There are three key features most users look for in enterprise project management software:

1) Porftolio Views;
2) Executive Dashboards and;
3) Automatic notification.

Portfolio views allow managers, clients or executives to view projects grouped together into different portfolios, or categories, that are meangingful to that person. For example, a marketing department may have numerous initiatives active for a particular brand. The project status details of each iniatitive may be important for the resources working on them or to their manager. But an executive often wants to see the status of all projects for that brand, grouped specifically by brand, compared against other brands for which that executive may be responsible.

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Happy 2007 from Vertabase Pro, project management software.  Thank you for a great 2006! Looking forward to a wonderful 2007.

The current space shuttle mission STS-116 is a great window on project management in action.  On NASA TV you can hear the live management of an ongoing process –managing in real-time, on the fly, a complex operation that’s rife with opportunities to deviate from a sophisticated project plan.

While the scale might be different, it parallels, in a lot of ways, the activities that go on in any creative, engineering or scientific project. It provides a view on the types of information, visibility and project communication that make any project a success.

Here are some of the random clips we heard on NASA TV:

“Thanks for the great big picture words.”
“1:51 Central Time power down expected.”
“Good insight into the system.”
“I have the steps here.”
“Trouble shooting task procedures.”
“Blocks of activity.”
“Ready to proceed to step three – it is good to talk to you.”
“OK I’ll stand by, appreciate the help.”

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The Corporate edition of Copper 2006 (version 3.0) seems to be geared towards improving visibility of to-do lists. It is light on features that can help task management, manage schedules or give deeper visibility of projects.

A good example is the process of adding or editing tasks on a project. This is a fundamental activity not only in task management but also in planning projects, setting up schedules and managing on-going project activity.

Tasks can be added in two ways. One is through a single web page form which means that adding many tasks means going through many individual forms.   The second is via an Adobe Flash based Gantt chart.

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Jeff Peters has a nice article in ColdFusion Developer’s Journal giving an overview on some of the basics that can be accomplished when using an organized project management process for development using project management software available from www.GrokFusebox.com.

There are an additional set of project management software tools that can surround the software development process as a whole, providing a framework in which the development work takes place. Functionality in this framework includes tracking tasks, priorities, resource allocation across projects or a department and budgetary tracking and reporting.

These features create a more positive environment for software development or for a software development project.

Essentially, with minimal data input from a developer, management can get all the data they need to monitor the project or portfolio of projects (which they’re going to do anyway), without having to interrupt the developers or waste people’s time in meetings.

Vertabase Pro is a ColdFusion based project management software tool that does just this. You can get a look at it by checking out a screenshot tour or requesting a test drive.

Nothing is going to be easier than just being left alone to do your work. But these kind of project management tools can make a big impact on the overall long-term success of a software development project or IT department within a company or in a client/developer relationship.

Mark Phillips

I am the product manager and lead project management consultant for Vertabase. It’s 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. That being said, the opinions expressed here are my own (except for guest posts).  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 am a periodic presenter at the PMI - Great Lakes Chapter and other user groups/conferences.

I write about those same topics on this blog and in other places. My work has been published in publications like C|Net, ComputerWorld Magazine and the Financial Times. News about Vertabase 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.

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, as well as thoughts on design and system.

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 am a PMP and 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, a cat and two turtles.