A serious project management solution

If this reads like your own life story, then you are an experienced project manager!

Why does this story play out time and time again all over the world? Simple...phase and task analysis simply DOES NOT WORK. Never has, never will.

Why do projects get delayed?

Why? Any project involving more than 1 person is likely to be complicated.  You can't possibly know every task that is needed at the beginning of a project, or how long they'll take to achieve.

However...if you're good, and you track activities well, you can generally get quite expert at making an "educated guess" as to how long the NEXT phase of a project with a similar team and similar workload will take to achieve it. Also, if your team understands clearly the goals of the project and you work in short but measurable "cycles", you stand a better chance of keeping a project "on-track" and being able to manage it. 

Furthermore, if your team actually has an understanding of what other people are doing on the same team, then everyone has a chance to improve their own self-management

If "executive" management's strategic goals (the goals that cause the project to exist in the first place) can actually jive with the work people are actually doing...then you have a "the dream" system, where everyone is getting the information they crave, and people can work without managers running around and bugging them for status reports.

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 The Dream

In 1999, towards the end of the Internet tech boom, I spent that year managing 23 projects with teams spread around the world and quite a few sub-managers.

I didn't get much sleep, and trying to pull status reports from 60 people every day presented a real challenge - it was a serious nightmare to track. We also had quite a bit of slippage that would have been caught had I really known what was actually happening beyond the status reports.

 At the time, I longed for, searched for, but never found a system to manage projects that tracked everyone's activities properly - until now.

Imagine if you had Gantt charts like the one on the right that were collected directly from your team as they were working.

Note the little icons like $ which indicates an expense occurred and the various color dots which show what the priority was of each tasks.
 

To do this, the trick is to use a combination of two products from the same company - Mobipro, in concert with each other.

Project Controller and TaskTimer
 

The first is called Project Controller™ and it essentially allows project managers and executives to plan goals for a company, then assign projects to those goals and milestones to those projects. It then helps them to manage themselves and plan their lives so that they can be good managers.

The second is called TaskTimer™, and you give one to every member of your team.

TaskTimer™  looks like any other heavily-featured PIM (Personal Information Manager), it has a task area, people to call area, appointment area...in general it's a very good PIM that people enjoy using, and by using it, people instantly impose on themselves good time management.

For example, they can brainstorm the tasks they need to do today, every morning, or.. those tasks might be assigned by someone else. Then they assign a priority to each task. One way of using it is with the "ABC technique":

A - Urgent and Important

B - Urgent

C - Important but not Urgent

At the end of the day, everyone can assign the tasks they didn't finish to another day. These simple time management features train everyone (even me) to be able to prioritize, estimate their own abilities, track their accomplishments, and causes them to self-evaluate every day it's used.

Workload Views

It also has views that show your team's workload. Overworked guy that I am, when I started using TaskTimer it kept telling me that I had booked myself 187%!

After awhile, I realized it was right, I was attempting to much and reality dictated that I needed to stretch out my weekly schedule.

Now here's a neat trick -

Every time your team checks off a task, or finishes an appointment, or lists an expense, or calls someone, or does ANY activity that pertains to a project -  it updates a corporate database - so that whatever you did...shows up on a myriad of all sorts of interesting Gantt-chart views such as this Single Project Day View...

This method of monitoring every activity, provides incredible metrics that you can readily use to predict the odds that your next milestone will be met. In fact there's even a "clone" option that allows you to take all the metrics you discovered in a previous project and "clone" it to create a schedule for a new one.

ProjectController and TaskTimer show you instantly when people have been slow or fast at their tasks (all the red in the above diagram shows that I was slow on a little one week project).

If you're comfortable with the skill levels of your team, then frankly, you don't really have to worry about thinking up the tasks...the people who we assume know what their job is tell YOU what their tasks are and when they plan on doing them, so you simply set the goals, the milestones for each phase,  then track and do everything else a project manager should be doing...like helping to facilitate their work!

Furthermore, project slippage changes colors in the Gantt chart view and "Executive Views" from green, to yellow to red...so that managers can "dive down" on the red items and figure out where the delays are, and check the green items to find out what's working.

There are so MANY views of the same project, that you'll never get bored...you can slice and dice the data in ways that would be totally impossible with any other project management tool.

Using it

While this application is largely unknown in North America, it's actually quite popular with 500,000+ users across Europe where companies like Airbus, BMW, Phillip's, Ericcson, SAS, Saab, Unisys,  3M, Seimen's and Lufthansa - have adopted it
 

Now that you've seen what it can do, you know why!  To be sure...when you first launch it, it's not completely intuitive, it does take some getting used to, and a tutorial video (like one we'll have on this page very soon) should help get you off on the right foot.

There are a LOT of functions in this system, more than you'll likely use. For example, there are about 8 Gantt chart views alone! So the best idea is to take an area of the system and learn it, then work on the next, and so on.

For simple PIM use, it's pretty easy...for example to create a task, hit the F5 key, pick what you want to add to your task list and it's there.

But...if you want to play with the task, the options available are extensive.

A multitude of wizards make a lot of the operations easy on the mind.

Key Facts

The more you dive into the system, the more interesting it gets...here are some facts that apply to both TaskTimer™ and ProjectController™ :

• It's not expensive, around $175US per seat for TaskTimer,  (or less in quantity). A team of 10 people costs around $2000 to get equipped with the basics, though the sexy add-ins like TimeWap (synchronizes your Tasktimer with an online database which provides not only Internet access to your data, but cellar phone access via any Wap-equipped cellular phone)...will likely cause you to beg to extend the budget to include it. After all...sometimes you're on the road!
  
   
• Project Controller is about another $300 on top of TaskTimer, and you need at least one of these per team for the project manager(s).
   
• It tracks billing costs of just about every aspect of the project.
   
• It's available in 7 languages which are all interoperable.
   
• Mobipro has connectivity products that all you to access the information using WAP, telephones, Pocket PC's, Palm Pilots, and the Internet, so you can update task and project status while sitting in an airport waiting for your plane.
   
• It works with MindManager where you can brainstorm tasks (Wow!)
   
• Though it comes with it's own database, it also works with MANY corporate databases out-of-the-box such as DB2, Oracle, and MS-SQL. It's as they say "server-friendly".
   
• You can build workflows, assign tasks to anybody in the organization instantly, and create status reports instantly
   
• It stores all documents related to the project so that everyone working on the project can access those documents, so you don't need to purchase a document management system.
   
• Has built-in e-mail support and and every report, document can be created with a built-in totally customizable report generator that includes mail-merge!

The list goes on. Honestly -  the reason you see this product sold at the I & A Research Success Store is this... it's bloody fantastic, top-of-the-top.

I know I'm gushing, but go try it, throw in some tasks and assign them to projects, and then look at the Gantt charts, and you'll gush too!

If I were to list the "cons", I'd have to say...well, there's a lot more features than you'll ever need... so the user interface definitely takes some time getting used to.

But do this - try it on a small project, the trial period should about cover it.

Download it now, then e-mail me at charles@iaresearch or call at 1-888-339-7250 and I'd be happy to schedule an appointment and personally demonstrate how to use it, and show you the many options that go beyond what we can show on the website.