A new case study was released describing how Creativity, Inc. of Van Nuys, California doubled the productivity of their internal art department using Vertabase project management software. The case study looks at performance over the last four years and concludes:

“I would strongly recommend Vertabase to coordinate project management activities for internal creative teams. There is absolutely no downside.”

Here are links to the case study, a pdf of the case study and the press release about it.

Good project management can be the missing piece in revenue growth.

Here is a simple test to know if project management could help you grow revenue:

How long does it take you to generate a list of all projects you’re working on?

If the answer is anything greater than 5 minutes, you could benefit from more formal project management and project management software.

A quick case study that demonstrates this point.

A client of ours targeted a division for revenue growth over the next 5 years. They allocated sales people and marketing dollars to capture the opportunity. They saw a market opportunity to grow this division significantly.

Management, though, was worried that the division wouldn’t be handle to handle the growth. They were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the new orders.

Why were they worried?  They asked a simple question.

They asked the head of the division to show them a list of all current projects.

The head of the division said she’d get back to them in a day or two.

That’s when red flags started to go off.

If it took the head of the division one to two days just to compile a list of what was going on, there was clearly no process in place.  They were flying by the seat of their pants. Without process, the division couldn’t scale. That’s why management was worried.

If growth came, they might get lucky at the beginning, like they have been. Key individuals and long-standing relationships could be relied on to push the work through.  But longer term, things will start to break. There are only so many items those key individuals can do. Tasks will fall through the cracks. Deadlines will be blown. Customers will be upset. And all the money spent acquiring new customers will go down the drain.

Project Management is a Foundation for Growth

Management knew they had to create a more mature and uniform process. They needed to formalize their processes into projects and implement project management software to keep things together and provide instant access to information. This initiative became part of the overall investment in revenue growth for that division, as critical as sales people and marketing dollars.

Once complete, the head of the division was able to generate a list of projects in one to two seconds, instead of one to two days.  The division was on firm footing to grow revenue.

So if you want to see if a lack of project management is holding back growth, see how long it takes to put together a list of all ongoing projects. If its anything longer than 5 minutes, you have a problem.

I came across a great question asking about using email to manage issues or tasks.

The short answer is that email is terrible for managing issues and tasks.

Sending or forwarding emails may make the sender feel like the issue is being handled (particularly if its a long email, with many threads and lots of names on the cc line). But in truth, sending or forwarding emails is just a fast and easy way for the sender to get the issue off their plate without investing themselves in the resolution of the issue or accomplishment of the task.

Not Enough Information

1. A forwarded email often does not have enough information or context to convey how the issue should be handled. Even though there may be a ton of discussion in the email itself the sender is assuming

• a) that the recipient will understand the discussion in the way that they do and
• b) that the recipient will understand the senders intent and come to the same conclusion as to how the issue should be resolved.

It is also extremely time consuming for the recipient to troll through the entire email, rather than get clear direction from the sender.

Who is Responsible?

2. Forwarding email has no clear way for the sender to see who is supposed to be handling the issue or task. They just know who they forwarded it to.  The next person in line (or all the people cc’d on it) may turn around and forward it to other people.

No Feedback. Just More Email.

3. There is no clear feedback loop on the status of the issue or task with email. While the email might contain a deadline or language conveying urgency,  the sender has no clear way of seeing how close to being done the issue is nor does the recipient have any way of updating the timeline on the issue -other than sending more email that then needs to be sifted through to get to the status information.

No Reports

4. It is cumbersome and difficult for the sender to see the status of all issues or tasks at any point in time. They need to search their inbox/outbox issue by issue or person by person.

Incidentally, the same things that are wrong with using email can apply to open-ended project collaboration software or task management systems that work like message boards with multiple posts.  Like email, these are easy for people to use. But, they provide limited information for project managers. A manager often needs to spend a lot of time sifting through posts to find information they need to make strategic decisions or to update clients.

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.)