It’s nice when everyone is thinking the same way – or at least it seems that way. It’s nice when you’re leading a team and everyone agrees with what you’re saying – with all of the decisions you’re making – or at least it seems that way. Then one day you wake up and realize that everyone is acting like zombies and saying ‘yes’ just to move forward – maybe because they’re too busy…maybe because they don’t feel the ownership of the project. Whatever the reason, the project then becomes scary….real scary.

I think deep down we all really know that having all ‘yes’ men on our projects would be a bad thing – no one questioning your actions or that next big decision. No one with a thought or mind of their own. It’s all you and no one is offering any input. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a comfort zone for me.

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The Problem I got used to working with Outlook and wouldn’t like to change it. I use it to assign and track and manage outlook tasks, share my calendar, exchange work files, and to send, receive and discuss tasks in emails. It’s a great collaborative system yet I would like to get more out of it. I want it to be coupled with a workflow software. Processes behind my tasks will coordinate team work while I am not going to have to switch between applications to see my full to-do list. My personal tasks and team workflow tasks will be synchronized together in one Outlook list of tasks. To make it fully collaborative, I’d like to have comments tread for each working task, too.

The Solution Comindware Tracker Outlook Add-in is a free Outlook extension that you can get right from your Comindware Tracker account. It will put Comindware Tracker workflow system behind your Outlook. It will be light and invisible. And it will give you the power of collaborating on workflows and tasks with your team directly from your Outlook.

How Will It Work? After you have the Comindware Add-In up and running, your Outlook list of tasks still looks like a list of tasks:

The difference is hidden behind the scenes: now your Outlook is coupled and synchronized with Comindware Tracker. Tasks from Comindware Tracker workflows automatically go to your Outlook list, and you can enjoy all the advantages of collaborative workflow tasks:

1. Workflow enables you to collaborate in team. It divides a process into steps and gives a task to the responsible at each step. As it is performed automatically by Comindware Tracker, you won’t need to write an email to your co-worker saying that your part of work has been accomplished, give details and attach documents: you save it together with your task and then it automatically goes to the next on your team, with all the content and the context.

2. Larger functionality for your tasks:

• processes behind workflow tasks,
• in progress\deferred status with play\pause buttons,
• collaborative thread,
• files versioning, hierarchy of tasks and subtasks,
• synchronization between Outlook and Comindware Tracker lists of tasks.

3. All in one: emails, calendar, team collaboration, tasks, attachments, workflow. You don’t need to switch between solutions, and all of the tasks and their content are synchronized automatically between solutions.

4. It’s powerful. Comindware Outlook Add-in is spared from any excessive features which makes it really light, so that it will not slow your MS Outlook by any means: it’s really quick.

5. You don’t need to learn anything new to work with Comindware Tracker through Outlook. The ribbon interface is already familiar to you, and you only get much larger functionality.

How Can I Get It?

The Comindware Outlook Add-in goes in the package with Comindware Tracker, and it’s free for Comindware Tracker users. Log in to your account in Comindware Tracker and hit the Menu tab. You will see the button that will get Comindware Outlook Add-In installed on your computer. You can find out more about the add-in installation here:

Try it now, it’s free!

Comindware Tracker and Microsoft Outlook are tightly integrated with the help of Comindware Outlook Add-in. Other third party applications can be integrated with Comindware Tracker through web-based API. Let’s take an example of Comindware Tracker integration with SalesForce: this will be the subject of our next topic.

Anastasia Chumakova is Product Marketing Analyst at Comindware.  She currently explores online process management product development trends, contributes to www.comindware.com and provides tips for better use of Comindware Tracker and online work management solutions.  Stay in touch with Comindware: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

Going “paperless.”  Going “green.”  Efficiently handling our project and program documents or any key documents in our organization that need to be accessed on a regular basis and are considered of any importance. These are all key buzzwords or concepts in IT right now and make for just plain smart business.  I know I’ve personally worked in many organizations where we have suffered miserably from not having a central, reliable repository for our key documents.  What’s more, I’ve led $30 million dollar government programs where access to documents we’ve processed was critical both during the contract and at program retirement time, but it was often a very painful process to locate documents.  And the government would pay our organization more than $100,000 to archive these key documents to federal records storage facilities at contract closure time and to  setup systems that they could use later on to locate specific archived documents should a need arise.  $100,000.  As taxpayers, that’s your money and mine.

Enter FileHold.  I’ve not personally used FileHold.  However, I ran across their site and thought their product was definitely worthy of inclusion on this blog and relevant to problems that so many organizations face.  And, I’ve discussed my federal project dilemma mentioned above with the president of FileHold and their product could indeed have provided us with a configurable system for archival and retrieval at a fraction of the cost of what the government spent.  Hindsight is 20-20.

What is FileHold?

FileHold document management software system is easy to install, and easy to use. The software licensing, implementation and support packages are affordable for small to large organizations.

FileHold can convert intellectual property into a secure organized electronic library. The software reduces time taken searching for information, decreases paper storage costs, while increasing worker collaboration and workflow efficiency across the entire organization. “Go Paperless”, “Go Green” with FileHold document management software. 

FileHold’s document management software solution includes the following:

• Document workflow software
• Records management software (with customizable indexing, searching and several levels of security built-in)
• Document scanning software (plus it supports many popular 3rd party document scanning software products)

Standard document management features include:

• Version Control

• Document Tagging or Metadata Capture

• User Roles and Security

• Searching

• Audit Logging and Tracking

• Document Linking

• Microsoft Office Integration

• Calendar

• E-forms
• Web Access... and more

Optional document management features include:

• Workflow

• Microsoft Active Directory Integration

• Microsoft SharePoint Integration

• FastFind

• Print-to-FileHold

• Electronic Signature Integration

• Redaction

• AutoCAD and Document Viewers

• Guest Account Users

• Web Portal... and more!

FileHold Express is a document management system priced for small business, departments, or big companies who want to go paperless by starting small.  It is designed and priced for business with up to 20 users.  FileHold Enterprise is the Big Data and provides the true fast track to the Paperless Office. Based on the Microsoft Service Oriented Architecture that can scale to support very large numbers of users and millions of documents.

If interested, you can signup for one of their upcoming free webinars, signup for a free trial on their demonstration server or a full trial installation on your server, or take a video tour of the product.

The next in my series of PM and project related tools that I’ve run across is Ganttic.  Starting out as a beta resource planning software under a different name in 2008, the offering has evolved into Ganttic that is being adopted by organizations around the world who are looking for affordable planning and resource scheduling software with a simple, web-based, visual planning approach.

According to the press kit Ganttic is a web-based, multi-resource scheduling and multi-project planning software.  Successfully completed projects generate your profits. Poorly managed resources take away those profits. Ganttic has combined resource scheduling and project management into one handy application. Ganttic users can manage their resources visually and see their allocation by resource groups or by projects.

You can create resource schedules as simple drawings. The system will turn those drawings into manageable data, but you can still manage it on your simple drawing. It significantly lowers your time and cost for implementation.

Organization's resources, like staff members, production lines, vehicles, facilities, etc., are the main bearers of costs. Therefore careful managing of them is crucial for any business.

Who is Ganttic’s target user?

Ganttic is targeted for any business that manages multiple resources. Service providers, manufacturers, design agencies, car/equipment/facilities rentals, translator bureaus, educational institutes, architect firms, hotels, construction companies and more.

What makes Ganttic stand out?

• Visual approach to resource scheduling
  
• Simple drag & drop rescheduling
  
• Multi-project management
  
• Almost no learning curve for team members
  
• User rights system with reasonable number of configuration options.
  
• Custom data fields and custom reports
  
• Automatic logbooks of all changes made in your plan.
  
• Flexible and affordable pricing.
  

Free trial signup

Ganttic invites potential buyers to take a tour of the product.  You can also signup for a free 30-day trial on their pricing page by entering an email address – no credit card required.  Ganttic offers a free version that allows up to 10 users for your organization.  Beyond 10 users, an organization will need to pay for the PRO version as a small monthly fee.

If you’re running projects in a project services organization as many project managers are, then chances are you’re running several projects at a time. For me, that’s usually five or six sizeable projects, with possibly some smaller engagements in process as well. The key is to handle all this work without losing control of the schedule in your online project management solution…without mismanaging your team, your project and your customer. And without losing your mind in the process. I realize we often don’t have much control over when our projects kickoff and when they hit critical phases, but since the project schedule is often something we create, then we often can at least try to create a schedule that will mesh well with the other projects we’re running.

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There are no cut and dried ‘best practices’ – everyone has their own opinion or list of best practices and what we do and how we do these things can vary from project to project depending on the project visibility, customer needs, organizational requirements, and definitely budget. But there are some general ‘best practices’ that – for me at least – have stood out as common threads on most of my projects over the years.

In Part 1 of this two part series on project management best practices we discussed project planning, project communication, and risk and issue management. In this Part 2, I’d like to discuss two more of my best practices concepts – budget management and project scope management.

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While virtualization offers many benefits, it also makes performance management harder than before. Often this is attributable to the fact that in a virtualized environment it can become much harder to pinpoint the underlying cause of a performance issue and the owners of each service layer in your IT organization may actually ‘see’ their area of oversight as performing as expected.  Virtualization, coupled with a dynamic environment – meaning VMs can be moving dynamically from one physical machine to another – can make the diagnosis of the underlying issue extremely difficult.  That’s why a powerful dashboard and diagnostic tool with a 360˚ view like the one eG Innovations offers is critical to your organization’s VDI success.

I created this white paper to showcase eG Innovations' Enterprise solution to Virtualization Performance Management and walk the reader through problematic scenarios and how the eG Enterprise tool drills down through the service layers in a virtualized organization to pinpoint the true cause of the performance issue.

To download this 18-page PDF white paper, go to my white papers page or click on the front page image of the white paper at the top of this article.  If you find it useful, let me know.  And be sure to visit eG Innovations' site to learn more about the eG Enterprise virtualization performance management tool/solution.  To view the streaming webinar for this content, sign up here.

When it has to happen it can be a frustrating process to go through, but it happens to all of us at some point: the need to add or replace one or more key project resources on a highly visible or mission critical project in midstream.  And we all know that how we handle this process on our project and with the customer can mean the difference between success and failure on the engagement.

Resources can need to be replaced for a number of reasons.  Maybe an employee left the company to accept a job with a competitor. Perhaps a key project resource was needed quickly on a new project.  It may be a case where an employee was let go from either the company or possibly just the current project due to performance issues. Whatever the reason, leadership is now faced with the critical task of finding a suitable replacement quickly, gaining customer acceptance, and getting the new resource up to speed and productive as quickly as possible so the progress on the project isn’t hindered and so the project customer continues to see seamless delivery.

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In today’s complex technical world, business moves fast. Every project is unique,  and every client has different requirements. So project-driven businesses simply can’t afford to waste time and money deploying complex, rigid and cumbersome project management software that’s neither adaptable nor agile. Yet many of today’s cloud-based project management software alternatives are offered by unproven companies who don’t understand your business, your reporting requirements, or your integration needs.

According to Tenrox, that’s why more and more organizations are turning to their software for an online enterprise project management solution that’s streamlined and flexible with several integration options.

Tenrox is a veteran cloud-based project management software provider, offering comprehensive project management tools that are easy to deploy and use. Tenrox’s site indicates that their project software combines simple and effective workflow-driven tools that integrate project planning software, time and expense tracking, project cost and billing, resource management software and other management capabilities into one project management solution. Integration with leading accounting, payroll, financial, CRM, and project management systems is built-in

Tenrox is the PM solution for businesses that can’t slow down

According to their website, Tenrox is designed to reduce costs, delays and complexity, our cloud workflow-driven project management software replaces the spreadsheets and fragmented applications that leave your teams and work processes disconnected. With Tenrox, you can put an end to management by spreadsheets, and everything you need for business project management will be connected in real time. All the tools you need for project planning, resource scheduling, time and expense tracking, invoicing, and request and issue tracking are all in a single dashboard, accessible by everyone on your team, any time via the cloud.

Tenrox is intuitive project management software

Tenrox software empowers your project workforce by giving them the tools they need to become more independent and to make faster, more informed decisions. Using online project management from Tenrox, your team members can access real-time information on costs, billable work, status, schedules, issues and change requests. That access helps ensure successful resource management, project planning and execution, with fewer delays and no surprises. 

And for forecasting and analysis, Tenrox is among the best project management software solutions you can buy. It lets you manage and view both process and financial impact in real time. Tenrox online project management software offers analytical tools to help your management team assess resource availability, allocations, forecasted and actual time, project cost and billing, budget variances, utilization, project requests and changes, and other critical factors – all across your enterprise. Plus, integration with your accounting, payroll, financial, and CRM systems is built in.

Interested in learning more?  Sign up on their site to try Tenrox, to view an online demo, or to register for a live demonstration.

Based on over 25 years of experience, project management expert and consultant Brad Egeland shares best practices and what it really means. This post is part of our series of tips how to manage projects, how project management tools can help, and how to avoid pitfalls.

In the project management world, we talk a lot about best practices. Best practices for running projects, best practices for leading teams, best practices for organizing and running a project management office. Yes, we all want to practice best practices…but what are they? What does best practices really mean? And more importantly, since it seems to be an interpretive thing, what does best practices mean to you?

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