Are you frustrated as a project manager trying to keep track of your project schedules, your status updates and your critical project documents in different repositories?  Perhaps even different collaboration tools?  Is your team unsure of project status at any given time?  Are they of always asking where to find document ‘x’ or where to store document ‘y’?

WorkZone may be the answer to your problems…and your prayers.  WorkZone is a web-based, collaborative, easy to use, project management software solution that includes document-sharing tools for your project and your project team members.

With WorkZone, you can give the entire team secure, web-based access to the latest project schedules and status. Associated documents are just a click away. Cross-project dashboards and automated alerts highlight projects and tasks that need attention, helping keep projects on time and on budget.

There are simpler tools on the market that may even be easier to adopt but provide too little functionality – I won’t name names.  And WorkZone is certainly less complicated than high-end tools like Microsoft Project.  WorkZone is the "just right" project management solution for most teams.

Easy of use and collaboration is the key to usage, adoption and ownership. WorkZone was designed with a simplicity that encourages use and collaboration by the entire team, so your projects stay on track and on time. And because WorkZone is accessed via the web, team members always have immediate access to the latest project schedules and documents.

View a product tour of WorkZone to see if it is going to work for your projects. And if you’d like to take a more personal approach, feel free to request a demo from the WorkZone site.

When an organization makes that decision to shift to agile development and project management practices, no one says it’s going to be an easy transition.  New developers coming in might already be trained or might make an easier transition to new practices.  However, experienced developers who have always been doing it ‘another way’ may have a much more difficult time modifying how they think about projects and development efforts and rollouts in general. 

When an organization is shifting to agile practices, existing developers often raise concerns – wondering how they are supposed to write code in an environment that involves shifting requirements and there seems to be little or no architecture.  These are concerns that need to be addressed of course – they are legitimate concerns.  In order to address them, it involves gaining knowledge of the agile development process and also getting the developers to acquire the skills needed to thrive in an agile development and project environment.

Let’s look at some of those key skills that are required to make a smooth transition…

Keep the system in a running state.  Finding errors is a huge time waster for developers.  When changes are happening and something goes wrong, it’s hard to know what caused the error – and it takes time.  By making incremental changes to detect errors immediately, this saves a lot of wasted time normally spent on search and destroy activities concerning bug fixes.

Minimize development complexity and, ultimately, rework.  The idea here is to move away from over-design (which causes complexity) and hacking away at the code (which causes re-work).  This is more of an attitude change than a skill set.

Separate use from construction.  This one is important as it eliminates the situation in which integrating new code into established systems exceeds the cost of writing the code in the first place.  It actually forces abstraction and encapsulation onto the developer…which is a good thing in the agile development world.  It provides discipline for  hiding the specific implementation you are using.

Define tests up-front.  It’s critical to define tests up-front even if they aren’t written up-front.  It definitely increases understanding and can certainly help prevent many errors in the long run.   Testing, of course, involves more than just discovering bugs.  Testing helps discover the causes of errors and allows the developer to eliminate them.  Testing helps make clear the assumptions and requirements that customers have without getting overly technical.  Testing ensures code integrity and compatibility with other code modules.  And it can help to minimize risks caused by humans, machines, and the environment.  Testing is critical and the ability to define it up-front is a critical skill to acquire.

Continuous Integration.  Continuous integration is not likely a skill that existing developers have and it’s not a mindset that they have been working in over the years.  This is critical to agile project management and agile development – and it is a low cost way of detecting errors early and quickly.  Also, it is essential if you are writing your tests up-front as mentioned above.

Summary

The switch to agile project management, agile development – and agile thinking, in general – is not necessarily an easy one to  make.  It certainly takes some time, likely some monetary resources, a learning curve, some pain and probably some resource replacement.  In the end, it can be very rewarding for your organization and for the customers you serve in terms of project successes.

By: Jonas Andersen, Podio

Whatever your project management methodology or style, there’s an app for that. Whether you manage a single project solo or with a team, a portfolio of different projects, or are living your life the agile way, chances are the project management app you need can be found in the Podio App Market.

Each app can be modified to fit exactly the way you manage your projects. Here is a run down of a few of the Podio apps available to start you off on the right track.

Simple Project Management

Manage your projects without all the fuzz. Simply install this app, describe your project, and get started in a matter of minutes. Share your resources and project descriptions in an easy and straight-forward way. Break your project into deliverables, and organise stand-ups to keep things on track. That's it.

As with all Podio apps, this pack leverages the built-in calendar, contacts, file sharing with ShareFile, dropbox, google docs, and more neat integrations for your files, as well as the social stream and task management.

Client Project Collaboration

Work with your project team and clients using the Client Project Collaboration app. Create and share project descriptions, define deliverables and roles, and delegate work to the relevant team members or split the work with freelancers and clients.

As you add the deliverables that make up your project, Podio calculates the total budget and the hours you are allocating for the project's completion. Throughout the project, reports show how much time and money your team have left to complete the project on budget.

Agile Project Management

If you’re running an Agile operation, chances are you’ll like the Agile Project Management app. Add ideas and input for your projects in the Project Input app. Illustrate with a sketch to get your ideas across to the team. Create action items in the Backlog app, add owner, deadline, and specifications.

Plan your iterations in the Iterations app, relate each iteration to the action items you plan to complete, and set the timeframe. In the releases app you can document all the action items you have delivered.

Project Portfolio Management

Manage your agency's project portfolio and keep your team aligned with the project portfolio management app.

Keep track of your projects in this space. On the space front page you can keep track of the overall performance on your project portfolio.

Use the Projects app to get a full overview of each project, and set up team meetings. Add timesheets, expense reports, and invoices in the corresponding apps to update the status on your project. Also, share any freelancers you employ on your projects with the rest of the team.

Project Tracking & Budgeting

Finish your projects on time and budget with this project tracking app. Set up a project, and allocate a budget and hours to each deliverable. As you go, track time in the Timesheets app and project expenses in the Expenditures app to get a real time overview of your project balance and time expenditure.

Read more about getting started with project management on Podio in our quick start guide, or go straight to the App Market where you can browse all the many project management apps available - including Brad Egeland’s Lessons Learned app to record learnings from your projects, and gantthead.com ‘s Project Headway app containing a complete checklist for managing a project in accoudance with PMI standards.

You can also see more about Podio for project management on the Podio website, or dive into the project management blog.

It’s your project - now you can decide how to run it. 

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Weebly is my website home-base. I purchase my domain through Go Daddy for about $9 annually and use Weebly to build the free site. And right now I'm using the free Weebly app to create a post on my blog about this and share this information with all of you.

And through all of this my site draws income in the form of paid posts, paid advertising, and visibility for my consulting practice. Try Weebly if you're looking for an answer to your website needs. It will definitely get you started while you figure out how much more functionality you need. Or you might just stick with it for several years like I have...very happily.

Many project managers have been down this road before.  You’re running a few projects simultaneously that are likely in varying stages of completeness and you’ve just been handed a new project – a large project.  It’s obvious that you need to offload – or handoff – one or more of your current projects to another project manager with a lighter workload.  How you go about doing that can sometimes mean success or failure to the project you’re handing off, and that success or failure can be traced right back to you and how you orchestrated the transition.

Aside from the normal activities you will need to perform to get up to speed on your new project, you will definitely need to focus on these four key events in order to make sure the transition of your existing project goes as smooth as possible:

#1 – Meet with your delivery team.  First, meet with your delivery team and get all the latest task status and progress updates from them that you possibly can.  It’s critical that you know the latest and greatest status of your project and all the details that go into what’s going on.  The next project manager will need all the help they can get.

#2 – Revise everything.  Take everything you learned from your team and everything you already knew and revise all ongoing status information on the project.  Revise the project schedule that you deliver to your team, customer and executive management every week.  Using a full-featured, and collaborative web-based project management tool like WorkZone can ensure that your team, customer, and the new project manager will be on the same page from the start.  Create a very detailed status report – probably more detailed than usual – for your next weekly status call with the customer because that’s when the transition will really begin.  And be sure to update the project budget and forecast so the financial health of the project is obvious to the incoming project manager.

#3 – Contact the project customer.  Call the project customer and bring them up to speed on the transition.  Your contact will likely be their first knowledge of this so provide them with as much detail on the solid background of the incoming project manager as possible.  You must present it in a way that will gain their confidence and not make them feel like a 2nd class project customer.  And, if possible, plan for at least a lengthy transition where you lead and mentor the next project manager as you get everyone used to the transition.  Handling the transition this way rather than making an abrupt exit will likely go a long way in keeping customer confidence and satisfaction high.

#4 – Transition over a minimum two-week period.  Ideally, if your time availability, the old project tasks, the new project startup effort, and the availability of the new project manager allows for it, stretch the transition over a period of at least two project status calls with the customer and team.  The outgoing project manager should lead the first one and officially introduce the new project manager and the new project manager should lead the second one, officially taking over the project in the eyes of the customer – even if it’s already happened with the team on the delivery side.

Summary

The key when leaving a project is to do it as smoothly as possible and maintaining what hopefully is already a high level of customer satisfaction.  Any bumps in the process can cause the customer concerns, and that’s something you want to try avoid at all costs.

WorkZone brings simplicity to project management in a way that encourages use and collaboration by the entire team, so your projects stay on track and on time. Take a product tour of WorkZone or request a demo.