Journyx Project Management Blog

• Should I use Total Cost Reports or Rate Reports to report on my billable time?
• Update - How can I view the approval process audit log for a selected time or expense sheet?

Get these and other useful tidbits at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/tips/

We mentioned this way back in January, but now seems like a good time to revisit the news that as of Monday, March 31 2008, Journyx will cease all support of Timesheet 5.6x. Moreover, Journyx will stop selling maintenance contracts for Timesheet 5.6x as of December 31,2007. So consider this your friendly warning to include some funding for a Timesheet upgrade in your budgets.

But don’t despair! We’re ready, willing and able to help you update that dependable old Timesheet install to our latest and greatest masterpiece, Timesheet 7.5. Visit the Journyx site to find out more about the latest version of Timesheet or to contact our Sales Team to get started on the road to upgrade nirvana.

Learn more about Timesheet 7.5: http://journyx.com/rss/products/timesheet/75features.html

Contact the Journyx Sales Team to upgrade: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/contactsales.html

Software-as-a-service may have come into the enterprise through “the bathroom window,” but it’s definitely becoming part of the mainstream, says SaaS expert Mike West, vice president at Saugatuck Technology Inc., a boutique management consulting and subscription research company focused on disruptive technologies.

Count ‘em all up at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cworld-ninesaas.html

Journyx is pleased to announce public availability of the latest update to Timesheet, version 7.5m2. This release includes bug fixes and interface enhancements.

Journyx recommends that users of 7.1, 7.5, and 7.5m1 upgrade to this release at their earliest convenience. New customers will automatically receive this version of Timesheet when they download.

Get the patch & instructions at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/mpatch.html

Or download the full installer at: http://journyx.com/rss/gendl.html

The fear of failure ranks with public speaking as one of our biggest fears. The causes of failure are widespread and usually specific to the project at hand, but there are some common threads that run through failing projects.

Conquer your fears at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/psmart-succeed.html

You need to be more profitable. And the newest tool from your friends at Journyx, lovingly christened CustomerCostTracker, can help. With this new solution you can:

• Understand Your Costs
• Bid Smarter (Thanks To Better Estimates)
• Shorten The Billing Cycle

CustomerCostTracker is built on the same foundation as our patented and proven flagship application, Journyx Timesheet, but it’s been streamlined to work “out of the box” for consultancies who need to know just how much each of their customers costs them to serve.

CustomerCostTracker is available as a hosted SaaS application, which means there’s no software to install. We offer a 30-day free trial and after that CCT is only $5/user per month.

Check out our new baby at: http://customercost.com

As fall begins, my thoughts often turn to the future. One of the common questions for IT professionals thinking about the future is whether to pursue a career in management.

It’s a good time to think about this if you’ve been purely technical for a long time. The coming wave of baby boomer retirements will leave plenty of management jobs available.

But how do you know whether management is really for you? Here are a few thoughts for the curious.

Reasons to not go into management:

Desire for money. While management jobs can pay well, not all do. In fact, when I managed a large group, there were a number of purely technical people who reported to me who made more than I did. And I thought that was appropriate. Pay is not a matter of position, but of supply and demand. Rare and valuable technical skills may be worth more than relatively common management skills.

Desire for power. One of the best-kept secrets of management is that the higher up you go in an organization, the more — not less — dependent on others you become. Successful managers know that power is mostly an illusion. The more people you manage, the more your success is the sum total of theirs. Alone, you are just a person with some ideas. The desire to dominate generally foments coups, not loyalty or productivity.

Read on at ComputerWorld.

You know, being a software support guy is a tough job.

And I know it’s tough. I used to do it, although what I did was more like bug fixing rather than one-on-one customer interaction-oriented support. Considering my personality, bug fixing was probably a much easier job than the one that first line support people do.

Nobody ever calls into support and says, “Things are working great! Thought you should know.”

You’re more likely to get calls from people asking, “What’s a backspace key?”

I remember back at IBM, I once heard my manager tell a customer, “No … the backslash key, the one above the enter key that also has the vertical bar symbol on it. Not the one with the question mark. No. No. Not that one. No. Aargh!”

You couldn’t always tell from his voice when he was getting pissed off, but you could always see it on his face. Here’s a guy that knows more about NFS packet loss than anyone on the planet and he’s dealing with this nimrod who can’t find the ‘\’ key.

And it was really funny watching him steam up. At least I thought it was at the time.

Anyway, that’s all just a long way of saying that I know it’s not easy. And personally, it means a lot to me when customers react positively - when they say things or send notes to us about how great our support is.

So if you’ve gotten good support from some software company recently, please send their CEO a note. He’ll appreciate it.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

How often do we say to one another: I just wish there were more hours in the day? Well, there can be. When you use Project Management techniques to your advantage, you can be singing the Rolling Stones classic, Time Is on My Side.

Here are some of my favorite time-saving tips that you can apply both to your business and home life.

1. Avoid the Long, Rambling To-Do List. One thing that gets many of us in trouble is when we have enormous To-Do lists that have no prioritization, and they just continue to grow like a pile of laundry. What’s dangerous about this, is that we get overwhelmed and the To-Do list starts to become the enemy instead of our ally.

2. Prioritize. At the beginning of every day, look at what you have to do and prioritize it. What’s red hot and time specific? Do that first. What do you need to do today to move forward on some of your Big Hairy Audacious Goals? What’s at your Bus Stop? These are things you are waiting for from others. What’s on your passion list? This is what you will you do to recharge your batteries and give you energy.

Read the rest at PM World Today.

Large projects can generate a lot of documents. I have been on a couple of projects that generated hundreds of documents over a two-year period. In each case, I needed to share much of this documentation with many other stakeholders in the organization. For these kinds of projects, you need to create a document repository. This repository can be managed with software tools, or you can have a simple folder/file structure on a shared directory.

If you’re going to create a repository, you need to establish some rules and processes to protect the integrity of the stored documents. For example, all of your team members usually need full access to any of the documents that they create. However, you need to decide whether any team member can update documents created by other team members. In some projects this would be perfectly acceptable, while on other projects this would be considered a security breach.

You also should decide whether anyone on the team can add documents into your repository, or whether the update process will be handled by a person filling the role of a Librarian. Your first thought might be that having a central Librarian role to control updates to the document repository is an exercise in bureaucracy and overhead. However, the role might make sense.

In the large projects I mentioned earlier, it was important that the documents added to the repository reflected a consistent and high quality. We felt there would be a tendency for the overall quality of the repository to degrade if everyone had the ability to add, delete, and modify documents anywhere. Instead, a Librarian was established to control the process of adding documents. We used the following simple process.

1. Team members submitted documents to the Librarian at the end of every phase and the end of each individual project. (Remember that we had a large program made up of many individual projects.) The team member completed a form that described the deliverable, the keywords, approval date, recommended storage location, etc.

Read the rest at TechRepublic.