Journyx Project Management Blog

We’ve all observed how teams, departments, and companies have been changing over the last decade or so. Telecommuting is more common; the practice of hiring people who never even come onsite is growing. It should come as no surprise, then, that tools to help teams communicate “beyond email” are springing up like hippies at a Rolling Stones concert.

During the dotcom bubble, a number of products emerged that were supposed to help teams work more effectively. Most of these tools were too complex, too ineffectual, or just so far ahead of their time that they ultimately failed, for whatever reason. In addition, most companies simply weren’t ready to hand over the reins of control to an offsite team for something as core to the business as communication.

But times have changed. Between the rise of the telecommuter and the changes that Salesforce.com has made on the business world by making it okay to outsource critical data and services, the industry is ripe for tools and applications that make it easier and more effective for teams to communicate, manage themselves, and work together—whether they’re 2,000 miles away or just down the hall.

Read more at:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=460396&rl=1

This is the first in a series of articles that will examine some of the most commonly used decision-making methods for the selection or rejection of individual projects throughout the project portfolio management process. These methods determine whether or not a given project (either proposed or in process) should be included in your next capital budget. After a brief discussion of the economic theories upon which these individual methods are based, I’ll cite the rationales for (1) not relying on these theories alone and (2) using as well, and sometimes instead, practical rules of thumb in real-world decision making.

Although no specific background is assumed, a little prior knowledge of project management and corporate finance, including probability theory and statistics, will facilitate your reading of the articles. For those readers wanting or needing up-to-date tutorials on these subjects, the References provide pertinent information. In addition, the appendixes at the end of this article contain supplementary material for the reader interested in further insight into these topics. And, throughout this series, I’ll illustrate how commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) software tools can aid in the management of larger, more complex portfolios. In short, these articles will be about computer-assisted common sense.

Read more at:
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/article.php/3595036

Like a bolt out of the blue Journyx is happy to announce that Timesheet 7.1 is available to one and all. This latest version builds on our commitment to making Timesheet not only the most powerful and full-featured time and expense solution on Planet Earth, but the most attractive and easiest to use, too. Timesheet 7.1 is a free upgrade for paid maintenance customers using Timesheet 7.0 and is more-than-reasonably priced for everyone else.

Learn more about the features and improvements in Timesheet 7.1 by visiting the Journyx website at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/products/timesheet/71features.html

Download Timesheet 7.1 today at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/gendl.html

There’s an old adage that says the best time to make a change is when things are going well. What this suggests is that, too often, we wait until things start weakening to make a change. Over a year ago, I decided that my company might be better served by evaluating our position when things are going smoothly—to look for opportunities to make things better and to anticipate events that could create adverse effects.

Our business involves managing compliance among insurance carriers, agents and state regulators. While that sounds simple enough, it is a very complex industry below the surface. Much of what we provide our customers is the management of these complexities by keeping track of regulatory changes and providing tools to manage compliance. However, the way in which we delivered these services was equally complex, and not particularly scalable. We called the shots, and good things happened, but we weren’t organized for accepting and processing feedback from our customers, not to mention the market as a whole.

See more clearly at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/cworld-changefocus.html

In addition to marketing in over 20 countries, Blinc Inc., a beauty products firm based in Herndon, Va., has to coordinate business divisions spread out across the entire country — from a call center in Colorado to a fulfillment and shipping warehouse in Florida, from an accountant in Washington to a purchasing manager in Vancouver, British Columbia.

‘We were relying on Outlook and e-mail to send data back and forth,’ says CEO Lewis Farsedakis. ‘We were actually faxing customer data from the call center that then needed to be retyped and recoded for other applications. We had no way to handle it.’

Then Farsedakis discovered on-demand software. In January 2006, Blinc put the bulk of its customer relationship data — along with shipping, accounting and other company information — online in an integrated bundle of management applications hosted by NetSuite. Farsedakis pays a modest annual licensing fee for the software, and a monthly per-user fee. For that, his 15 full-time employees and hundreds of sales reps nationwide have access to real-time customer, product and sales data — all of which can be instantly integrated — at the click of a mouse anytime, anywhere. ‘It has made us much more efficient,’ says Farsedakis.

Bite into this article at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/inc-lureods.html

Journyx recently announced its partnership with KaleidaCare Management Solutions, the provider of the most comprehensive on-line client management system for social service organizations. The partnership will allow Journyx to help KaleidaCare’s customers - social service agencies - to track and manage their resources through a comprehensive timesheet and expense report tracking solution with a robust reporting system.

Get the whole story at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/press/pr20060404.html

• How can I stop approval email notifications from being sent on weekends?
• How can I sort project search results on the Project Management screen to show the hierarchical project tree?

Get these great tips and more at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/tips/

Being a project manager today is a lot different from playing that role a few years ago. Just ask Brenda Dunn, a project manager/business analyst at Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. in Fairfax, Va. She recently headed up a project to build a critical relocation system for the privately owned realty firm.

For several hours each day over a period of more than six months, Dunn worked intensively with users from five different departments to hash out exactly how the system would work. “I’d sit with them and get approval on the workflow, the drop-down menus, the names of fields — everything,” she says. Part of Dunn’s job was to corral all of the users’ opinions and needs into a single, unified system and help them visualize what it would look like.

Once the requirements and screen prototypes were solidified, Dunn sent them to 12 offshore programmers in India whom she had previously met to tutor in the ways of the U.S. real estate business. Then she coordinated communication between the users and programmers, remaining mindful of the cultural and time-zone differences.

Read more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/project/story/0,10801,110268,00.html

At my partner’s request, I finally uninstalled Homeworld (still the best game ever). That left me with lots of time to catch up on my reading, so I plowed through Stellman and Greene’s Applied Software Project Management and Stepanek’s Why Software Projects Fail back to back. They made an interesting pair, and the differences between their authors’ positions say a lot about where the software industry is today.

Stellman and Greene’s book is the more conventional of the two. Their aim is to put everything you need to know to run a small-to-medium-sized software project between two covers. After a short introduction, which lays out the principles they believe successful managers should follow, the book is divided into two parts. The first, “Tools and Techniques,” includes all the usual suspects: planning, estimation, schedules, reviews, requirements, design and programming, and testing. While their language is sometimes a little highfalutin’ (”Wideband Delphi estimates,” anyone?), the advice is all solidly grounded and eminently practical. It’s all been said before, but as covers go, this is as good as The Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law.”

Read more at:
http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184429854