Friday, February 22, 2008

Online Presentation of the Casework Module

Now you can view an online presentation of the Casework module.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Presentation of the Casework Module now Online

Feedback appreciated

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Converse to Manage and Manage to Converse

JobWarden believes that project management must be conversational to be effective.

I recently read a weblog posting that sums this up perfectly, exceptfor two small details, which I will address in a minute. But first, letme quote Paul Burdick, a developer at Expression Engine (emphasis and edits below added by me.) Paul says:

[ a user] sent me an email this weekend asking if I might write an entry about how a small team like ours manages ideas, tasks, and projects when developing software. The question is actually slightly loaded because while there are two developers at pMachine (Rick and I), there is actually far more that each of us does through the course of our work that is not development¹ related. I hesitate to put forth that only about half of my time is focused on active development for our software. Does that sound suspiciously improbable to you considering the amount going on with the company and our level of development? I suspect it might. And yet, develop software is what we must do to keep the pMachine ship going. With the fluidity of our days (and nights) though, an organized project management routine would simply fall apart at pMachine² I know this regularly freaks [another team member] out because he is not used to such a lack of structure, but it works for us and works well.

Unfortunately Paul's original article has disappeared fromthe the ExpressionEngine blog (formerly pMachine) so the link does notwork anymore ... you will have to take my word for it that the above quote isaccurate ... or you could visit the Expression Engine site and bug Paul about it. Now, regarding how JobWarden deals with this, starting withmy two highlights in the above quotation:

1. Very few of us have the luxury of being able to maintain a total focus on the job or project at hand. This why we think it is important to think of a project or job as an ongoing conversation which might have to be set aside from time to time, without losing the thread. It is quite difficult to do so if all the participants are not privy to the entire conversation, including the asides and occasional mutterings - requirements that applications such as E-mail and most middleware systems simply do not facilitate.
2. Formal project management systems tend to fall apart when smaller teams try to use them, for the simple reason that they impose overheads which do not contribute materially to the successful pursuit of the jobs at hand; either that or they become a frustrating distraction.

Wethink that most small to medium sized operations have perforce tooperate in the fluid environment which Paul describes, and that is whywe designed JobWarden to be conversational in nature - conversationscan be started, stopped, interrupted and the subject can be changed atwill. Most importantly, all participants have a voice.

Try that with a Gantt chart!

Now for the Two Small Details

WhatPaul fails to mention (because it is totally obvious to the enthusiastswho use the Pmachine product) is the critical need to keep customers andother stakeholders informed. In this regard:

• He and Rick handle their customer information interface perfectly, serving customers all over the world. To do so they rely heavily on the internet to keep their users informed through their forum, a wiki and their website, the latter providing up-to-date information on every conceivable subject relating to their products. Technically therefore, these things are part and parcel of their "project management system."
• On the other hand, he does not mention his incoming logistics problems (if indeed he has any) such as those which roofing contractors, legal offices, dental labs or municipal projects (for example) have to contend with. These require that suppliers also need to be fully in the loop without their conversations necessarily being visible to the business's clients or to each other, nor should the clients' conversations neccessarily be visible to the suppliers. In other words, here the conversations may have to be more private, but conversations nevertheless. Which in turn necessitates an ability to easily excerpt or edit private conversations for use "across the divide" so to speak.

We have designed JobWarden to cover both of these needs with specialattention to the environment in which smaller operations have tosurvive, by ensuring that the overheads are as low as we can make them,while covering the bases. You can find more detailhere if you would like to see how we provide a simple but effective toolfor keeping project participants of all kinds informed and involved inthe conversation.

A Word on Project/Job Terminology

When I contract with a plumber to install or upgrade a bathroom, both of us treat the ensuing effort as a JOB and we both refer to it as such. But for some reason if I tackle the same JOB myself, it magically becomes a PROJECT.There is not much logic to this, other perhaps than the fact that Iexpect the job to take up more time if I do it myself, and because itmay stretch my skills, whereas my contractor will do the job more as aroutine and to a familiar rythm. It seems that project managementsystems are not referred to as "job management systems" because of theassumed inherent "one-off" nature of projects. This is a badassumption, because my plumber loves to moan about how unique mybathroom job is because of the small space, my "unreasonable" ideasabout layout and equipment - yadda yadda yadda.

For these and other more weighty reasons, JobWarden uses the terms "job" and "project" interchangeably.

We though you might want to know.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

So, Let’s Have It!

We are interested in your thoughts on project management, particularly as they pertain to conversations between customers and providers and/or between team members.

Here's how you can air your opinions:

1. Browse our site and make comments wherever you see a "comments" link
2. Click on the "MORE..." link and add your comments via the "comments" link
3. e-mail us using our contact link
   

To limit the ever-present threat of spam, you will have to be registered before you can make an entry in our forums ... we hope you understand. We pledge (and it is our policy) to not disclose your name or contact details to any third party. It is up to you whether you choose to publish your e-mail address or any other details about yourself in the various comments areas on the main site.

We will regularly select insightful contributions to publish here with a link to your website if you include one.

Entries will be monitored and vetted. Spam and abusive or off-topic communications will be deleted, and the writer will be blacklisted.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A New Module for Jobwarden

We welcome any comments and suggestions relating to the newest addition to the JobWarden capabilities.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

JobWarden System Development

Many months have gone by since we last had anything to say about JobWarden - well, the time has come to change that.

We have been beavering away to implement the following major improvements and developments:

Voila! a New Module

We are proud to announce the availability of a new module, the Casework Management Module . The module is available in a number of variations to suit different kinds of casework - you may visit our Cases Demo area, which shows the module in it's Mediation Casework format. We have prepared a 1 page graphic (PDF format - so make sure your PDF reader is ready or download one ) illustrating the Features and Benefits of this module.

Improvements to the Jobs Management Module

While developing the Casework Module, we learned a few lessons about interfacing a long-ish list of activities. We have now updated the Jobs Management Module to take advantage of the interface we developed for the casework module. Visit the Jobs Demo. We hope you like it and we look forward to any comments and/or suggestions.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

What is Conversational Project Management?

To answer that, we need to ask:
    What is a “conversational project?” And to answer that, we need to remember:
    "What is a conversation?”

Many people believe, with some justification, that the art of conversation is lost. We do not agree entirely, but we have some sympathy for their point of view. Many “conversations” are really monologues - even two or more simultaneous monologues. And too many “conversations” are devoid of content - you know, conversations like:
A says:- “(insert adjective) weather!”
B replies:- “Yes, isn’t it?”

So what exactly IS a conversation? For example, from wikipedia we get (the emphases are mine)

A conversation is communication by two or more people, often on a particular topic. William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, the Dick Cavett Show, and many other television programs described as “talk shows” are exercises in conversation. Conversations are the ideal form of communication from at least one point of view, since they allow people with different views of a topic to learn from each other. A speech, on the other hand, is an oral presentation by one person directed at a group. Conversers naturally relate the other speaker’s statements to themselves, and insert themselves (or some degree of relation to themselves, ranging from the replier’s opinions or points to actual stories about themselves) into their replies. For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions. A successful conversation includes mutually interesting connections between the speakers or things that the speakers know. For this to happen, conversers must find a topic on which they can relate in some sense

So there you have it:

• Conversations are the ideal form of communication
• They allow people with different views of a topic to learn from each other
• Conversers naturally relate the other speaker’s statements to themselves
• For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions

Conversational Projects

To paraphrase what was said above, a conversational project should consist of interchanges in which all participants can bring their different views (preferably without merely descending into exchanges of differences,) where each can relate what the others are saying to themselves, and where each strives to make contributions which progress the project to mutual benefit. In my opinion, the most important and most elusive of these criteria is the one of recognizing and providing for the participants’ natural need to relate what others are saying to themselves. Unfortunately, too many projects are run more like secret societies, in which the conversations, if any, are incestuous in the sense that they are confined to the respective “in groups.” Suppliers, customers, teams, contractors, whatever, each converse among themselves about projects and run project management systems (if they run any systems at all,) by and for themselves, while throwing more-or-less limited bits of self-selected information over the transoms, rather than engaging in meaningful dialogues in which information is provided according to others’ stated needs.

This is not necessarily or even usually malicious or negligent - it is out of culturally ingrained custom-become-habit that this happens, aggravated by the transference of the habit into both management and IT systems. For this reason we have extremely powerful project management systems which are almost completely unintelligible to laymen - even articulate and very well educated laymen. Systems whose steep learning curves, burdensome resource requirements, arcane jargons and stilted cross-organizational interfaces render them of no interest to ordinary busy folk. To quote a business associate, “I am drowning in gantt charts which tell me almost nothing I need to know to run my project. I get what I need to know by talking to everyone involved all the time.”

Enter Conversational Project Management

Without the worldwide web, conversational project management without actually getting participants together physically, would be unthinkable. Imagine trying to manage a project using only a telephone? Yet many online project management systems do little to promote real conversations between participants. The most conversational phenomenon to take root on the web owes nothing to existing IT-based project management systems and everything to the conversational meme as articulated above - I refer to the phenomenon known as the weblog or “blog.” It is only a short step from the blog to the conversational project management system that is JobWarden

If you take the time to examine JobWarden, you will find it is conversationally blog-like, with added project management features, such as:

• The ability to track project status
• The ability to assign action items to individuals and track progress/performance - call them time cards if you wish
• Clients and/or suppliers can add entries and all participants can comment on existing entries
• Access can be password-controlled for security
• Status can be tracked via a calendar
• A highly effective, concise graphical project status is provided using sparklines

To explore further, poke around in our demo area, and please comment freely while you are there - we believe in practicing what we preach.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Let’s Face It - Its Overhead

There can be no doubt about it, project management systems impose an overhead on you which may not be justifiable because they are too complex and/or bureaucratic.

But Sometimes, Absolutely Necessary

There are some jobs which simply cannot be done effectively without a formal Project Management System (PMS.) Jobs like:

• Designing and building a hospital, a power station, an airliner or a nuclear submarine
• Organizing the London Marathon, staging a performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle or running a NASCAR race
• Implementing major software projects
  

Maybe A Good Idea?

There are jobs you can do without a formal PMS, but they tend to stress you out and you may end up with a crappy result because you can't stay on top of the "unforeseen happenings." Jobs like:

• Building a new home or small apartment block
  
• Installing an escalator to replace a stairway or refurbishing the air-conditioning for an office block
  
• Staging a local rock concert or running a series of local league football games
• Moving a business to a another area

Don't Bug Me

There are jobs that are routinely and successfully done without a formal PMS, such as:

• Refurbishing an interior, re-roofing a home, rebuilding an antique car, landscaping a garden
• Catering for or just planning a wedding, arranging a funeral, organizing a class reunion
• Rewiring a home, adding an extension, painting the outside of a building
• Moving to another city or country, relocating your office

It is easy to see that the higher the level of complexity, the greater the need for a formal PMS. For this reason almost all of the early project management protocols grew out of the need to formalize the management of projects which were so complex as to be almost impossible without them - projects like building the first nuclear submarines, the Apollo Missions and so forth. With such a heritage, it is no wonder that many of today's project management systems impose resource and know-how requirements, not to mention jargon, which frightens you, when all you want is some way to help with your conflicting pressures.

So Is There Any Help?

If you manage jobs and projects that are in the "Maybe a Good Idea?" category AND you have a number of projects with a number of different customers or independent participants going on at the same time, then JobWarden can help because it is light-weight and conversational. By "light-weight" we mean both:

• Requiring few of your resources in time money, personnel and infrastructure and
• Easy to use by anyone inyour organization, from CEO to the company computer geek and all disciplines in between.

By conversational, we mean ... erm ... conversational, as in interaction between people using a common language without the need for facilitators, gurus and interpreters.

We mean, of course, JobWarden.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

What’s New - Online at Last

We have added a number of new features to JobWarden since we made this entry. While maintaining JobWarden's conversational character, you can now also:

• Set up teams, add team members and assign individuals to specific tasks
  
• Schedule projects/jobs with action items and milestones, and enter time sheets
• Track jobs/projects for on-time, early or late status

We are just now adding the ability to also track the performance of team members against their assignments, and will post a more comprehensive "What's New" then.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Featured Demo - Dental

This may seem dull, but if you click on the link you may be surprised to see the power and flexibility of our job/project tracking features

Sunday, February 19, 2006

About JobWarden - Features

In JobWarden all documents, actions, team memberships and statuses relating to a job or project are presented through a single, flexible, interactive interface.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

About Jobwarden - Self Service

There is an interesting "Self Service" bandwagon springing up under the banner of "WEB2" with Microsoft joining in. It never hurts to have Microsoft sprinkle holy water on something!

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Join the Self-Service Revolution

Self-service is not just for cafeterias anymore!

The internet can short circuit the bottlenecks which prevent providers and users of information from communicating effectively.

Self-service via the net is "in" - for some reason its is called "web 2" or even "web 3". Unfortunately, when it comes to managing projects, most of the services are aimed at large corporate product and service providers, and most of the tools are either large, unwieldy, expensive, with long and steep learning curves, or all of the above. Even the best project management tools make it difficult to integrate the way that projects really work, with the routine information needs of customers. High-end project management tools are very well established and useful, provided your operation is big enough to be able to afford IT-proficient project managers familiar with their use - but what to do about all the users for whom utterance of the phrase "Project Management System" is a signal to switch off or invent another appointment.

Operations in which the the project manager is also the chief cook, bottle washer and scapegoat for everything that goes wrong (meaning YOU) are on their own with the proverbial ill-conceived collection of ill-assorted parts (mostly bits of paper) assembled into a distressing whole - otherwise know as a KLUGE.

JobWarden tries to keep it simple, but not stupid

• JobWarden short circuits the high-end IT and information handling bottlenecks that prevent service providers, customers and project team members from keeping up to date.
• JobWarden does not require providers of project information to do anything different than they are already doing - it just makes it easier and makes it accessible online.
• JobWarden suits users of project information who do not need to know, and DO NOT CARE TO KNOW, how to use project management systems such as Microsoft Project and DotProject.
• JobWarden makes project-related information more accessible by keeping all documentation such as contracts, memos, e-mails and invoices, as well as project status, forecasts and time sheets for a given job or project, in one secure place, accessible online.

Familiarize yourself with JobWarden, and let us know what you think.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

JobWarden Works for Buyers as Well As Providers

JobWarden is not only a powerful tool for contractors and providers of professional services who wish to improve their level of service to customers, but also a way in which buyers and procurement managers can make their own lives more productive.

If you manage a number of contractors and/or service providers, you could make JobWarden the interface through which you and your contractors are kept up-to-date and on track.

Your site structure

Because JobWarden's features and benefits work for both the buyer and the provider, buyers could specify JobWarden as their communication tool of choice, if their providers are not already using our service.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Online at Last!

The only news so far is that we are online and ready to serve you.

Maybe YOU will be our first visitor.

May we interview you?

Tell us what you think of this site by clicking on the "Comments" link at the foot of this entry.