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I’m now on a two-week holiday – A Girl’s Guide to Project Management returns on 2 August when I’ll be kicking off this year’s Summer of Books. There are some excellent books that I’ve reviewed this year, so join me then!

No related posts.

Taming Change with Portfolio Management: Unify Your Organization, Sharpen Your Strategy and Create Measurable Value is a meaty book – and I only got the paperback advance reader’s copy.  I’ve been lumping it around for a while now.  The hardback formal print run is now complete and the book is (just) on the shelves.

Pat Durbin and Terry Doerscher have written a definitive guide to modern portfolio management.  It covers all the basics like managing a portfolio of projects with common resources and funding but it takes it to the next level.  “We are approaching these subjects from a broader perspective – applying portfolio management to changes that impact you on an organizational level to effectively manage these change events, deliver exceptional growth, and create measurable value.”  (And they use the Oxford comma!  That’s proper writing, that is.  I hope that comma made it into the hardback.*)

Essentially, Durbin and Doerscher say that you can run your whole business on a portfolio management approach.  Why do we need a model of portfolio management that is so broad?  As a result of changing business models we have ended up with organisations that need to be more flexible.  The authors say that using portfolio management as an overarching business principle means that you can:

Implement the right decision-making tools

• Understand and demonstrate how individuals and their actions fit within the big picture
• Measure and assess effectiveness
• Improve performance in the future.

It is a deeper look at portfolios than anything I have read before, including Simon Moore’s excellent book.  Moore looks at how to set up and create strategic project portfolios, but Durbin and Doerscher consider the change and impact of portfolios on organisations.  This approach does make it an interesting read for a project manager, although PM’s will find it less relevant than Moore’s book to their day-to-day work.  Managers of all kinds in small companies will also find it pretty heavy going, as a lot of the principles relate to large organisations.  You can’t have a corporate portfolio if you’re a one-person project management consultancy.  However, a lot of the thinking will be the same, even if it doesn’t translate into teams of portfolio managers.  You still need a way to assess individual investment opportunities, manage an investment portfolio, asses and manage the work coming in and a delivery function to implement the work.

It isn’t supposed to be a radical rethink of the portfolio model.  Instead, it’s evolved thinking – taking the concepts to the next level to get even more value out of them.

For all that Taming Change is aimed at keeping financial decisions on track and helping companies get the best return in a structured way, it isn’t supposed to be a radical rethink of the portfolio model.  Instead, it’s evolved thinking – taking the concepts to the next level to get even more value out of them.

Conceptually there is a lot of stuff in here, but some of the detail is worth a mention too.  The bit on key performance indicators in the section on the operational planning process is excellent.  There is a strong focus on proactivity:  “Leadership has another level at its disposal to manage capacity – timing…Operational planning may need to consider slowing down, spreading out, or [there’s that comma again] rearranging how the total portfolio of initiatives is slated for execution,” the authors write.  Chapter 15 points out that portfolio management processes by themselves deliver nothing, and that you have to pair them with the delivery of products, services and assets.

Taming Change is a mixture of practical and conceptual ways to approach portfolio management.  I didn’t find it an easy read, but it is challenging.  You didn’t expect it to be easy to get your organisation to deliver repeatable results, did you?

*Apologies for the focus on grammar in this post – I have seen too many examples of poor sentence construction recently to let good grammar pass without a pat on the back!

Buy on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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1. Book review: Strategic Project Portfolio Management It took me a while to get my hands on Simon Moore’s book, Strategic Project Portfolio Management, but I’m rather glad I did. For a...
2. Book review (and giveaway): IT Enabled Business Change “Change happens in organisations,” writes Sharm Manwani.  “Sometimes you have a choice – to be in the driving seat, ride as a passenger or not...
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“The risk people are the business prevention people,” said David Hillson, at the beginning of his presentation at the Gower Experts’ Forum at the National Centre for Project Management.

He pointed out that the results from the 2009 CHAOS report aren’t that much better than those when CHAOS started out: last year the survey reported 24% of projects falling into the ‘Failed’ category, 44% as being ‘Challenged’ and only 32% being successful.  “Project Risk Management is supposed to help,” said Hillson. “Risk management gives us a clear focus on objectives.”

Hillson believes that risk management is the key driver for project success.  Of course he would, he’s the self-styled Risk Doctor.  But what he says does make a lot of sense.  Risk management:

• makes us proactive, not reactive
• creates the space to manage effectively
• and ensures consensus and focus.

When it comes to getting better at risk management, Hillson presented 3 areas to improve:  Principles, Processes and People.

Principles

Hillson defines risk as “uncertainty that matters,” i.e. uncertainty that could have a risk on our project objectives.  “We don’t have every uncertainty in the world on our risk registers,” he said.  We filter out what matters by whether it will affect our objectives.  Different risks matter at different levels:  what is important to project objectives may not be important to strategic objectives.  Equally, we need to remember that risk is not always bad.  “Opportunity and threat are the two flavours of risk, but they are both risks,” Hillson explained.

The final principle Hillson touched on was the concept that overall project risk is different from risk events.  When a sponsor asks, “How risky is this project,” the answer is not, “Here is my risk register.”  Instead, there is a different judgement applied to the concept of risk as distinct from risks.  Risk is not equal to the sum of all the risks.

Processes

Two things are missing from our standard risk processes.

1. When do we implement the risk response?
   Hillson pointed out that most standard risk processes stop with working out what the mitigating actions should be.  There is nowhere to actually do the doing of risk response.  He explained that people tend to think that this will be naturally incorporated into the project tasks but in reality it could be better managed.
2. When do we learn?
   The risk management process is a circle – identify-assess-plan-review – so where does it stop?  There is no final step at project completion to incorporate the learnings into the post-implementation review or lessons learned exercise.

People

People do projects, and our risk attitudes frame how we respond to risk.  “If we understand and manage the way people position themselves with regard to risk, it will make our risk effectiveness better,” Hillson said.  He talked about a spectrum of risk attitude, and where you fall on it depends on the event.  For example, you may have a very cavalier approach to risk if you are gambling with matchsticks, but become much more cautious when abseiling for the first time.  Where you should be on the spectrum depends on what you are trying to achieve.

“We focus on the tools and forget about the people,” Hillson concluded.

It was a very interesting presentation.  You can by David Hillson’s book, Managing Risk in Projects, from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

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3. Fixed date projects: more advice from the experts Last week we saw that PRINCE2 doesn’t really have much advice to offer the project manager stuck with delivering to a fixed date.  I also...

Today I’m speaking at the Virtual Working Summit on the subject of using social media with virtual teams, in conversation with Dr Penny Pullan.

Want to listen in?  It’s free, and here’s everything else you need to know:

When can I listen?

Each summit interview will be available from 8am UK time, 3am Eastern. Whenever you choose, you’ll hear the day’s interview from the very start. So, choose a slot in your day to suit you. We decided to do this as we have people from Australia to San Francisco taking part and there’s no one time that’s ideal for everyone. We hope you enjoy the flexibility.

How can we interact?

As you’ve realised, I’m not speaking for 12 hours on the trot.  The interview is recorded, so you can’t ask questions live.  However, during the Summit please join in discussions around the topics and ask questions at our open LinkedIn group.

Alternatively, you can tweet your thoughts, questions and input with Twitter, making sure you include #virtualwork in your tweet.

How do I join in to hear the interview?

To listen online from 8am UK time, go to http://www.virtualworkingsummit.com/today
To hear the interview, just click on one of the audio players, choosing the one for a slow connection if that’s what you’ve got – otherwise choose the broadband one.  There’s no charge for this method of access. The files will be available until 7am the next day UK time, 2am Eastern.

You can also hear the interview by phone, and if you have signed up to the Virtual Working Summit site you will have received the telephone numbers.  Alternatively, you can get them from the Summit website.

I can’t listen today!  How can I hear the interview?

The Summit proceedings are available to buy on CD.  You’ll get the lot – all the interviews with all the experts.  Penny has primed the audio engineer from New Zealand to prepare the best quality files he can for each CD so that you can enjoy good sound whenever you listen again to the talks, in the car, at home, whenever.

If you would like the CDs, you can find out more here:
http://www.virtualworkingsummit.com/cd

Related posts:

1. Join the Virtual Working Summit! Is your project team scattered all over the place, and most of your meetings done on the phone?  Many project managers lead a virtual team...
2. Watch this space… There’ll be no post tomorrow. Instead, watch out for the Ada Lovelace Day interview: a two-part interview with Dr Sophie Kain.  You’ll get the first...
3. News roundup I was interviewed recently by Pawel Brodzinski, who writes the great Software Project Management blog.  The interview was around project management approaches and forms part...

Can you believe I’ve been blogging for four and a half years?  Time has flown past and in that time I’ve met some amazing people and done some really interesting projects.  Here’s a look back at what we were talking about:

This time last year: Recovering troubled programmes.  The 5-step approach to recovering a programme and its constituent projects.

This time in 2008: Project sponsors.  An FAQ to use with newbie sponsors and tips for what a good sponsor looks like.

This time in 2007:  Helicopter project management.  Zooming in and then pulling back to see the big picture.

This time in 2006:  The sad state of Gypsy Moth IV.  The role of regular status reporting.

If you subscribe by RSS and got an email over the weekend with a ‘Hello World’ post, I’m sorry about that.  I had a problem with a corrupt database file that resulted in having to restore the blog from backup, and that post was automatically (and accidentally) generated during the restore.

Related posts:

1. Status reporting might have helped Gypsy Moth IV You might remember I have written before about the Gypsy Moth IV project. It was a project to restore Sir Francis Chichester’s yacht and sail...
2. The Gipsy Moth IV project The restoration effort has been a significant project: 28 weeks, 9000 hours. Not bad for a boat bought for £1 and a gin and tonic...

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Related posts:

1. Blogging for projects You might remember that earlier in the year I said there would be more on the subject of blogging for project teams.  You can read...
2. Upgrade weekend: a project that didn’t work out so well If you tried to access A Girl’s Guide to Project Management over the weekend, you probably came up with an error message.  Your feed might...

Two new career resources for you today:

Stepping into Project Management

Stepping into Project Management is a new website from Soma Bhattacharya which aims to pair novice and experienced project managers together to form mentoring relationships.

You might know Soma from her blog:  she’s an Assistant Project Manager who started out on her journey to work in project management in 2007.  I met her last year when she was well on the way, but she acknowledges it was a long journey, and that is why she has started this new site.

“I wanted to spread the help I was getting in my career to others, who could benefit from finding mentors and understanding Project Management first hand,” she says.  “It’s a chance to experience instead of just read about theories on becoming a Project Manager.  This site will give you a chance to meet your mentors, see Project Managers who are working on some amazing projects.  Hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to one day come back on to the site as an expert and help others!”

Project managers wishing to take on mentoring roles – however large or small – can sign up as experts.  New and aspiring project managers can sign up as ‘newbies’ and look for help on the site from the experienced project managers.  And it’s free, whether you are a newbie or an expert.

Training grants

The UKRC, the UK government’s lead body for advice and consultancy on gender equality to employers in industry and academia, professional institutes, education and research councils, is offering training grants to help women progress their science, engineering and technology careers.  So if you are an IT project manager, or you would like to be, this could be relevant for you.  Or maybe you are a project manager but would like to move into a more technical role, following in the footsteps of Computer Engineer Barbie, perhaps.

The awards are worth up to £500 and can be to use for a number of eligible courses including higher degree level.  You could put the money towards the course fees, travel to the course or as a contribution towards child care or other care costs that are incurred as a result of attending the training.

See all the eligibility criteria and the application forms online here.

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2. Two resources for jargon Don’t know your ALO from your elbow? Business Balls has a long list of business (and other) acronyms to help you decode all those TLA’s....
3. Blogging your way to a new career I have an article on this topic in Projects@Work this week, so click here if you want to find out more about how surfing the...

I try really hard not to let scope creep impose upon my projects, so why is it so difficult to stop it in the rest of my life?

Despite my efforts to keep my language skills up since moving back to the UK from Paris, my French is rusty to the point where if it was a sword it wouldn’t even cut through jelly.  The latest series of Un Dos Tres is still in it’s cellophane, and surfing the website of Le Monde just highlights how much of my language I have lost.

So, new plan.  I don’t have time to watch French TV (too much CSI, Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries to keep up with) so I will be making better use of my commuting time.

Last weekend I went to London’s quartier français to have a look in the Librarie Française for the next Alex Rider book.  No luck.  Arkange was out of stock – they had the previous one in the series and the next one, but not the one I needed to read next.  Not to be put off from my mission to read more in French, I spent ages looking at the other books by Anthony Horowitz before choosing Devine Qui Vient Tuer (the English title of which is South by Southeast, which bears no resemblance to the French at all).

Hurrah!  I had a book to read on the tube by an author I like.  At the till was a big pile of Stephenie Meyer books, including a translation of her latest, The Host.  I think it is going to be hard to read, given that it is all about the end of the world as we know it, but I picked it up and paid for it anyway.

I was still disappointed that they didn’t have Arkange, and then I noticed another French bookshop across the street (they don’t call it the quartier français for nothing).

They did have Arkange!  So I bought that too.

Forecasted budget:  £7.45
Forecasted deliverables:  One book.

Actual budget:  £23.20
Actual deliverables:  Three books.

Total overspent:  £15.75 or nearly 320%!

On the plus side, my tube journeys are not so boring any longer.  I’m 116 pages into Arkange and Alex has escaped two attempts on his life already, and I just know there will be a couple of others before he saves the world again…

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On Friday I recorded a special edition podcast on one of my favourite topics at the moment: social media in project management with Paul Naybour from Parallel Project Training, Lindsay Scott from Arras People and How to Manage a Camel and Owain Wilson from the Association for Project Management.  We covered:

• What is social media?
• Can it really help deliver successful projects or is it just a fad?
• What are the challenges with social media?

Have a listen and let me know what you think!

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The winner of All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource by the CEO of Journyx was Grace, from Wales.  Well done, Grace.

If you weren’t lucky this time, you can read the review here and buy a copy at Amazon.com, if you’d like. And you still have time to enter this month’s giveaway, to win some business cards.

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Initiating a project is where it all starts in PRINCE2.  This is the phase where you start working out who is going to do what.  You also put in place all the required elements to make sure the project goes smoothly.  The Initiating a Project process is designed to “establish solid foundations” according to the manual.  Essentially, this is the part where you make sure that everyone knows what they need to do and that there is a common agreement on the project objectives and the rationale for undertaking the work.

There are a lot of items to set up in the Initiating a Project process, although if you have managed a project with PRINCE2 before you’ll just need to get out the versions you did for those projects and tweak them to suit this new one.  No sense in reinventing the wheel.

In my opinion, the four most important parts of this process are putting in place the approach to deal with issues and changes as they arise. That means having:

• a Risk Management Strategy
• a Configuration Management Strategy
• a Quality Management Strategy, and;
• a Communications Management Strategy.

For each of these you need to work out who is going to:

• approve the strategy (A)
• review the strategy (R); and
• produce the strategy (P).

The responsibilities for each member of the project team are shown in the table below.  Remember that the Config Management Strategy is where your issues register sits.

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Digité is head quartered in Mountain View, California and was started as a collaboration between two companies.  The objective was to bring out a tool that would help people collaborate and fulfil the needs of a trend they had already spotted back in 2003, that of distributed teams.

“It’s not a PPM tool trying to cover everything under the umbrella,” says Abhinav Praneet, Senior Solution Specialist at Digité Inc.  Instead, Digité puts itself in the Application Lifecycle Management space. “This gives you a complete holistic view. You are doing everything in one workspace and this allows you complete integration and control over what is happening.”

Below is an example of an expense report:

The early versions of Digité were very simplified versions of what is now available.  Praneet explains that in the last few years the user base has grown and the customers have been vocal about what they actually need to do their jobs. Now the company employs 120 people across the world and has offices in Mumbai and Bangalore as well as on-site consultants in Germany and France.

This global approach means that there is a focus on the international.  You can set exchange rates. Cost and price are captured in US dollars but you have the facility to view the figures in Sterling, Euro, Rupees or Brazilian Reais.  However, you can only view calendar entries in the US format of having the month first.  Praneet writes down my suggestion to have the date displayed with the day first.

“As a project manager you don’t have to struggle to create things from scratch,” he says.  Once the administrator has set up the system, a lot of the templates and reports are then available to you with just a click.  “A lot of things of can be pre-planned for you as the project manager,” he explains.  “Or as a team member. Everything can be captured as a template and presented for you, so all you have to do is take it.”  He explains that this means the time to start a new project is reduced, and gives the example of one customer who managed to get their start-up time down by 40%.  “Previous to Digité they were struggling to getting projects started and getting them cracking,” he says.

It’s also LDAP compliant so you can set it up to be accessed through single-sign on if you company has that in place.

The tool has good collaboration features and allows people to come together to work on the same project.  The assignment view means you can see the list of items that you are working on now and those that will be coming your way in the future.  Whether it is a short-term or long-term assignment, or just your attendance at a one-off meeting, all your tasks are together in the Inbox.  Digité pulls together tasks from project plans and meeting minutes, and flags them red if the due date has passed.

“Project workspace is where all the action happens,” Praneet says.  “You don’t have to be part of a project to be a Digité user.”  Stakeholders can be a ghost resource which gives them access to the project workspace.  The project manager can invite individuals to be part of the project team and access the project workspace.

“We have tried to logically segment it into different modules,” Praneet says.  There is a tab-based menu structure, and within each of the tabs there is a left hand menu which shows what you can display in main part of the screen.  He says the idea is to offer granular controls so you can define access rights depending on a person’s input to the project or role.  Tabs cover My Work, Financials, Portfolio, and Process Governance and the whole interface is customisable in terms of graphics and colours.

This shows you the demo interface, with the tabs across the top:

I have seen nicer looking tools, but Digite is feature-rich, even though Praneet is quick to say that the financial functionality is light.  I don’t think so. It allows you to estimate financials, produce budgets, track actuals and cost work for client invoicing.  It also does earned value reporting if you use the timesheet module to gather data from the team.  This is about as much as any average project manager would want from project management software, so it seems fine to me.

Digité certainly has plenty of project functionality.  It covers the different aspects of ALM from requirements management to change management, so it isn’t a pure project management tool.  “Our latest release has Twitter and Google Wave integration,” explains Prannet.  They have a new release coming out at the end of July, although the scope isn’t quite finalised.  There will be some enhancements, I’m told, and this is part of their plan to deliver two major releases a year.

The major downside is the amount of configuration it takes to set it all up properly.  You can only benefit from reports with one click if you have set up template reports already.  A system administrator could spend a long time configuring the interface to make the lives of project managers easier, and could then find out that they don’t use those features anyway.  Praneet says that Digité is so flexible that some users water it right down.  This is great if you are a project sponsor, but not so great for an administrator who has spent a lot of time configuring custom views.  You’d be wise to work out what you are going to use it for and who will be needing what before spending a lot of time setting it up.

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Is your project team scattered all over the place, and most of your meetings done on the phone?  Many project managers lead a virtual team and getting the best out of people and their time can be a challenge when you are not based in the same office.

You can learn how to do work better with a virtual team by joining The Virtual Working Summit, which runs from 28 June through to 9 July 2010.

I’m one of several experts taking part in the first ever Virtual Working Summit. It consists of short, practical interviews over ten days this summer and is hosted by Dr Penny Pullan from Making Projects Work. You can join wherever you are, by phone or web. For more details, see the Summit website.

The Summit will cover:

• Building Trust Remotely
• Navigating Across Cross-Cultural Tripwires
• Tools for Successful Virtual Working
• Communication on global projects
• Sustainability and Virtual Working
• Negotiating Internationally
• Social Media and Virtual Teams (this one is my presentation)
• Conference Calls Made Easy

And there will be other topics as well.

The Summit is free, and the first of its kind.  It will give you access to leading thinkers and practical tips to make you even more effective at working virtually – which has to be useful for project and program managers looking to be more efficient.

If you can’t make it to any or all of the presentations, Penny is recording the proceedings and they’ll be available to buy on CD, so you can listen to what you missed at your leisure.

If you are able to attend, why not register now? I look forward to ‘seeing’ you there!

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You know when you are attending a conference and someone gives you their business card?  For networking purposes you absolutely should have something to give back to them.

To make it easier for you to always have something in your handbag to hand out, I have another great giveaway for you this month.  All Business Cards, which (as the name suggests) do business card printing, have offered three readers each one set of 500 business cards.

They are printed on thick 16 pt card stock, and you can choose from single or double sided cards.  Another choice:  you can pick from a glossy UV finish which apparently “enhances color depth” and “extends card life”, or a matte finish (like my latest favourite nail varnish), or you can opt for uncoated cards.

There’s one small final thing to bear in mind, and that is that shipping costs are only included for winners within the US and Canada.  If you enter the draw and are successful, and you live outside the US and Canada, you’ll have to pay the actual UPS shipping charges (or you could choose not to win and let someone else have the prize).  There is more about shipping on the All Business Cards website, but it isn’t expensive.  And the cards themselves are still free!

Anyway, if you would like to enter, leave a comment to this post (remember to include your email address in the comment form – it doesn’t get published but it will let me get in touch if you win), or drop me a message with your name and email address.  There’s no silly phrase to write this time – I’ll save that for next month’s great book giveaway.

The closing date is 9 July 2010.  Good luck!

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It’s amazingly different working with a US publisher this time round.  My new book, Social Media for Project Managers, is already available on Amazon.co.uk (where my name looks funny) and Amazon.com (where my name looks OK) which seems very early, although I am not complaining.  And the process for reviewing the proofs is also different.

I knew the text would get revised to US English, but I had thought that meant taking out words like ‘analysed’ and replacing them with US equivalents with a z.  I hadn’t taken into account that there are larger linguistic differences.  The funniest that I have found in the proofs so far is a note from the editor about my use of the word ‘senior’.  I use the term ‘senior stakeholders’ all the time, on this blog and in other articles.  Over here, people will interpret that to mean ‘most important, just under the Board or Board level executive stakeholders’.  In the US, it could be interpreted to mean ‘old’!

Chapter 10, Winning over Management, starts with: “Not all senior managers will embrace the opportunity to adopt social media tools to support the project activity in their companies.”  That’s not supposed to be a comment about managers nearing retirement! Many executive stakeholders are mature in years, but in a book about cutting edge technology I can see how there could be misunderstandings. I feel another round of editing coming along…

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Is there are big divide between project management academics and those offering training?  And do project managers need both?  These were some of the questions discussed at a recent BCS event where a panel debated the differences between project management education and training.

The evening started with a vote on the motion:  “Education and training are suitably aligned to meet the development needs of project managers.”  There were:

• 3 in favour (including me)
• 13 against
• 3 abstentions

Why do I agree?  In my opinion, there is a sufficient blend of academic research and training on offer for project managers.  PMI sends out the PM Journal, packed with research.  Even PM Today includes articles based on academic research, properly footnoted.  Books like my own Project Management in the Real World draw heavily on academic research to support and inform practice.  The National Centre for Project Management at Middlesex University is headed up by Prof. Darren Dalcher, a very practical guy who is interested in real-life application of theory.  So in the space of a few minutes, I came up with plenty to justify how project managers have access to education (i.e. academia) and training (i.e. work-based courses) and how one supports the other.

Bob Hughes from the University of Brighton and ISEB presented the portfolio of ISEB qualifications which offers a mix of the practical (Foundation and Practitioner qualifications) and the academic (Higher Education Diploma, which gets 400 candidates a year, mostly from overseas).  “Although I come from an academic background, I’m very unusual for ISEB,” said Bob.  “There’s an ethos of kicking the academics out and leaving it to the practitioners.”  That’s something that could probably be said of other practitioner-led organisations as well, and doesn’t bode well for any alignment between academia and practitioners.  Could this be a disconnect I have never seen before?

Bob spoke about SFIA, the model that tries to rate professional competence.  “It’s very different to aligning that to the outcome of a training course,” he said.  “We don’t believe at all that if you do a multiple choice exam you come out a competent project manager.”  I agree with this, and I think it adds another level to the discussion about education and training – that of experience.  I would argue that project managers develop through experience as well as through education and training opportunities.

Melanie Franklin, CEO of Maven Training, put the case that both education and training are required to equip project managers.  She argued that education “builds the mind” and training “builds skills.”  Understanding the business context is essential for project managers and this is a product of education: the ability to understand the world in which your skills and experience are being used and apply critical thinking.  Capability is a product of training: a blend of competence and process.  “If we specifically need to do x,” she said, “we will train in x.”

She presented a version of Kolb’s learning cycle, and explained that context, capability, motivation and performance equal capacity.  And what businesses need is the capacity to deliver projects.   Education and training, she said, are about valuing people.  Developing people is a way to motivate them.  “I don’t think we can have one without the other,” she explained.  “But just because we have people with qualifications doesn’t mean we have greater capacity.”

“In this country there is a great resentment of book learning,” said Miles Shepherd.  “If the academic is rejected, how can project management be a profession?  It is simply a trade, like gas fitting.”  He said that we still need education, and we still need training.  “I’m not too sure how we’re aligned,” he added.

During the Q&A we discussed where some of these challenges come from, and the point was made that employers have a lot to answer for.  Employers want ‘useful’ people, not those with an MSc, so there is a bias towards collecting training courses as proof of usefulness.  The less the employer has to teach a new starter, the better.

At the end of the evening we had another vote – and guess what?  The results were exactly the same.  However, some people, including myself, had changed their position.  I chose to abstain in the second vote.  Each of the panelists had presented their own positions, but I didn’t feel that anyone had strongly argued for or against the debate topic, and some of the panelists had admitted to taking different interpretations of the question which I felt made it difficult to vote one way or the other based on what I had heard.  I still believe that education and training are aligned in the project management arena.  I still believe they both serve the development needs of project managers.  What do you think?

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@task announced its new Stream platform last month at the annual user conference.  Stream “combines the power of social networking with the structure of project management,” says the press release. “Stream empowers teams, increasing their acceptance of, and participation in, the project management process. With Stream, front-line conversational information and commitments flow upward, enabling greater accuracy in projections and more well-informed decision making.”

I’m sure many people read the press release and thought this was another company jumping on the social media bandwagon, but when I spoke to Adam Michaelson, product manager at @task, he told a different story.

“About one and a half years ago we came to a point where we felt like we were at relative parity with the rest of the industry in relation to features, planning resources, portfolio management and so on,” he said.  “We saw a big problem that we think everyone realises but no one addressing – the adoption of enterprise project management tools.  These are great for planning but unless you have everyone engaged in entering in the data, all the planning and recording tools not as powerful as they could be.”

@task realised that this was one of the main drawbacks with enterprise project management software for project and portfolio management.  If you don’t put the data in, the reports out aren’t worth having.  And who wants to type numbers in to a software tool?  It’s not an easy thing to get project resources to do, as they don’t get any personal value out of it.

“We wanted to address that problem,” Michaelson continues.  “We were also seeing a disconnect between management and those people in the trenches. Not because of a particular industry-standard approach to project management, more because of a culture that demonstrates lack of trust, lack of communication, and project teams not executing as well as they could be because of lack of unity.”

@task did a lot of research with customers and non-customers regarding how project management software was used in the workplace and then they started working on solutions to address those problems.  “For the past year we’ve been working on this design and taking it back to customers to get feedback,” Michaelson says.  “There are lots of different tools emerging right now that incorporate elements of social media.  That was really not our objective – it wasn’t about getting in Twitter-style conversations or Facebook status updates, it was all about getting engagement with the tool.  It turned out that we incorporated several elements that you will find feel familiar.”

He’s right – the changes to @task really do look like they have social media roots.  It’s a very conversational interface, where users can post updates, ask questions, comment on each other’s progress and generally interact without ever having to leave the project management software.

Everything is within a few clicks.  “Enterprise project management tools do not have reputation for being very friendly,” Michaelson says.  @task prompts the user for qualitative information and asks them to commit to a date by which the task will be done. “Dates are set by humans not a system,” Michaelson says.  They can change the date, but any change is an extra data point for the project manager, not a committed change.  By changing the date, a note goes to the project manager who can decide whether or not to accept the new date for the schedule.  Neatly, the dates show up as green or red depending on whether they are before or after the delivery date, and the Gantt chart clearly shows the impact of slippage on the critical path.

“We’re not asking for percent complete,” says Michaelson, “this is seen as arbitrary. We wanted to catch something more earned value-centric, so we are asking for hours to complete now.”  This gives a more rounded picture and feeds into the other financial management features in @task.

The point of all this interaction and commitment from the team and “engagement” is partly to encourage conversation about changing dates and project slippage before it really becomes a problem for the project.  This, and the other features around project and team member status, could be really useful tools for the project manager.

@task will begin a limited beta release of Stream this summer and plan to have the product generally available in 2010.  It will be free to current customers, so they will have a large user base to provide feedback as to whether these features actually make a difference to the teams using it.  “We’ve had a lot of positive feedback,” says Michaelson.  “The past six months have been mostly validation with customers.  The overwhelming response has been very positive. We’ve been cautiously optimistic, and we wondered if we were talking to the wrong people.”  @task went to show the new improvements to some not-so-friendly project management teams and “really didn’t get too many negative reviews.”

If even the people who don’t like your software like your software, you must be on to something good.

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Congratulations to Sue from Ontario, Canada, who is the winner of a copy of Ann Marie Sabath’s Business Etiquette: 101 Ways to Conduct Business With Charm & Savvy.

If you’d like to find out more about how to do business without offending anyone, there will be a book review of Business Etiquette here in August, during the annual Summer of Books event.  Can you believe it is practically summer already?

I think Sue is our first winner from Canada.  Well done, your book is in the post.

You still have time to enter this month’s giveaway to win a copy of  All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource by of Curt Finch, CEO of Journyx.  Click here to find out how to enter.

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5pm is web-based, on demand project management software.  It looks lovely and the user interface is intuitive.  It’s very easy to get going and the help feature is good if you get stuck (they have videos and a blog which covers new features and useful info like downtime).

The main downside I could see is the lack of complexity in the available features.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are managing small or medium projects, and only need the basic functionality.  Too much complexity can confuse team members who are not used to the ways of projects as well.  5pm adds new tasks above the old tasks, which personally I don’t like, especially when you set the start date to be later than the tasks below.  Call me old fashioned, but my mind works down a to do list, not up.  However, it is very easy to drag and drop the tasks into the right order – a brand new feature, recently released – and you can also drag and drop to make one task a sub-task of another, which is a tidy way to manage task linking.  They are not dynamic dependencies though – you can make a sub-task finish before the parent task is finished, which isn’t really a dependency.  You have to set start-to-finish, finish-to-start and other dependencies by fixing the dates.

This is what the resulting Gantt looks like.  I don’t know why Gather Requirements is at the bottom.  It’s at the top of the list in the task view, and on the Gantt I couldn’t drag and drop it.  I expect this is a feature that I just haven’t yet quite worked out how to use.

When you mark a task as done it changes to green, which is nice.

It flags new and updated tasks, which is a handy visual way to show what’s changed since the last time – particularly useful for other team members or to monitor how things are progressing.  When your users aren’t all in the same room they can find it difficult to keep up to date, which is something the 5pm development team know all about.  On their blog they say:

As a team split between two continents, separated by timezones and speaking a total of four different languages, we are striving to get the most out of our work time. So do teams all across the world, every work day. This blog is about sharing this experience.

Email notification is a good feature, and I like the fact that you can upload files and make the 5pm interface a single point of reference for your project team.  You can create tasks from emails, by adding a 5pm email address in copy when you send it.  It also integrates with Outlook so you can export calendar items.  The interface gives you the ability to manage multiple projects, and you can hide the ones that are done.

I didn’t use the time tracker widget but I like the idea of it, and given that timesheets are such an onerous task this could make unwilling trackers much more likely to record their time.  You can see a time report as well, although as with anything the accuracy depends on the data input.

There’s a longer and more detailed review here on PM Karma.  You can sign up for a free 14 day trial if you want to find out if it’s for you.

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