I am one of those people who needs to have music on all the time. Every day deserves its own soundtrack, right? Maybe you enjoy listening to classical music on your commute to work, or you prefer rocking out to 80s hair metal while finishing up those spreadsheets at your desk. Even the most mundane things can be improved with the right background music. 

That’s why I've come up with the Ultimate Project Manager Playlist. How did these songs make the cut? I had strict criteria for each song: 

• How hard does it rock? The scale went from 1 (“elevator music”) to 11 (“melts faces”). 
• Whether this was demonstrated in the song title or in the content of the lyrics, the song had to have something to do with the project management profession.
• The song is just really fun/hilarious/great to dance to. The work day can already feel much longer than eight hours; what's the harm in listening to a little Jimmy Buffett to spice things up?

Your suggestions on Twitter and Facebook were also a huge help - keep them coming! So without further ado, let's get this party started:

1. Michael Jackson – Working Day and Night

2. Bachman Turner Overdrive - Taking Care of Business

3. Blue Oyster Cult – Deadline

4. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger

5. The Beatles – Help!

6. Billy Joel – She’s Right On Time

7. Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett - It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

8. Puff Daddy – It’s All About the Benjamins

9. Europe – The Final Countdown

10. Blink 182 – All The Small Things

How did I do? Did I miss anything obvious? Leave a comment and let me know!

We love hearing from our customers and receiving product feedback. It not only allows us to improve our online project management tool, but we also get to learn from our customers. Sometimes THEY'RE the ones teaching us a scheduling trick or two! 

I recently had a call with one of our longtime customers, Matt Nisonger. Matt is with SharedVue, an ever-growing cloud marketing company, and he's definitely earned the title of "LP Guru." Want proof of his LiquidPlanner prowess? Matt formulated his own project creation workflow trick that's so good, we just had to share it.

With SharedVue’s steady influx of projects, Matt needed to find a way to streamline project creation. As he explains it, “we wanted to find a way for our Project Managers to quickly set up projects without having to recreate the wheel each time with regard to scoping out tasks and phases." In short, his goals were to create a template that could: 

• Be used for the planning of all projects;
• Place the responsibility for scoping and task planning on departmental leads;
• Free the project manager from having to track detailed tasks outside of their domain.

Here’s how Matt’s project creation process works: 

1. He's started by creating a general “skeleton” template for his projects:

Note that the milestones are determined by client deadlines, are driven by department work, and the project manager is responsible for making sure each one is met. The grey sub-folders are for functional breakdowns that represent each department that typically works on the project. They are assigned to the departmental heads and will be populated with tasks as soon as they are scoped by the department.

2. When the “Project Approved” milestone is met, the project manager duplicates this template and keeps the new, "live" project low in the priority order until it is fully built out. To initiate the project work, the project manager uses our Email Integration feature to send comments directly to departmental heads requesting that they initiate scoping for the project. 

3. The department heads then create task deliverables within their allocated sub-folder, estimate them, and assign them to their team members. They have one week to scope their portion of the project. This locks down the scoping period, ensures that everyone involved has early input, and helps prevent future feature creep. Once this is complete, the project manager checks off the “Scoping” milestone for each department. 

4. Next, the “Scheduling Signoff” milestone is the kick-off to bring the project up in priority order and start prioritizing project tasks within the monthly package structure they have in place. See below:

The project manager and department heads have a 15 minute huddle each week (with LiquidPlanner up on a projector) to prioritize tasks within packages and discuss status updates and resource allocation.

5. Once each department has executed all tasks within their sub-folders, the PM signs off on all the work by marking the “Signoff” milestones complete. This process allows the project manager to focus primarily on managing the scoping process and tracking against major milestones. They can check on status by simply viewing how many hours have rolled up in the "Total Done" column for each of the the departmental sub- folders.

6. Finally, the last milestone for “Push to Production” is used to mark the date when the product is released and available to the customer.

Although this exact project creation workflow is specific to Matt and his team, you might be able to apply some of his ideas to your own project creation and prioritization needs.

Do you have any tricks you’d like to share with fellow LP customers for more efficient project planning? If so, I’d love to hear them! Feel free to shoot me an email at jen@liquidplanner.com or leave a comment below.

I get a lot of questions about how to use LiquidPlanner for (or in addition to) bug tracking software.  We have LiquidPlanner customers doing both, depending on the nature of their team, the systems that are already in place, etc. Several customers are using our API to integrate with GitHub, Jira, and Bugzilla. Internally, we use LiquidPlanner and only LiquidPlanner for filing, tracking, collaborating on, and verifying bugs & incidents.

Why? At the end of the day, we want to track bugs along with the rest of our work—in our schedule. Bugs need to be assigned, estimated, and prioritized alongside our project work, based on their severity and impact. We fix bugs (new and existing) in every release of LiquidPlanner, and since LiquidPlanner is the one system we all look at every day, it doesn’t make sense for us to track them in a separate system.

But how, you might ask, does it actually work? Here are the gory details.

First, we have a single place to collect new bugs.  They all get sent to a Package called “UNTRIAGED,” which is the central holding place for new bugs, feature requests, ideas, and tasks until we can process them (Figure 1).  This Package has a relatively high priority position in the "Projects" page of LiquidPlanner, just under our urgent work and active sprint releases.

For us, bugs come to our attention in a variety of ways. They might be reported by a customer via email, found during the testing process or through our normal use of the tool, or sent to us as a system alert.

To get these items into LiquidPlanner, most of us use email integration. This “UNTRIAGED” Package has its own email address, which we’ve all added to our address books. When we mail an issue into LiquidPlanner, we automatically create a new “task” for tracking.

Using the subject line of the email, we can:

• Name the bug (usually it starts with “Bug: XXXXX”)
• Assign the bug to any member of our workspace
• Estimate it in any unit we want (2-4h, .5-1d)

The attached documents and body of the email (including screenshots, repro steps, or error messaging) get saved to the Details page of LiquidPlanner, ensuring that all relevant information stays with the item as it goes through our workflow.

Next, we have twice-weekly meetings to process our “UNTRIAGED” bugs. During those meetings, we review every new item, and assign, estimate, and prioritize it. Some bugs get moved into the current sprint, others get pushed into the staging sprint or out to the backlog. If a new bug is assigned to a developer, they get notified via email and it shows up on their personal tasklist.

We typically structure the work in each release into several major categories, one of which is “Bugs.” This allows us to view, analyze, and report on them as a group, separate from other tasks like new features or tech debt. However, as you can see in Figure 2, the amount of work associated with bugs is non-trivial – hence our interest in tracking them in conjunction with our other project work!

All comments, collaboration, updates, and files associated with the bugs are stored on the Details Page. This includes references to specific customers who may have been affected.  Sometimes this information can pile up, but since the most recent comments, documents, and links are added to the top of the list, it’s pretty easy to stay on top of the latest happenings for each item. We also have LiquidPlanner integrated with our source control system, so that applicable references/commit notifications are automatically added as comments to the bug.

Finally, once the bug has been fixed, we assign it back to the creator (or a tester) for verification. By simply switching ownership of the task, we can move it through an informal workflow that doesn’t bog us down in process. (The person who created the item is also notified by email that they have a new assignment.) Once the fix has been verified, the item is marked done and becomes part of our (fully searchable) archive for later reference.  Voilà!

We recently added new custom fields that allow us to track our bugs even more effectively. We've created a custom field for "bugs", "feature requests", etc. And, when a new issue comes up, we simply assign the appropriate custom field. This is great for filtering in the plan and for reporting purposes!

Naturally, you can argue that LiquidPlanner lacks some of the features of a dedicated bug management system. I’ll give you that. But what it lacks in dedicated features it makes up for in ease of use, simplicity, and integration into our other processes.

Ah, holiday. Vacation. Time spent not working. No matter how you say it, the concept of getting away from the office and instead, taking tightrope walking classes in Paris, for example, is incredibly exciting. Or maybe your idea of a perfect vacation is to spend 48 hours straight in your living room catching up on Downton Abbey. There’s no judgment here.

However, before you pack up and head off for distant, unknown lands, there’s one thing you need to remember to do: tell LiquidPlanner about your upcoming absence. Why? LiquidPlanner is constantly trying to predict and build the most accurate schedule it can for you and your team.

So if you’re not available to work at some point, LiquidPlanner needs to know so that it doesn’t schedule you for work during those dates. You wouldn’t want LiquidPlanner to think you’re working on those website specs when you’re actually perfecting cannonballs while cliff diving in Fiji, right? To tell LiquidPlanner about your holiday, you’ll need to create an event. Many teams like to do this by creating a package called “Events,” and then having each team member put their own personal events in that same package. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the Add button at the top of your Projects page. Click “Package.”
2. An edit pane will pop up. Call the package “Events.”
3. After it’s added to your project plan, the Events package may drop to the bottom of your page. For ease of reference, drag and drop that package to the top.

Now on to adding the event itself. You say you’re climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in June? Sounds a little insane, but good for you! To add this event or so called “vacation” (did I mention I think you’re nuts?) to your new Events package:

1. Go back to the Add button and select “Add an Event.”
2. The edit pane will pop up. Rename the event something like “Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Someone Please Talk Me Out of This.”  
3. Double-check that the event is assigned to you.
4. Enter the calendar dates in which you’ll be gone. This is one of the only times that LiquidPlanner will ask you for hard dates. 
5. Hit save. 

LiquidPlanner will automatically recalculate your project plan, flowing work around your holiday. You’ll know instantly if your little jaunt will cause any project deadlines to become at risk, and you can go put out those fires before the big day comes.

Feeling a little foggy about this process still? Our Support Manager Mary Ellen can give you a visual tour step-by-step in our new training video, “Planning Events": 

And no matter where your travels take you: Bon voyage!

Ah, holiday. Vacation. Time spent not working. No matter how you say it, the concept of getting away from the office and instead, taking tightrope walking classes in Paris, for example, is incredibly exciting. Or maybe your idea of a perfect vacation is to spend 48 hours straight in your living room catching up on Downton Abbey. There’s no judgment here.

However, before you pack up and head off for distant, unknown lands, there’s one thing you need to remember to do: tell LiquidPlanner about your upcoming absence. Why? LiquidPlanner is constantly trying to predict and build the most accurate schedule it can for you and your team.

So if you’re not available to work at some point, LiquidPlanner needs to know so that it doesn’t schedule you for work during those dates. You wouldn’t want LiquidPlanner to think you’re working on those website specs when you’re actually perfecting cannonballs while cliff diving in Fiji, right? To tell LiquidPlanner about your holiday, you’ll need to create an event. Many teams like to do this by creating a package called “Events,” and then having each team member put their own personal events in that same package. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the Add button at the top of your Projects page. Click “Package.”
2. An edit pane will pop up. Call the package “Events.”
3. After it’s added to your project plan, the Events package may drop to the bottom of your page. For ease of reference, drag and drop that package to the top.

Now on to adding the event itself. You say you’re climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in June? Sounds a little insane, but good for you! To add this event or so called “vacation” (did I mention I think you’re nuts?) to your new Events package:

1. Go back to the Add button and select “Add an Event.”
2. The edit pane will pop up. Rename the event something like “Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Someone Please Talk Me Out of This.”  
3. Double-check that the event is assigned to you.
4. Enter the calendar dates in which you’ll be gone. This is one of the only times that LiquidPlanner will ask you for hard dates. 
5. Hit save. 

LiquidPlanner will automatically recalculate your project plan, flowing work around your holiday. You’ll know instantly if your little jaunt will cause any project deadlines to become at risk, and you can go put out those fires before the big day comes.

Feeling a little foggy about this process still? Our Support Manager Mary Ellen can give you a visual tour step-by-step in our new training video, “Planning Events": 

And no matter where your travels take you: Bon voyage!

Last year was a huge year for us, but I’ve got a feeling that 2012 is going to be even bigger. And what better way to kick the year off then with a full set of brand new training videos for you and your team to enjoy?

Start with Part 1 as an introduction to LiquidPlanner, and proceed through to your desired topic (we’ve got everything from “Logging Progress” to “Multi-Project Management” covered). Whatever questions you may have, our Support Manager Mary Ellen will walk you through the steps needed to get your work done in LiquidPlanner. Whether you’re a Workspace Owner, a individual contributor, a 30-day trial-er or a longtime LiquidPlanner user, we can guarantee that you’ll learn at least one new thing from these videos.

Part 1: Introduction to LiquidPlanner

Part 2: Creating Project Plans

Part 3: Date Calculations and Scheduling Tools

Part 4: Multi-Project Management

Part 5: Events

Part 6: Logging Progress

Part 7: Command Menus and View Gallery

Part 8: Filters

Part 9: Recap of Key Concepts

You can watch these videos any time on our website or on the LiquidPlanner YouTube channel (don't forget to subscribe!). What is the next training video we should produce? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

In December, I used the quiet time between Christmas and New Years to set up LiquidPlanner for 2012. As an independent consultant, providing project management to a variety of businesses and non-profit organizations, I need to accomplish two major things when planning out my work for the year:

• Filling the pipeline
• Avoiding taking on more than I can handle

LiquidPlanner helps me do both these things and in turn, manages to keep me out of trouble. Here’s a step-by-step description of my process for preparing LiquidPlanner (and myself) for the New Year:

First, I created all the projects and tasks that have to be completed in the coming year. My volunteer commitments were the easiest to model. For example, my Toastmasters group has 90-minute meetings twice a month, so I created a project named “Toastmasters Member 2012.” I used the “Add Multiple Tasks” function to quickly create two dozen tasks to represent those meetings.

 

Second, I created a package for the year, and then within that package, I added 12 more packages, one for each month. 

I then put each task into the appropriate month’s package. It’s my practice to place every LiquidPlanner task into both a folder and a package. In this way, I can estimate both at the project level and at the calendar level.

Planning my projects and tasks for my consulting business is more difficult to model. It’s often true that in December, I don’t know what my big projects will be in the coming year. However, this year I have several ongoing projects as well as some big proposals in the queue. I had used LiquidPlanner to model the proposed projects before I submitted bids, and I already had a good sense of how much time I should budget for those projects. It was simple to plug the appropriate tasks into the months when I believed the work would take place.

And there we have it - by using LiquidPlanner, I saw that the month of June could be quite full if I were to receive all the contracts I’ve bid on. As I negotiate with other clients, I’ll keep this in mind so that I don’t end up overloaded.

LiquidPlanner is an integral part of both my daily work flow and my monthly planning, and I can’t imagine running my consulting practice without it.

With over 20 years of project management experience, Lisa Sieverts specializes in improving organizational project success rates. She owns and manages Facilitated Change, an independent project management consulting firm based in Harrisville, NH.  Lisa teaches project management at the Masters degree level at Marlboro College Graduate School and Northeastern University College of Professional Studies. Since 2001, she has been certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute (PMI), a global leader in the development of standards for the practice of project management. Previously, she worked for Hewlett-Packard in California and Idaho as a project manager in the HP Services division.

One thing that really sets LiquidPlanner apart from other online project management software is our belief in the power of ranged estimates. LiquidPlanner customers make best case/worst case estimates when planning their projects and tasks, and we think this creates a more realistic project schedule. Because you know what? Life happens. And sometimes, things don't go according to plan, even when you're trying to cook the perfect turkey for your holiday celebration. We'll let Laura and Marcy explain the rest.

 

Click here for larger image and code to embed on your site.

 

Project managers are often put in the challenging position of having the responsibility for a project but limited authority over the people actually working on that project.  Can’t you just imagine a world where all of the project teams would work with the efficiency of the orange-faced Oompa-Loompas from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?  Willy Wonka must have held some management secret over the pint-size doers to get them to unclog Augustus Gloop and juice Violet Beauregarde, all while singing an educational tune.

In reality, projects are not filled with chocolate rivers, Fizzy Lifting drinks and Everlasting Gobstoppers. Most project teams are made up of cooperative (and sometimes uncooperative) team members with different—and often competing—priorities. The project manager doesn't always have authority over the entire project team in the traditional sense (i.e., the team members don’t “report” to the project manager). When project managers lack positional influence, they need to rely on other “organizational currencies” to influence others and get the job done. 

In the book Influence Without Authority, Dr. Allan Cohen and Dr. David Bradford introduce the Cohen-Bradford Influence Model that describes how to influence others through a "give and take” exchange (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Cohen-Bradford Influence Without Authority Model

Effective project managers know they get work done by working well within their peer network. If someone does something for the project manager, there’s a good chance the project manager will do something for them in return.  To pave the way for these exchanges, project managers need to build a “bank account” of organizational currencies.

Below are a few types of organizational currencies and a few sample questions to help you think about how to apply them: 

Influence in Action

In one of my IT projects, the team needed additional servers that were not scoped in the original hosting order. Due to the demand for capacity, I knew the timeline to rack, stack and install servers could take several weeks. George, the infrastructure manager, already had a long list of server requests ahead of my project. I had to spend some of my organizational currency to improve my project’s place in the priority list.  Based on the Cohen-Bradford model, I exchanged the following organizational currencies: 

• Position-related: My project had high visibility with executive management and by pushing it through, George’s team got recognition for supporting a critical project.
• Task-related: I had cost information from outside vendors who provided a similar service.  By sharing the information with George, he gained additional insight and competitive information that helped him develop a center of excellence within the company.
• Relationship-related:  George and I had a personal friendship because we worked together over 6 years, three companies, many team lunches, coffee breaks, and general commiseration.

In this project, there were still challenges and other delays that couldn’t be resolved solely using organizational currency and peer-influence.  However, by relying on the relationship we had and leveraging these organizational currencies, I was able to move the project forward.

Learn More About the Influence Without Authority Model

Influencing without authority isn’t an easy task. Project managers need to spend time to earn organizational currency with co-workers.  Time isn’t a luxury many project managers can afford, but investing in relationship-building will ultimately help them be more productive and generate quicker consensus with project team members (for more information on the Cohen-Bradford model, please visit their website). Cohen and Bradford have several case studies and articles that take a deeper look at influencing without authority.

Until I find my Golden Ticket and inherit a team of Oompa-Loompas, I’ll continue to invest in my own organizational related currencies.  Perhaps that’s how Willy Wonka kept an entire tribe of Oompa-Loompas on-task and happy.

Author’s note:  A note of thanks goes to Dr.Cohen and Dr. Bradford for their permission to reprint their Influence Without Authority model in this article.

About the Author

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT manager, author, instructor, and lecturer on a range of project management topics including PMO management, ERP implementation, application portfolio management, and infrastructure management. 

As a freelancer, I fall into the project manager role quite often. I need to manage not only myself, but my time, my deadlines and my clients. My getting paid (and maintaining a good working relationship) sometimes rides on the outcome of a client’s project and whether it meets its deadlines. While I have little to no control over their development and deployment processes, and I’m not a project manager by title, I still have a stake in the success or failure to ship a product on time.

An involuntary and reluctant project manager is born.

Most jobs require some amount of project management, even freelance jobs. When the stakes of a project's outcome includes your livelihood and likelihood of future work, you will undoubtedly respond as I have done: sink or swim.

Treading Water: Signs You Need to Start Swimming

I was once hired for an ongoing freelance postiion with a small but fast-growing company. Interestingly enough, they made productivity software for managing projects. My job was simply to write the user documentation and help systems for various parts of the software suite. This demanded that I stay on top of my targets and deadlines, track my time, and liaise with internal developers and product managers to complete my admittedly small part of the final software product. 

When I finished my first piece of documentation, roadblocks started popping up everywhere at work:

• There was no structure to implementing my work or getting the final approval for its inclusion in the software
• A major staffing crisis with outsourced programmers in another country
• The acting product development manager was also the business development manager, trying to juggle too many responsibilities at once

I recognized quickly that I was treading water (in fact, my client’s whole team was), and despite the fact that it was completely outside the scope of my role, I took on some of the tasks a project manager would handle. The process needed to move forward again.

Learning to Swim: Managing Projects When You Are Not A PM

The dearth of communication and coordination taking place in my office undermined the potential success of the entire product launch. All the parties were capable, dedicated people but they did not have the bandwidth to follow through and coordinate with each other. I needed to take matters into my own hands. Here were just some of my self-assigned tasks:

• Relieve pressure from key actors to help them be more effective at their main responsibilities. To do this, I acted as a liaison between the frazzled biz dev-sometime-product-manager and the local software development team to ensure that the most up-to-date information about program and system changes were conveyed to all the appropriate individuals. This cut the need for long, time-eating meetings among people who needed to devote their time elsewhere. You can also alleviate this sort of problem in LiquidPlanner with our online collaboration tools. 
• Identifying problems and bottlenecks and finding a solution. In this case, I was far enough removed from the day-to-day workings and office politics to see simple processes and fixes that could alleviate or eliminate a major problem. Being too close to a situation makes it easy to overlook even basic missing factors, such as clear communication between the right stakeholders. A good project manager, even an involuntary one, can step in and see past these blind spots. 

In the end, the component of the software we were working on shipped on time, even if there were fixes that needed to take place after the fact. However, by stepping in where I saw a need, I helped to facilitate this outcome. You might find yourself in this position, as companies downsize and employees are increasingly asked to contribute more. Using your communication and organization skills while also recognizing that you are now indeed a project manager will serve you well in the long run.