by project managers using traditional project management software is to prioritize tasks based on the critical path of the project.  This critical path is constructed by defining tasks, information about those tasks and constraints.  Project management software (like MS Project) then auto-calculates a critical path.

Time and again I’ve found that this isn’t helpful to getting projects done.

1. It doesn’t capture all the variables that should go into prioritizing a task and
2. It is way too cumbersome to be useful to most people doing projects.

Instead, try a holistic approach to task prioritization.

Here are two ways of doing that. They can be used separately or together.

Subjective Task Priorities
First, come up with at least three levels of task priority. For simplicity, these can be low, medium and high or 3,2,1 -with 1 being highest priority.

These are completely subjective priority levels which allow you, as a human being, to factor in any number of variables when deciding what is important to work on.

A human being can better appreciate all the factors around a project or task better than any algorithm or decision making model. Algorithms and models can only go so far when factoring in things like human error, rework time, and things simply taking longer than planned. Algorithms also allow the project manager to be aloof from the process as a whole. This isn’t good.

An added benefit of a subjective approach is that it requires the project manager to have detailed knowledge of the production process and the business goals behind the project. That way, they can weigh everything in when deciding what people should be working on and when.

Second, when putting together a task list, label each task with the priority.

When the relative importance of a task changes, change the label and make sure everyone on the team knows about it.

Project management tools like Vertabase can help you notify people automatically. Or, just make sure you continue to communicate with the team.

Subjective Critical Path
A second way of incorporating holistic prioritization is to manually flag critical tasks when you set up your task list or work breakdown structure. The critical tasks should be those which are key for your project to be completed properly and/or on time.  Many organizations call these project milestones, though I like to reserve the term for major phases of a project.

I’ve often said that managing the active phase of a project is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle.  This is when the project’s goals are being worked on. Some have argued that planning is the most important phase. That good planning can take care of anything. An incident on the most recent spacewalk by NASA seems to prove my point.

Two astronauts went out on a spacewalk to fix a particular part on the Hubble Telescope. The part that needed repair was blocked by a handrail. To get to the part, they had to unscrew the handrail. But, of course, the bolt that held the handrail onto the telescope was stripped. They couldn’t use any of their tools to get it off. The plan called for them to use a tool to unscrew the bolt. But it wasn’t working. Eventually, they had to resort to brute force, yanking the handrail off with old fashion muscle, in order to get to the part. They called it ”Plan C.”

My wife and I cracked-up when we heard this. The same thing always seems to happen to our household projects. Nothing ever goes as planned, things take longer and you often have to come up with innovative solutions to achieve your goals (which sometimes involved brute force).  Even with the huge budget, master planners and technical information that NASA has, things don’t always go as planned.

Why is this important?  It has a direct impact on how you structure your projects, the techniques you use and the tools you use for managing projects.

Recognizing that the active phase is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle, means that the flow of information from team members to the project manager, and back again, is of utmost importance. It is only by having accurate information that the project manager can understand the situation and implement changes as needed.

Without good information, those astronauts would probably be stuck trying to build a tool that could unscrew the bolt, to go according to plan, rather than just getting the job done.