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Teamwork Product Review

Teamwork is a great SaaS project management solution for small-mid sized companies and project teams. Like other products in this category, Teamwork is focused on task management and collaboration, sacrificing some features and complexity of enterprise solutions, for ease of use.

Tasks and task lists are at the core of Teamwork. Within a project, Project Managers create and assign tasks. Team members can review their tasks; add comments, track time, and mark tasks as complete. Tasks can also be associated with project milestones. A calendar view of project milestones gives a nice high-level overview of important project dates.

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Basecamp Product Review

Basecamp is one of the most popular and simplest project management SaaS solutions. Its low monthly fee with unlimited users makes it very appealing to small project teams.

To-do’s and discussions are the core features of Basecamp. Team members can create and group lists of tasks into To-do’s. These tasks can be assigned, scheduled, and marked complete. To-do’s in Basecamp are simple task lists. They do not track dependencies, effort levels, or allow assigning multiple resources.

Discussions are threaded, topic based, collaborative discussions. Discussions let team members collaborate and exchange ideas around a specific topic. For example, we often post project documents in the discussion area and ask project team members to review the document and submit comments.

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Software as a Service (SaaS), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Solutions

This is the first of several blog posts in which we will evaluate Software as a Service (SaaS), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software solutions.

During this evaluation, we primarily looked at solutions for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), and project teams. We loosely define the SMB space as companies with between 100 and 5,000 employees, or between $20 million and $1 billion in annual revenue. More importantly, we looked at tools which are appropriate for organizations with an IT staff of less than 500, fewer than 20 project managers, and no more than 50 concurrent projects. Larger organizations should consider enterprise level solutions. Although some of the products we looked at will support enterprise implementations, there are several other products that we are not covering here.

The following are among the products we initially evaluated at a high level. About half of these we already have some familiarity with. From this initial set of PPM SaaS products, we selected several for a deeper dive and evaluation.

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Project Managers are… What!?

I did a Google search on “Project Managers are” and was surprised with what Google revealed as autosuggestions:

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Top results are: Idiots, Responsible for, Useless, and Stupid!  Three out of the four are pretty cynical to put it mildly.  I certainly do not want to be generalized into these negative buckets and I’d bet nether do you!  Here are some qualities a good PM should possess that will help change these stereotypes.

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Jim Graham, the new Director of Corporate Outreach for the Buffalo PMI

Jim Graham, the new Director of Corporate Outreach for the Buffalo PMI

Congratulations Jim Graham, the new Director of Corporate Outreach for the Buffalo PMI. As Director of Corporate Outreach, Jim will work with local business leaders to promote the value of project management and the many services provided by PMI.

If you or your company is interested in learning more about the PMI and how they can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact Jim.

More About Jim 

A lifelong Buffaloian, with a beautiful family; twin 8 year old boys and a 6 year old girl. Jim has 10+ years experience as a Program and Project Management professional, having spent the last several years with a national IT services firm, delivering complex IT solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Jim has a BA in Psychology, and a MS in IT Management. He first joined the Buffalo PMI in 2005, earning his PMP and later teaching PMP prep classes. Jim is active in local youth hockey, previously serving on the Board of Directors, Mite Program Director, and Head Goaltending Coach for the Buffalo Shamrocks Hockey Club, and is now currently coaching with the Clarence Mustangs Hockey Club.

 

A Matter of Size

After spending the better part of a decade managing projects for large Fortune500 organizations. I recently had the opportunity to consult and project manage for some small companies. As you would expect that there are positives and negatives in both, and the disparity can generally be seen with team size/support and decision processes.

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PM Networking

networkingNetworking is often thought as a ‘pre or post’ by-product of attending a PMI dinner, lecture, or a business meeting. Often we skip the networking portion because we are in a hurry to get home. Instead it is important to be able to dedicate the time to improve our professional relationships, learn from our PM peers project experiences (both good and bad), and discover if there are new techniques that could be applied to your own projects.

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26th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey

Aprelion Healthcare This month, HIMSS released the 26th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey, which gathers opinions of IT professionals in healthcare provider organizations regarding their use of technology.
The survey revealed that 72 percent of respondents report that consumer and patient considerations, such as patient engagement, satisfaction and quality of care will have a major impact on their organization’s strategic efforts over the next two years.

Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the 330 respondents to the 26th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey indicated that consumer and patient considerations, such as patient engagement, satisfaction and quality of care would be the business issue that would most impact their organization over the course of the next two years. Indeed, 87 percent of respondents indicated that patient satisfaction will be the top priority at their organization in the course of the next 12 months. – 26th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey

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The Buffalo Sabres Future Should Start With a Communication Plan

sabres-puckWe are in the final week until the regular season the National Hockey League comes to a conclusion. Teams are fighting for playoff positions, but our attention is drawn to not the top of the standings but to the bottom. The “race” to 30th place has caused a lot of discussion on sports talk radio and national publications. Sharp focus is on the current last place team, the Buffalo Sabres. Fans are divided on whether the team should deliberately try to loose games, in order to get a chance at the number one draft pick, or at worst the number two draft pick (per the NHL’s draft lottery rules). As a project manager, I took a broader look at this event in Sabres history, as the fan opinions steadily grow apart. Although sports fans will always have varying opinions, what has been missing is a solid project Stakeholder Communication Plan.
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