29 Ağustos 2010
PMFORUM Library
PM Perspectives Makaleleri
Personality Plus: Choosing the Best Fit for Your Software Project Posted: 13-May-2010full article | highlights | pdfShould your human resources department be choosing extroverts, introverts, thinkers or ‘judges' for your next software engineering project? Or maybe… |
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Delivering Business Value from IT Projects – Results from a Pilot Study Posted: 1-Mar-2010full article | highlights | pdfIn a competitive and depressed economic climate, executives want to know that any IT project they undertake will deliver a… |
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Study links good leaders to successful projects Posted: 3-Feb-2010full article | highlights | pdfWhile good leadership must have something to do with successful projects, it's surprising how few studies have examined this correlation. A… |
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Sponsors Play a Vital Role in Projects Posted: 24-Sep-2009full article | highlights | pdfProject sponsors don't get much applause-in research literature or on the job. Yet there is convincing evidence that a project's… |
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Building The PM-Centric Organization Posted: 20-Feb-2009full article | highlights | pdfWhat can IT service firms and in-house IT organizations learn from the construction industry? "Continuous improvement of project management skills," says… |
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Managing Knowledge Risks Posted: 12-Jan-2009full article | highlights | pdfUnderstanding and managing knowledge risks can be critically important for innovative IT-enabled business projects. These projects rely on the project… |
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Know Your Knowledge Risks Posted: 28-Nov-2008full article | highlights | pdfWhen it comes to managing knowledge during an IT project, most project managers hide their heads in the sand. Knowledge… |
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IT Projects: Getting Beyond CHAOS Posted: 27-Oct-2008full article | highlights | pdfOver-achieving IT projects? It sounds too good to be true. But new research by Dr. Andrew Gemino of Simon Fraser… |
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The Thought-Leader Mindset Posted: 17-Sep-2008full article | highlights | pdfIT project management is rapidly evolving. Traditional concerns for cost, time and scope are now only one aspect of the… |
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Managing Great Expectations Posted: 26-Aug-2008full article | highlights | pdfDid you ever ask for an outrageously expensive brand-name toy for your birthday - and then received a generic version… |
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New Roles for the Consultant Project Manager Posted: 28-Apr-2008full article | highlights | pdfThere's a new trend evolving in external project management and it isn't for the faint-of-heart. Increasingly, companies are relying on… |
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Measuring for Success in IT Projects Posted: 19-Mar-2008full article | highlights | pdfThere's a familiar French proverb that says, "Nothing succeeds like success." But it's difficult to get the benefit if success… |
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The New Project Leader Posted: 14-Feb-2008full article | highlights | pdfThere's a new mindset among IT business customers these days. Increasingly, they're banking on IT projects to yield investment returns.… |
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Planning for the Unexpected Posted: 14-Feb-2008full article | highlights | pdfProjects are planned change. Volatility is unplanned change. Yet inevitably, as all project managers will attest, every project encounters some… |
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Applying Lessons Learned to a Project Posted: 13-Feb-2008full article | highlights | pdfHow often does your organization apply the lessons learned from past projects to new projects? If you say "rarely", you're… |
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Do Women Perform Better than Men? Posted: 12-Feb-2008full article | highlights | pdfPsst! Have you heard those rumours claiming that women are the best project managers? It seems there may be… |
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Does Size Really Matter? Posted: 11-Feb-2008
full article | highlights | pdfIt's no secret that information technology (IT) projects, which are typically very large, have a high risk of failure. In…
21 Mayıs 2010
9 Free Open Source Project Management Tools To Plan And Schedule Your Project
Endeavour Software Project Management is an Open Source solution to manage the creation of large-scale enterprise systems in an iterative and incremental development process. It features support for Use Case management, Iterations, Project Plan, Change Requests, Defect Tracking, Test Cases, Test Plans, Tasks, Document management, Reports and many other process artifacts. Endeavour Software Project Management has been designed for easy to use, intuitive. It is realistic by avoiding unnecessary features that might increase complexity. As part of the project management it let you manage your resource and plan the project efficiently.
More info here.
2. Feng Office
Feng Office community version is an open source project management software that allows businesses to manage project tasks, billing, documents, communication with co-workers, customers and vendors, schedule meetings and events, and share every kind of electronic information. It was earlier known as OpenGoo. It supports web based access so an be accessed from anywhere.
More info here
3. GanttProject
GanttProject is a open source cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. With GanttProject you can create work breakdown structure, draw dependencies, define milestones. It lets you assign human resources to work on tasks, see their allocation on the Resource Load chart. You can also generate PERT chart from Gantt chart.
More info here.
4. Open Workbench
Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. It is the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project. You can define projects and create associated work breakdown structures with activities, phases, tasks and milestones.
More info here.
5. OpenProj
OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Projects On Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.
More info here.
6. Project.net
Project.net is an open source, enterprise scale project management application that maximizes the performance of any organization tracking a single project or a portfolio of projects. Project.net addresses the needs of all project and corporate stakeholders - team members, project managers, portfolio managers, and executives - for current and accurate information on the status of all projects. Project.net delivers the real-time reporting that keeps distributed projects on track.
More info here.
7. Project-Open
Project-Open is one of the leading open source project management tools. It is a comprehensive resource management tool that is fully integrated into the ERP system. It lets you Plan projects and resources via GanttProject, Track project advance and resource consumption of both internal and external costs and execute status reporting using "traffic lights.
More info here.
8. Redmine
Redmine is a open source based flexible project management web application. It lets you handle multiple projects, provides flexible role based access control, provides flexible issue tracking system, Gantt chart and calendar, news, documents & files management, feeds & email notifications, per project wiki, per project forums and time tracking.
More info here.
9. TaskJuggler
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Free and Open Source Software project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks. TaskJuggler is project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planning, risk and communication management.
More info here.
11 Mayıs 2010
10 Free Project Management Tools to Fit Your Needs
1. Retrospectiva
Retrospectiva is a powerful open-source project management tool, designed towards agile software development teams. It features a solid core with ticket system, code review and milestones, but it also has powerful addons like wiki, blog or agile project management.
2. Trac
Trac is one powerful issue tracking tool judging by the fact that Wordpress development is tracked using it. Trac is an enhanced open-source wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. It uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management.
3. Collabtive
Collabtive is web-based open source project management software. It was developed as an PHP&Javascript alternative to commercial project management tools like Basecamp. It features basic project management features and it has a decent and usable user interface.
http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/index.php
4. Teambox
Although it is a rather new player in the project management area, Teambox can be seen as one of the future leaders. It is developed as an open source application and it benefits from a simple and clean user interface similar to Twitter. It supports multiple projects, statuses, document attachments.
5. Redmine
Redmine is a great project management tool based on Ruby on Rails and released under GPL v2. It has multiple projects support, news, documents & files management, time tracking and even multilingual support.
6. SteberPM
Continuing the open source trend, we will place SteberPM in this list. Teams can easily setup projects and keep track of tasks, issues, bugs, efforts etc – using SteberPM.
7. Todoyu
This application has a more compact yet visually rich interface compared to previous project management tools. Todoyu features are: manage multiple projects, overview your customer’s data, assign tasks, share files, group calendars and meet deadlines.
http://www.todoyu.com/en/todoyu/
8. OpenAtrium
With one impressive set of features as well as a clean and well executed user interface, OpenAtrium will definitely succeed against commercial tools. It is still in beta and probably when it will be stable, OpenAtrium will make happy a lot of teams.
9. PlanCake
Probably light is the term that comes into my mind when I see the user interface from PlanCake. It is super light and clean and it provides fast response to your actions. And considering that the project is free, it can make a lot of friends in freelancers.
10. myTinyTodo
I’ve left this application at the end because it is one of my favorites. Not because of its features but because of the simplicity and speed. myTinyTodo is as the name says a tiny todo list. The best thing about it is that you are quite productive using it and it serves its purpose: todo manager for individuals and freelancers.
26 Nisan 2010
Project Management - 5 Review - Part 1
Tenrox Project Management Software
This application has a complete set of features unlike any other. You can go digging through its various interfaces and dashboards without getting a headache, all thanks to its well-structured creation.
Standout features:
- easy-to-use project planning tool
- the project plans are interchangeable with Microsoft Project files
- excellent time tracking, cost accounting and billing features.
Resources management
Create a perfect team using the resource search function. Find the most appropriate, qualified and available individuals to complete different tasks. As soon as the project manager publishes the project plan, every member of your team can see their assigned tasks. In return, they can report an estimated time to complete their assigned tasks. This information will be used along with the plan to report on the cost and schedule variances. Tag your time entries as capitalized, charge-back, billable, R&D and other similar attributes. Also you can report n capitalized project time and billable versus non billable time and access profitability and productivity with various project cost/revenue analysis reports.
Project management
A great advantage is that you can manage your projects offline, so you can share your plan with your team once it’s finished. Publish, check-in and check-out are some excellent features that help team members to collaborate on the plan.
Ease of use
You can’t go wrong with this software! Although it has a very complex structure, anyone can handle it, even someone that doesn’t know what project management is.
Overall
From all the software management applications, this one is probably one of the best. It’s easy to use, brings a lot of features and it’s at a reasonable price.
Microsoft Project
This application is the flagship for any other similar software, because most of the project management software can integrate files with it, either by importing or exporting them into your preferred application. This feature lessens the learning of different software, since there are many professionals who are already familiar with Microsoft Project.
Standout features
- Import/export Feature
- Effective management of project schedules
- Enables you to quickly become productive
- Able to build professional charts and diagrams
Resources Management
Microsoft Project enables an easy management of both adding and managing your resources, essential for any effective project management. Easily create slots and assign them tasks as you would fill some data in a spreadsheet. Optimize efficiency by assigning tasks to the right resource: Microsoft Project allows you to keep info about your employees (such as skill sets and resumes).
Project Management
Microsoft Project doesn’t provide many features, but it holds the necessary tools to effectively manage any project. A practical tool is the expand-and-contract feature, that allows you to easily browse through your project and get a better overall view without scrolling through hundreds of tasks and milestones.
The scheduling feature includes calendars for a day-by-day breakdown of tasks, timelines for an overall view of the project, and events for specific milestones within the calendar.
But the interactive Gantt chart makes it easy to comprehend. You can update your project and easily adjust it right on the graph!
Up-to-date reports are available in Microsoft Project, so you can keep track of statistics, financial status and employees work loads.
Ease of use
Microsoft Project focuses on four points in project management: Task, resource, Track and Report. You can easily navigate through them and you can find any info you need with just a click.
The spreadsheet-like interface allows you to input data using your keyboard. Add tasks, milestones, dates and resource assignments quickly without having to click into every field.
The interactive Gantt chart is really handy to easily update the progress of your tasks, changing their dates or their completing order.
Overall
Microsoft Project provides the necessary tools needed to assign tasks, manage resources and complete the project on schedule within the budget limits. Also you can integrate your work into mostly any project management software.
Project KickStart
Project KickStart is a project management software that can easily integrate with other software like Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, MS Word, Microsoft Prokect, WBS Cart and MindManager. It is very useful for basic project planning, but does not provide many features like resources management.
Standout Features
- Six-step plan creation wizard
- QA process
- Free sample projects
Resources Management
KickStart has a user-friendly interface with tabs for every aspect of a project, except the resources tab. A “People” tab is included, but it’s not even close to an effective management tool.
Project Management
KickStart offers a very simple UI, organized in tabs. The wizard just walks you through the project plan: picking goals, assign tasks and dates and show obstacles that could prevent the project’s smooth flow.
After running through all the tabs, you can keep track and edit your project in the resulting Gantt chart.
Ease of use
Very easy to install, easy to navigate and visually pleasing, KickStart is a very good tool. It simply runs your through the entire management plan and it provides an excellent comprehension and overall view.
Overall
Project KickStart is a great tool for smaller projects that probably have a single project manager, and does not require much collaboration with other managers or with a CEO.
MindView 3 Business
MindView has a spreadsheet-like layout, so you can easily add, edit or delete tasks without clicking each cell. A very useful feature that sets it apart from other software is the MindMap option: you can see your project in brainstorming bubbles and see how tasks are related to milestones.
Standout Features
- Brainstorming
- Multimedia
- Calculation
Resources Management
It’s easy to add or remove human resources with just a click. Easily import resources directly from Microsoft Outlook or add them from your tasks list. Just be careful when you add resources, MindView does not allow you to make groups or sort them by skills or departments.
Project Management
MindView includes the standard project management elements: Tasks, Calendars and Budgeting, but it lacks recurring tasks and auto notifications to check the project progress.
The strength of this application lies in its different views of the project: tasks list, Gantt chart, mind map, timeline and outline. This allows a better overall view and the interactive map allows manual data input without opening the task list.
Ease of use
MindView has a very low learning curve. It simply leads you directly to a new project or existing ones. The spreadsheet-like task list and interactive Gantt charts allow you to easily update your project info.
Overall
Easy to learn, MindView offers a view through its different visual options that allows any user to comprehend rapidly his project’s work-flow. Although it does not provide many features, you can easily and effectively complete any management plan.
Genius project for Domino
Genius project is a high-functioning project management software that can be use by both experienced computer users and beginners alike.
Standout features
- User-friendly user interface
- Complex charts
- Budget planning dashboard
- Auto E-mail notification
Resources Management
The complex and detailed dashboards, charts and sets of views allow you to have a good idea of resource assignments. Easily make adjustments or substitutions as you see fit. Properly assign staff for your tasks using the matrix planning. Assigning tasks to the right person is no longer a laborious issue with the resource search function. With this tool, you can perform a quick search for potential members and you can diminish their number by sets of skills or availability. You can gather up the perfect team in a very short amount of time!
Project Management
This application provides extensive offerings in dashboards and reporting, risk and change management, document management, demand management, invoicing, cost and budget managing, project tracking, time and expense tracking, planning and project portfolio management.
Ease of use
Although it has a lot of functions explained in hundreds of pages, it’s easy to comprehend. There are no confusing or disorienting features at all.
Overall
Genius project offers a complete set of features needed for a thorough, in-depth management planning.
25 Nisan 2010
26 Ocak 2010
Thinklinkr – Come Together To Think, Outline and Collaborate In Real Time
The web has been about doing away with distances. Web 2.0 also has been a lot about doing everything in real time. What’s real time, you may ask? Twitter, is real time I would say. Real time is when an action draws an immediate response. When something gets on the web and is received by someone almost instantaneously, that’s real time. Web apps also have gone real time. There’s no more of mailing across and update and waiting for the response to flow in. Now, collaborative tools allow two or more people to work on the same web space.
It’s akin to sitting across the desk and thrashing out ideas over a cup of coffee – and it is how people can collaborate in real time.
Thinklinkr is another species in the new breed of collaborative web applications. With cloud based computing, the breed of collaborative web-based apps is crowding together. From online meet-ups involving huge projects to simple things as To-do lists or even sharing a screen session, collaboration tools are the new way.
Thinklinkr is not as complex as online project management tools. It is more in the line of OmniOutliner (paid) which is a Mac software or the web-based LooseStitch.
So, just to outline the three facets of Thinklinkr…
- It is web based.
- It is an outliner.
- It is fully collaborative.
Thinklinkr as an outliner
For those who have come in late, the application of an ‘outliner’ follows from the word – outline. An outliner is a program that allows us to arrange data into distinct chunks or sections or main headings and sub-points. Outliners allow data to be ordered and organized. Think of it as the first thoughts…the first idea of a plan or just a plain step by step of things you want to do. You can use an Outliner app for jotting down, brainstorming, or GTD.
Thinklinkr’s data organization features cover all that.
Using Thinklinkr, you can easily create outlines, indent and outdent them. With a mouse click you can collapse or expand the outlines. Drag and drop operations are all supported for easy reorganization of your data. A host of keyboard shortcuts may goad you to become a keyboard ninja and a hotshot outliner.
Advanced features like importing-exporting outlines to other Outliner apps as Text/HTML/Word/OPML files is great for flexibility.
View revision history of your outlines (using a slick slider) or just delete them for a tighter library.
The automatic save feature of Thinklinkr speeds up the outlining tasks as any data entered gets saved to the Thinklinkr servers.
Thinklinkr as a group or team tool
The usefulness of an Outliner increases manifold when you want to use it to collaborate in real time. In Thinklinkr, you can invite other team members as editors or simply as viewers to share the current outline. Editors can of course, make changes themselves which gets reflected in real time. Viewers can share any Thinklinkr project but they cannot make any changes themselves. Notification emails keeps the team updated on what’s happening in their Thinklinkr outlines.
The collaboration tool gets enhanced by the live chat service. All logged in team members can collaborate and chat in real time. An avatar next to the outline entry is the signpost to who’s contributing to the outlines in real time.
Will you be on Thinklinkr?
As a simple online Outliner application, Thinklinkr covers the basics. It is fast and free of glitches. For the first-time Outliner app user, the use of shortcuts to speed up the process is also easily accessible. You just need to press the little icon on the bottom bar to toggle the Keyboard Shortcuts screen. The screencast video help does all the explaining to the guy who has just signed up. Last but not the least – the chat service in Thinklinkr rounds off the real time collaboration experience.
This is just version 0.9.18. So more features surely will come in. The wish list includes more team management tools and a feature to attach external documents to the outlines. Also, for a collaborative environment, I believe the program shouldn’t stop at just outlines but should help the team to monitor the actionable steps taken on specific outlines.
Online collaboration and brainstorming apps are stirring up the cloud like never before. The free version of LooseStitch is already there. The new ThinkFold is also on the starting blocks with a beta.
Do you use a web-based outliner like Thinklinkr or prefer the desktop variant to collaborate in real time? Let us know your favorite tool for the job.
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
3 Flexible Project Management Apps for the Mac
OmniPlan
OmniPlan from OmniGroup — one of the brightest minds in Mac productivity applications — includes an intuitive user interface with customizable views.
Task management in OmniPlan takes an outline approach, which is good for users who aren’t full-time project managers. From the outline view, you can track the costs associated with your tasks (resource cost, task cost and total); view task constraints and dependencies; and create milestones that represent completion points in your project.
I came to OmniPlan for my own project management needs because I was looking for a reasonably lightweight project management application and was already using OmniFocus, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner Pro. One worry I did have was that I work with clients standardized on Microsoft Project, but OmniPlan can import and export MS Project files, and looking at my projects I saw most schedules were saved as PDF before they were distributed to the project team anyway, which took my worry off the table.
OmniPlan costs $149.95 for a single license (a free trial is available).
SharedPlan Pro
SharedPlan Pro from SharedPlan offers a project sketching tool (with network diagramming) and an online project editor with additional views, including Gantt chart and resource views. It also includes some more complex project management features including reports, analysis tools and management tools, offering flexibility as to how you can slice, dice and otherwise present project data.
You can easily overlook version management of project schedules, but Shared Plan includes version management features enabling you to compare previous project versions and check historical information.
SharedPlan Pro is available for Mac, Windows and Linux and costs $99.95/user (free trial available). A free iPhone application is also available.
Merlin2
Merlin2 is another strong Mac project management offering that includes several views of project data, including Activities, a comprehensive Gantt chart, Netplan, Resources and Utilization.
The Merlin2 Library is a source for project-specific information. You can drag and drop information from the library to any of your active projects. Out of the box, the library contains a range of documents and activities for general projects. You also have the option to customize the library to meet your respective project needs.
Merlin2 costs $210, with a free trial available. There is also an iPhone application available.