There is no question that issue management is a critical process for project management and for any organization, for that matter.  And, of course, doing it right is just as important.  After all, if it doesn’t serve your needs, doesn’t provide meaningful reporting, and doesn’t all for the proper identification, oversight and ongoing management of issues then it isn’t going to provide much value to your organization and it won’t get used.

You could plan forever

So should we take months designing the right issue management platform to make sure it’s right the first time and usable forever?  No….absolutely not.  It’s like couples who decide to wait till they have enough money to start a family, or a big enough house or just the right jobs.  Their youth passes them by and they end up with no children at all, no family and no grandchildren and so on.  And they get bored looking at each other 20 years later. 

Don’t wait for perfection

They key is, you have to start somewhere.  No one gets it right the first time.  Projects ‘fail’ more than 50% of the time, but that doesn’t mean a usable solution hasn’t been implemented.  It means they went over budget, or over the timeframe for implementation, or something was out of whack at deployment that was probably fixed later.  A majority of projects aren’t a complete success at deployment…but most get the job done and with some post deployment tweaking they are successful or at least basically delivered the anticipated outcome.

The same is true for an issue management platform.  Issues need tracked…period.  It’s imperative that you don’t miss critical windows of issue management and issue tracking on key projects just because you’re trying to build or select the perfect tracking system.  The key is to hold some planning meetings to identify what the major issue elements are that need to be tracked and reported on for your organization and develop or buy something that will meet those requirements – at least as much as possible.  You can tweak it later because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get it completely right the first time.  Despite what my first manager told me about his first software application, no code was ever written error-free the first time, no project was implemented issue-free from beginning to end, and no tracking platform has ever been developed that will do everything you need it to do right out of the gate.  Design it to capture what you think you need today and in the near future, and plan to revisit those needs along the way.  Assume that it will need to grow and flex with your organization’s needs.  Don’t wait to start with perfection – or you will never get started and you’ll miss tracking critical issues on your early projects.

For issue management and project tracking on your ongoing engagements, check out Gemini.  Gemini uses understandable and consistent industry-specific terminology to facilitate the most collaborative situation possible for everyone involved on the project.  Gemini can meet all of your task management needs for your organization.

When you’re thinking project management practices, what comes to mind?  Are these things you do when the CEO is watching?  Things you do if you’re part of a project management office (PMO)?  Things you only do if you’re running a $1+ million engagement? 

I hope not…but sadly it is an easy trap to fit in to.  When you’re running a two-month, $10,000 project, you have to admit that it’s hard to get into the details of applying best practices to your project...especially if you have four or five other projects happening at the same time.  Let’s say, you’re running a large JD Edwards ERP solution implementation with significant executive management buy-in and oversight at the same time you’re leading an effort to upgrade the website of an internal business unit in your organization.  Which one gets the most attention?  Which one might fall through the cracks?  Yes, the popular thought would be to apply best practices to the large project and do as little as possible for the internal customer, right? 

Well, in a true best practices organization it really can’t work that way…and it shouldn’t.  Not if you’re really trying to build a consistent PM methodology and have repeatable practices and processes that lead to ongoing success.  You can make those processes scalable – certainly.  You don’t have to create a 30-page communication plan for a $10,000 project…2-3 pages will probably do it.  But still do it.  So, even for the small stuff, be sure to:

Kick the project off right.  No matter how big or small the project, conduct a formal kickoff session, even if it’s a short one for those extremely small projects.  Don’t blow this off – it’s a bad way to start any project off.  Start off doing it right and be thorough about it – it sets a nice example for the project team because I’m sure you want them operating at the top of their game for every size project, right?

Conduct weekly status meetings.  Always product a weekly status report and revised project schedule and always…always conduct a weekly status call or meeting with the customer.  It doesn’t matter if it’s just a five-minute phone call some weeks, but be sure to do it. The minute you start letting yourself and others skip it or cancel it, is the minute the project may start to slip away.  And I don’t care how small the project may be, the customer can still get frustrated.

Keep the customer engaged.  Keep tasks assigned to the customer throughout the engagement even if it’s a small project and they seem like meaningless or ‘filler’ tasks.  Keeping things assigned to them forces them to report on them and forces their attendance on a weekly status call.  Trust me, this one is important.

Forecast and reforecast dollars and resources.  Finally, don’t forget to review the resource usage and upcoming needs weekly as well as the budget actuals and forecast.  It’s easy to fix and get back on track if you stray a little as long as you’re watching it weekly.  Don’t think that just because the budget is very small that it’s ok to just let it go.  It’s not.  If you can keep a project within budget by watching resource usage and dollars expended, then do so…it means the difference between project success and project failure.

Privilege management is often at the very core of IT security for most companies and also a major stress point for most IT directors and CIOs.  It doesn’t come easy, and if it’s not carried out right…or carefully…major security breaches or unintentional security incidences can result.

Indeed, careful control of administrator rights as well is at the very foundation of IT security and when users have widespread administrator rights, this opens the network to a variety of security risks.  This can be easily mitigated because users do not need to have full administrator rights to accomplish daily tasks, and privileged users should have restricted access to tasks related to their role/responsibilities only.  What an IT group needs is an product that can control end user and privileged user rights for applications and systems which require elevated permissions.  Viewfinity can do just that.  Let’s examine further…

The Viewfinity Privilege Management Suite

Viewfinity Privilege Management offers granular-level control for managing least privilege environments by providing elevation of privileges for applications and to reduce and control permissions for privileged users. Privilege control for data extends privilege management policies to control permissions by elevating or reducing privileges and permissions on folders, files and shares.

The Viewfinity Privilege Management Suite provides regulation of administrator rights via these critical features:   

• Application Blocking/Whitelisting
• Privilege elevation, including self-elevation or workflow approval
• Automated policy creation, management and intelligent policy aggregation
• Automated analysis to determine user needs and prepare the environment
• Readiness indicator determines optimal point to remove administrator rights
• Compliance, Audit trail, policy validation reporting and privileged account activity auditing
• Windows UAC Management and UAC Auditing Reports
• Control permissions for data by elevating or reducing privileges on folders, files & shares
• Mobile Workforce Support

Interested in trying it out?  Signup here for an evaluation trial, go here for a demo, or contact Viewfinity for more information.

Comindware is a leader in workflow and task management software.  The real breakthrough – the real difference maker for Comindware – is in the unprecedented flexibility and usability that it brings to an organization. Many products like Comindware are based on relational databases.  Comindware, however, bases theirs on something different – something they call ElasticData.  ElasticData is ultra-flexible and gives your organization and workgroups unmatched flexibility for automating and managing workflow processes for just about any workgroup activity.  This can include tasks, help desk tickets, software bugs, requests, claims, documents, issues and, well…just about anything else you can think of.

With ElasticData, you can start with minimal formalization of workflow processes and then modify them later on-the-fly. Usually you end up being forced to modify your needs to fit the software.  With ElasticData, that is no longer the case – this workflow process management software adapts so easily to your evolving needs and flexes to how you need it to work in your organization.

ElasticData is just one key feature of the Comindware product experience.  I’ve been amazed with the Comindware product and the functionality it brings to the workflow and task management marketplace.  Contact Comindware for more info or you can elect to try it for 30 days.

EPM Live is a global leader in the development and deployment of enterprise Sharepoint Project and Work Management solutions.  I personally had no knowledge of their offerings until I connected with them through social media and decided to investigate their different products.  What I learned through discussions with a few key EPM Live resources and the information they provided is that they have, in fact, worked with thousands of organizations deploying customized project management and work management solutions in the enterprise. 

Built seamlessly within one of the fastest growing enterprise tools on the market – Microsoft Sharepoint – EPM Live leverages tools you likely already know or are familiar with in order to enhance your team’s collaboration experience.  Because project teams in different organizations – or even in different parts of the same organization – work differently, EPM Live offers the flexibility to incorporate different workflows and match up well with the chosen processes and methodologies within the specific work units of an organization.

EPM Live is, in fact, a full-featured product offering three editions: ProjectEngine, WorkEngine, and PortfolioEngine.  The target audience, or user-base, for each is probably evident just by their names and we’ll be examining each of these as well as more details on the EPM Live solutions and capabilities as a whole in upcoming overviews. 

For more information on EPM Live, check out their site or signup for a 30-day trial on one or more of their enterprise solutions.

Think workflow management?  What comes to mind?  Wikipedia defines a workflow management system as this…

“A workflow management system is a computer system that manages and defines a series of tasks within an organization to produce a final outcome or outcomes. Workflow management systems allow the user to define different workflows for different types of jobs or processes.”

Blah, blah, blah.  Sounds mundane and it is.  Let’s consider what we should be able to expect now, in 2012, from workflow management software.  It should be web-based. It should be easy to use.  It should be full-featured, with detailed reporting capabilities.  It should be able to track and manage issues on your projects.  It should allow for team collaboration.  It should have integrated task management to keep tabs on the efforts going on within your project and organization.  In my opinion, it should be something like Comindware Tracker. 

Consider this…

Comindware Tracker is a cutting edge workflow management and issue tracking system that integrates task management and provides the collaboration features that managers and project managers need on detailed work engagements.  Does it work?  Yes.  I downloaded the free trial and tested it out on a recent consulting engagement for a remote client of mine.  I was able to track issues efficiently and smoothy, I was able to assign and monitor tasks and progress and my team was able to easily collaborate with me and with each other even though we were geographically dispersed across the US.  Through the collaborations features – which we found especially useful - we were able to easily share files and conduct discussions thus speeding decision-making efforts, deliverable reviews and approval efforts, and the review and proactive efforts on the ongoing issues on the project.

I highly recommend Comindware, but if you’re not convinced, try it for 30 days.

There are literally thousands of Project Management tools on the market. THOUSANDS. While so many choices may seem like a dream, it can quickly become a nightmare. Each product comes with its own methodology, UI, structure, and functionality which makes finding, learning and using the ideal one for your project and team difficult.

It’s also why most people, after they search for their ideal purpose-built tool, return to old standby: the trusty spreadsheet.

Outside of power users who rely on tools such as Microsoft Project, spreadsheets are the dominant tool of choice (along with email) for coordinating work, gathering information, and updating tasks within teams. They're the instinctive ‘go-to’ tool because they're seemingly free, infinitely flexible to 'set up your way', and don't require IT involvement or approval.

If you send a spreadsheet to a colleague, client, or partner to edit or review, you’re confident he or she will be able to understand and update the work. But Project is too complicated - and expensive - for an extended team or clients to access directly. (If you’ve ever had to print Gantts or email PDFs, you know what I’m talking about.)

Look around your company. If you’re like most, the majority of your coworkers are using spreadsheets to manage all types of work -- projects, tasks, simple to-do lists, and ongoing programs. And, for the most part they work pretty well...

Until they don’t.

They don’t work when it comes to real-time collaboration with teams, adding automated workflows, finding out who’s made changes (and when), or housing related information like documents, graphics or PDFs. Plus, it gets complicated establishing cross-project dependencies, automating workflows, integrating schedules with your calendar - to name a few issues.

If you’ve ever tried to quickly roll up several spreadsheets into one master sheet with data automatically pulled from other sheets, or wanted dates on one sheet to drive a dependency on another, you’ve probably experienced “spreadsheet hell.” Linking cells across sheets is often challenging – and maddening. Links get broken when the source sheet is moved from the designated directory, and trying to figure out the source of a value, or whether other sheets reference data you are about to change, creates uncertainty and errors.

When we founded Smartsheet, we decided to keep what works about the spreadsheet, but fix the problems. It turns out that beyond data and number crunching, there hasn't been much fundamental innovation in spreadsheets in 20 years.  Even as the cloud has fundamentally changed the nature of enterprise apps, spreadsheet providers haven't responded. (“Why” they haven’t responded is worthy of a whole other post.)

Think of Smartsheet as a foundational SaaS app for managing work -- blending the most widely used and valued features of Project, SharePoint and Excel, with the collaboration capabilities of the cloud. Because it can be used to manage everything -- projects, marketing campaigns, HR onboarding, sales pipelines, manufacturing processes, and more -- it’s earned a seat at the table when companies evaluate productivity tools to deploy across the organization.

All within a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, you have the ability to attach files, view project dates in calendar or Gantt chart view, share the entire sheet or send individual rows to others via email to get updates, link cells across sheets, automate workflows and establish conditional formatting rules. It’s the tool that, as a former CEO of a global enterprise, I wish my teams had been able to use to manage work.

We’re betting the world doesn’t need another project management tool. It just needs to take what already works, and make it work better. We think we’re on the right track with our fresh alternative for managing work. Let us know what you think.

About the Author 

Brent Frei is the founder and executive chairman of Smartsheet.com. Previously he served as CEO and co-founder of Onyx Software Corporation and has also held roles at Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft and Motorola. He can be reached at brent.frei@smartsheet.com and you can read more about his thoughts at his blog at http://www.smartsheet.com/blogs/

As with any project, program, methodology, or system the terminology you and your team use must be consistent in order to breed understanding and productivity.  Have you ever gone to work for a new organization or taken on a project in a new industry and wished someone had published a glossary of terminology and acronyms?  I know I have…I’ve even go so far as to create my own along the way and offered to share them with whoever was interested...and there was always interest because there were always those who didn’t know all the terminology but figured they should because they had been there so long and were afraid to admit it.  But if the new guy is offering…they’re happy to take it!  Glad I could help….

Back to the issue management and project management concept.  Think in terms of solving issues.  When referring to elements of an application, should they be stated in terms of “modules” or “components”? Do those two terms mean the same thing to you? Do they mean the same thing to everyone?  In some organizations design and development are broken out while in others the term ‘development’ covers the entire process after requirements till user acceptance testing. And what about change management?  Does that cover change orders only or configuration management only or both? Could these terms be confused leading to poor issue management and resolution that happens in a less than timely manner?  Definitely.  One misstep, one bad assumption on the meaning of a certain terminology can potentially end up causing a huge problem on any given project at any given time.

Consistency and understanding is key

The key is that when we’re managing issues and assigning issue management like tasks on a project – giving full oversight and ownership of the management, work, and resolution of the issues to individual team members, we have to be certain we’re speaking a common language.  I’ve always said that efficient and effective communication is Job One for the project manager. Without it, too many things can be misinterpreted, too many things could fall through the cracks, team members can get off task and misaligned with the goals of the project and organization, and customers can lose confidence in the delivery teams ability to actually deliver.  Common ground must be established in order to ensure that everyone is working on a level playing field and that issues are being effectively managed and resolved toward the proper successful end goal of the solution you are trying to deliver.

It is critical that an organization adopt readily understood and consistent terminology for their company and for the projects that happen in their organization.  And it is also the project manager’s job to ensure that the consistent terminology is in place prior to the start of the project.  Indeed, as part of any project risk management process, the concept of identifying potential terminology issues lies with the project manager and the entire project team (and customer) to sort out at the beginning of the engagement and to closely monitor throughout the lifecycle of the project.

For issue management and project tracking on your ongoing engagements, check out Gemini.  Gemini uses understandable and consistent industry-specific terminology to facilitate the most collaborative situation possible for everyone involved on the project.  Gemini can meet all of your task management needs for your organization.

Yes, this is an odd one.  I'm no fan of rap.  I'm no fan of Tupac, dead or alive.  And I certainly don't approve of his lyrics.  However, his recent post-mortem appearance (lyric/language content warning) rapping two songs - including one with Snoop Dogg - at the Coachella music festival in California a few days ago was nothing short of amazing.  First described as a hologram costing millions of dollars it turns out it was actually a $400,000 CGI (computer-generated imagery).  Still, it was cool, and it got me thinking.

Actually, I've had ideas in my head for a long time as to where holographic images will be taking us in the future.  For sports fans like me, I believe that we're not far from taking sports to the 3D level in our homes...actually playing in our homes.  In the near future, I believe we'll have projected 3D NFL football games, MLB baseball games, and NBA basketball games playing before our very eyes on tabletops, large game room floors, etc....all scaled to fit the locale with amazing clarity.  Watching LeBron James dunk right in front of you in your own home in 3D is closer than you think.

That said, this concept can be used to make business drastically greener.  And as a project manager who has routinely traveled with large teams to customer sites for expensive status meetings, I can tell you that the use of this technology - in 'live' mode, not dead Tupac mode - can mean no one has to travel anywhere.  A room set up at each site with the right technology will mean status meeting participants can interact personally with each other - actually with their counterparts hologram or image - without ever getting on a plane.  The startup costs will be a little steep I'm sure, but once in place the savings will be enormous and the reduction in an organization's carbon footprint will be huge.  Think about it....

by Josh Yeager, Swift Software

Our development team uses an “agile” software process, which means that we work in a series of two-week plan->code->test->polish iterations. As we complete each iteration, we install a small new feature set on our internal production server for alpha testing. Each iteration completes a small portion of the overall development plan. After two to ten iterations, a whole set of features that have passed QA are designated as complete, and we build a final release and announce it to our customers.

Our JobTraQ system manages this process for us in several ways. First, it manages our feature wishlist and roadmap. We have a parent project called “Future”, which contains subprojects that stage all of our feature ideas, enhancements, and strategic goals that are not on our immediate roadmap. A second project is called “Planning Queue”, and that project contains all of the tasks and projects that we plan to complete in the next two releases. We simply drag and drop the appropriate features into this “Planning Queue” project as we approach the iteration they will be developed in.  Over time, our product management team prioritizes these items, plans their details, and reviews them with the development team to ensure they are technically sound. We work together to refine the time estimates and identify possible problems, so that all the basic details are decided by the time we’re ready to start working on each task.

Second, JobTraQ manages our iterations. At the start of each iteration, the development team sits down and pulls the top items from the planning queue into a new project for the iteration. They select a set of tasks that can be completed within a two-week iteration, and then they plan those tasks in detail. All of the decisions and designs that they create are recorded in the JobTraQ tasks. Then, throughout the iteration, they track their progress and time spent in those tasks, record notes about their designs and code, and close the tasks when they are complete. To help usall stay coordinated, JobTraQ sends email notifications to the team when tasks are updated and closed, and we have a “burn-up” chart report that is sent to the team every day to compare our closed tasks to our goal.

Example Burn Up Chart

The third thing that JobTraQ manages is customer support. When a new email request comes in, we use the new beta version of our two-way email processing feature to automatically create a task for the request and log the time that it came in. Then, as our support team and the customer reply to each email, all of the replies are logged in that task. Screenshots or attached files are also extracted from the emails and attached to the task. When the issue is resolved, the task is closed. Along the way, JobTraQ email notifications inform the team about the state of the active support cases, and the support task list reminds us about support requests that have not been resolved and questions that the customer has not replied to in a while. These tools help us ensure that no customer request is forgotten or mishandled. We use the same process for support phone calls, although we have to update JobTraQ manually after each call.

The common thread among all three of these processes is that JobTraQ holds all of the information about our plans and our current work, as well as the status and progress of the tasks that we are working on. As a result, we almost never lose track of a project or request. We don’t forget about our bigger plans while we’re working on the details. And we can predict and evaluate our development timelines, support responsiveness, and team productivity. All these benefits are extremely helpful to me as the product leader and to the individuals and teams that work on our product.

In future posts, we will be discussing the ways that we use JobTraQ to manage other parts of our business, and we may even highlight some of our customers’ processes if anyone is interested in sharing. As always, if you have any questions, please comment below.

If you are in need of a full-featured Task Management software tool - I recommend you check out JobTraQ.  Take a tour of the product or request a demo.  Trust me - it will be time well spent. - Brad Egeland