projectified-old

Mindmanager Blogs

Hobart Swan started a blog about MindManager.

Great Product, great company. Check it out.

Steelray and Project Management Scratchpad

Brian Leach from Steelray does a pretty cool blog about Microsoft Project and related stuff. Add it to your list of sites to check, or add his RSS feed to your reader.

Steelray makes a pretty cool viewer for Microsoft Project files. It basically makes it so that people in your org do not need a copy of MSP to view your MPP file. You can download a trial copy here. Check it out if you need a way for non-Project users to view your schedules. The really good news is that it is only $34.95 a copy!

Congrats to Gord over at Do More Than Manage: 10,000 Visitors!

Do More Than Manage just got it’s 10,000th visitor! Great Job.

Apparently projectified is his top referrer which is ironic since I have been doing projectified for over a year and only have 27,000 hits and he got 10,000 since November of 2004!

Good work Gord! Here’s to 50,000 more!

Pretty Cool New KM\Search Application: Watson

This is an app with HUGE potential. Watson is a background search app that monitors what you are typing in Word or PowerPoint (or browsing in IE) and does a background search across a wide variety of sources (Yahoo, NY Times, DogPile, etc). When it thinks it has info for you based on what you have been typing it lights up a Light Bulb on a button it adds to the title bar of these applications.
What it gives you is shown to the left. It is a page with several categories like Web, News, Blogs, Images, etc. Click on a category and see the things it found.

Also very cool is that it will integrate with X1 desktop search. (My example does not show it because at this time it only integrates with X1 v4. It will be supporting v 5 shortly according to the website.) It also says it supports Google Desktop Search as well.

This is pretty cool stuff. I still have some playing to do to see how accurate it is in figuring out what I’m really going to be interested in based on what it sees me typing but this has a ton of potential.

The only odd thing I saw was that seemed odd was that it integrated with Google Desktop Search but does not use Google as one of it’s sources. I'm not sure if this is the result of some partnership deal but it struck me as kind of strange.

Anyway, the tool has a 30 day trial for the regular version, which is $99 to buy. It also comes in an Enterprise edition that will let you add corporate intranets and portal sites to the list of sources.

I would love to see an SDK from these guys so that you could add your own personal favorite sites and sources to your ‘version’ of the software. I see this as being able to add things like document management systems, CRM systems, Windows Sharepoint sites and the list goes on. We will have to stay tuned to see where this app goes.

 

Agile Software Dev Group in Denver

If you live in Denver or might be passing through Denver on business you might check out this site: Agile Denver. This is a group that puts on meetings and brings in speakers to talk about Agile software development. The meetings are FREE and it looks like they get some pretty heavy hitters like Esther Derby.

They have a meeting coming up on the 28th of March and it makes me wish I was going to be in Denver! It is a panel discussion about Agile PM vs. ‘Traditional PM” and will have Zach Nies, Ryan Martens, Martin VanDerSchouw and Tad Haas. I can’t speak for the others but I have known Tadd Haas for several years and he is a great speaker. The guy knows a ton!

Anyway, if you are going to be in Denver on the 28th check it out. If you can’t be there check out the site. They have some great resources.

TechRepublic Articles and Working with Repetitive tasks in Microsoft Project

I wanted to start pointing over to some old articles I wrote for TechRepublic. There are 90 articles there that I wrote mostly about Project, Project Server and Office products. I'm pretty proud of them so I will start posting some pointers here over to some of the ones I like the best.

Here is one I did on repetitive task names in projects. Lots of PMs put their projects together in iterative phases and many end up with several tasks with the exact same name. The hard part about this is that in many views you end up seeing just a flat list of task names that are all the same since not all views put them in the Summary task context that they are in in the Gantt Chart view. This article will show you a macro that will help with this. As a reader pointed out the code in this article only works if you run it once. If you add tasks and then run it twice it messes things up. So HERE is a new macro that is in a comment on the article that will make sure you can run the macro more than once and it only updates NEW tasks. The new macro counts on you NOT using Task Text30 for anything! :-)

 

 

ProjectSteps: Check it Out

OK so it is not exactly new but if you have not been to ProjectSteps you should go and check it out!

Very interesting stuff that WILL help you think about your work.

Technorati Searching on Tags

Technorati has a feature called Tagging that allows you to search on the categories the author assigns to them. This is a great way to search blogs without getting every post that used the word. It allows you to basically do a subject search. Full text searches are great but this just adds another tool to the box.

Cool Blurb about My Book!

Rand Morimoto of Convergent Computing looks to be a real powerhouse in consulting and computer writing. He has at least 10 books out on a huge range of topics.

I was flattered to find these kind words from him about my book.

I'm one of those users who has used Microsoft Project for years, but too embarrassed to admit I really have no clue how to use Project. Every other book I looked at assumed I wanted to read hundreds of pages of formal project management methodology and processes. This book graphically showed me how to do everyday tasks, and explained the key functions of Project without overwhelming me with details I care not to know.

Thanks Rand!

 

Budget Envy...

The guys over at Cutting Through are talking about what I call “Budget Macho” among project managers.

They talk about how recruiters in particular are obsessed with how big the budgets were for a PMs projects or in some cases how big the team was for a project as a measure of the value or talent of the PM.

I agree with these guys in their assertion that some of the smallest projects (budget and\or team) have taught them the most. In theory a PM that successfully managed lots of $1000 projects should be able to apply the same principles to a $1,000,000 project. But I have to say that I think this theory breaks down to some degree. I think that big, high stakes projects carry with them different kinds of pressure than small ones. Also in many cases large budget often equates to large scope. If that is the case then I would want to know that the PM I’m looking at for a position has managed BIG projects if I’m hiring them to manage a big project.

Lastly, if you have not checked out their stuff I recommend stopping by there and browsing through. They have some excellent things to say.