Next-Gen Project Management
One of the jobs most important to business, and especially the business of technology, is the management of projects and tasks. In pretty much every business, groups of employees and outside contractors need to work together to complete essential projects. And, given the importance of projects, one would think project management would be one of the most vibrant, competitive and important fields in software. But, instead, in many ways it has become a stagnant backwater of enterprise applications. This is due in a certain degree to the success of Microsoft Office Project. Despite many years of competition, Project has remained the biggest player in project management, and its file format is a de facto standard. But there has also been a surprising resistance to change in project management. Over the years, we've seen many interesting new applications that attempted to bring new methods and processes to project management, tying in projects to bigger and more collaborative environments such as groupware systems and corporate portals. While these systems gained some converts, they failed to really change how projects were managed, leaving many users to return to the familiar world of Gantt charts and Project. Recently, we've seen Web 2.0 standards and technologies applied to project and task management. This makes a great deal of sense in many ways. After all, wikis, blogs and Web-based apps are all about shared and collaborative work spaces. These Web 2.0 systems definitely have their share of fans, especially those outside the traditional world of hard-core project management. However, while these systems have low learning curves and are easy to get up and running on, they lack many of the tracking and management tools required for any serious business project. Nonetheless, although past attempts at innovation have failed to radically change the world of project management, there are vendors out there trying to lead the way to the next generation of project management. Two new products that went into beta in February have clearly set their sights on changing the way people collaborate on and manage projects and tasks. Both LiquidPlanner and Lunarr are SAAS (software as a service) offerings and firmly set in the world of Web 2.0 -- with complex, Web-based GUIs and plenty of social and collaborative features. Of the two products, LiquidPlanner, from the company of the same name, is closer to a traditional project management tool and will be more familiar to those used to working in tools such as Project. However, LiquidPlanner's key differentiating feature is its tolerance of and ability to deal with uncertainty. LiquidPlanner is designed to take into account the changing aspect of project timelines and deliverables, and it works to help project teams estimate project completion and to detect and respond to changes that can cause a project to run late. Lunarr's namesake software, on the other hand, is a completely different type of product. It's really a stretch to even call it a project management application, as it lacks most standard project management features, such as scheduling. What Lunarr offers is a fairly radical new take on how people work together to complete a task, especially tasks based on documents or Web pages and applications. The product creates what Lunarr terms a back page for any document or Web page loaded into the service. On the back page is all the collaborative information tied to that document or site, including every e-mail exchange. This means that every piece of information, discussion and other associated content tied to a document or project is gathered in one place (the back of the document) rather than scattered across a multitude of applications, documents and e-mail threads. Of course, both LiquidPlanner and Lunarr could fail to change the culture of project and task management. But, eventually, project management will have to join the 21st century. And both applications point toward a new way of getting things done. Click here to read the review of LiquidPlanner |
Comments (5)
Strange you profile two marginal companies when there are a few that are really impacting and changing the Project marketplace. Projity is one that we use: Project-ON-Demand is their SaaS offering and it combines an AJAX user interface with a complete replacement of Microsoft Project and it is $19/month. The SaaS nature of the business lets my team manage projects in the USA, Germany and Australia. It is a better solution than Microsoft Project and is easy on the cashflow!
In addition there are other solutions out there that are really making a difference. OpenProj has been downloaded over 300,000 times and has been translated into many languages. I follow them but needed a SaaS solution. OpenProj is a free, open source desktop solution that is also from Projity. This is enough on the Projity bandwagon cheering section but I did find it odd that you choose those solutions when there are others that are in fact changing the landscape for the first time.
Posted by Stephen Jameson | March 3, 2008 9:44 AM
The main problem is there is no easy way to crack this nut. SAAS is probably the most likely place, but paradoxically they wont have the market size to pull it off(unless they out-flank MS by using a Google-like approach---lots of tiny pennys adding up). The other factor is that the same personality traits that make a good project manager also belong to folks that dont want a lot of noise on the outside from a new "solution", (this will date me but...), like Lotus 1-2-3 being replaced by Excel---nobody wants to go through that again. We will live with MS Project, so the "new" paradigm has to be good. Not easy. Maybe some foreign company (China Inc?) will come up with something.
Posted by Kevin Gaza | March 4, 2008 9:00 AM
While I am no fan of the superfluous overhead of PMP style project management and it's progeny,MS Project (et al); I would be greatly surprised if yet another technique/format for communication (herein Web 2.0) would somehow improve the situation.
Oddly, the very features innate to Web 2.0 - particularly e-mail alerting on expiry of a task, (ostensibly extensible to all in the given task/workflow dependency chain in realtime) was the most disliked (thus unproductive) element I have yet encountered in many years of various PM schemes ("a rose by ay other name ..."). When blindly enforced, team members quickly learned to "game" the scheme.
Despite the earnest desire to track progress and instill meaningful metrics, projects fail because of bad plans OR bad execution of good plans (little is learned from projects that already succeeded). Try as we may to find one-size-fits-all "systems" to track successes and/or mourn failures, we cannot escape the simple need for timely earnest communication with a knowledgeable single-point-of-contact for escalation to empowered stakeholders - at the start and at the good/bad end.
I have seen some truly awful projects and some truly awful project managers but I have never heard tell of any failure caused by the method of networked information transfer during the project.
Posted by Bill OBrien | March 5, 2008 6:22 PM
the reason why there hasnt been much excitement around the project management tools is because we all know that project failure has little to do with the tools used.
The causes of project failure have more to do with poor organisational systems (which includes the poor communication and a lack of commitment to project objectives) also in to a reasonable degree the shortage of skilled project managers and subject matter experts.
These are more like people / organisational culture issues than issues with the technology used.
Posted by oladele Ayuba | March 23, 2008 6:21 AM
I agree with the comments above, no PM software is a replacement for good PM skills of the leads and the team. Yet, good PM soft makes it easeir on the people involve. No revolution, but tiny evolutionary steps, if you ask me.
Perosnally I find AJAX solutions a bit sluggish, but Saas is a reason enough to overlook that drawback.
Posted by michael kariv | April 6, 2008 2:34 AM