There are two ways to manage a project: with brute force and with finesse.

Brute force managers are like rock climbers who uses their arms to pull themselves up a wall. It can get you there if you have the strength, but it sure is tiring and ugly.

Project managers who use finesse are like climbers who realize that their can legs do most of the vertical lifting. They just need to use their head to find the right placement. Climbing with their legs (which are stronger than arms), using their hands mostly for balance, they can climb a lot higher, for a lot longer and its much prettier to see.

Read the rest of this post »

I have the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of people looking for project management software every month, and what I find amazing is the great difference in the way they are all working from one another. When I started speaking to people about their project management needs, I believed for the most part that everyone would basically be working in a very similar fashion. After all, we all put on our shoes basically the same way, brush our teeth, and walk upright as we move from place to place. But the more I spoke with potential customers, the more they kept asking me about very specific software functionalities. The first part of the question does your software do x and then y and then z, is followed by surprise when I answer that no, no one else has ever asked about that feature before. “Really?!” Is a classic response and they pause in disbelief.

Read the rest of this post »

Mark Phillips

I am the product manager and lead spokesperson for Vertabase. Its my job to make sure the Vertabase approach to project management gets out there and that feedback from our customer’s and the market make it back to the engineers who build the great products we sell. I spend a lot of time traveling, talking to customers, users groups and conferences in the US and Canada primarily about project management, time management and getting more done.

I write about those same topics on this blog and in other places including a regular column for Fusion Authority. My work has been published in publications like C|Net, ComputerWorld Magazine and the Financial Times. News about Vertabase (which my team generates) has been in almost every major project management magazine, vertical industry magazine (e.g. the insurance industry, banking industry, education, municipal government, oil and gas, etc.) and local newspaper around the United States.

Besides project management I am an active member of Adobe Technology related communities. This includes ColdFusion, AIR and the Creative Suite group of products like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

Before getting into project management and software I worked on Wall Street as an economic and financial analyst. Those topics are still very dear to me. Sometimes, on this blog, you’ll find that I can’t help but comment on economic and financial events going on in the world. But I do stay away from politics (on the blog).

Philosophically, the Vertabase approach to project management comes from over 15 years of real world experience helping thousands of people at hundreds of companies get more done -everyday. It has been used to produce projects for companies like MTV, Young and Rubicam, Sesame Street and the State of California. It is based on having to produce high quality work with limited resources. It is built on making it easy to get project related information, track information and use that information for intelligent reporting and decision making.

I hold a Masters degree in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors of Science [Econ] in Philosophy and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I live in Michigan with my wife and kids, our dog and a fish.

BusinessWeek Online has an interesting article about failure. It cites a couple of high profile successes (like Bill Gates and Abraham Lincoln) that had failed businesses early in their careers. It then goes on to talk about making business failures more productive through analysis and review.

The same holds true in projects. A huge number of projects “fail” in that they don’t meet original expectations, timelines or budgets. Sometimes they even fail by not producing the expected deliverable. Good project management can help minimize these kind of failures. But even the best team or is not going to bat 1000.

Read the rest of this post »