Journyx Project Management Blog

Friends, customers, vaguely interested parties, lend us your thoughts… Journyx would very much like five short minutes of your time and the answers to a few little (mostly multiple choice) questions. In return for doing us this small favor, we offer you a chance to win a $500 Amazon gift card. Yes, you read that right - $500 US Dollars.

We’ll hold a drawing at 1:00 pm CDT on Wednesday May 7th and one lucky survey taker will win a chunk of change to spend on nearly anything his or her heart desires (while we personally recommend buying approximately 29 copies of our CEO Curt Finch’s book All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy, we’ll understand if you want to stop at an even dozen).

Just take the survey, leave us your email address (so we can notify you if you win) and see if you’re the luckiest duck in the pond.

The next time you hear the words ‘bottom-line’ when you’re sitting in the audience at a company meeting, don’t roll your eyes. Instead, think about all the ways that you as a project manager can help to boost that bottom-line.

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Timesheet 7.6m1, the latest version of Timesheet, is now publicly available. This release addresses technical issues in Timesheet 7.6 and is a recommended upgrade for all customers using Timesheet 7.6.

Download the patch for existing Timesheet 7.6 installs at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/mpatch.html

Find out what’s fixed in this release at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/76m1_changedoc.html

Download the full Timesheet 7.6m1 installers at: http://journyx.com/rss/gendl.html

While Teaching a Project Management workshop in the UK in the late 1980s, we posed the question, “What is Project Quality?” One participant responded, “Quality is meeting or exceeding the customer’s project needs.” We recorded that insight on the whiteboard, spelling Qualitty with two t’s. Then we spoke of the need to be close to the Customers, to spend time to understand needs, and so on.

After a while, one embarrassed participant pointed out that we had misspelled Quality. To which we responded, Au Contraire, we have merely exceeded the Customer’s needs. This was an insightful moment for all of us…

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• How can I ensure that employees aren’t exceeding their vacation time balances when approving future leave requests?
• How can I view approval status information in reports?

Click to continue.

Hello children. It’s time for another installment of “The Grumpy IT Guy,” or what I like to call, “Why the Hell Can’t People Just Do Their Jobs?”

This month’s installment comes to you courtesy of a large telecommunications company who, for anonymity’s sake, we will refer to as “XO Communications.” We discovered last month that when you call our fax line from an XO line, it doesn’t answer. It rings forever. When you call from anywhere else in the world, it answers. This was a new development; it had been working just fine three weeks ago.

Now, this occurred right near the time that my Veep of Sales likes to call “End of Month.” Being March, it was also what my Leadership Team likes to call “End of Quarter.” They also seem to like to have these things called “sales” which do things like “fund payroll” and other minor details. Since I am strongly invested in my ability to continue paying my bartenders after work, it peaked my interest to hear, “THE FAX IS DOWN! THE FAX IS DOWN! NO ONE CAN SELL!”

Alright, well, that’s not really true. Our sales team is top-notch, man, and they can sell all day long, fax machine or no fax machine. However, I will admit that it is remarkably difficult to get the orders to them if, say, the fax machine is not working. I crawled out of my cave into the bright fluorescent-lit world of my colleagues and stumbled over to the fax machine. I dialed out, and it worked. I dialed the number with my cell phone, and it worked. I wondered why the sales team felt the need to turn my place of work into a House of Lies. I dialed the fax number from my office phone. It rang about 30 times before I gave up.

“Aha!” I said to myself. I liked the sound so much, I said it again, out loud this time. “Aha!”

I picked up the phone and called XO Communications. It also rang 30 times, but being used to that, I waited. At about ring 9,283,182, they answered. I explained my situation and they said they’d get right on it.

I received my ticket number via email and a few minutes later, I received a second email telling me the ticket was closed. “It’s a Time Warner number,” they said. Annoyed, I went to the online helpdesk and tried to re-open the ticket to explain the situation. This is not possible at XO Communications, you see, because once they kill a ticket, it stays dead.

I opened a new ticket, fully explaining the situation. Their response was that this is a Time Warner problem, and they closed the ticket again.

Irritated, I opened yet another ticket and waited. A day or more. Then I came in one morning and saw an email stating that the problem was resolved. Okay, not bad, I thought. Only 1 1/2 days to get this fixed. I picked up my phone and dialed the fax number, which rang… and rang… and rang. And, some say, if it’s very quiet at night and there is a full moon, you can still hear the ringing today!

Flabbergasted, I went to re-open the ticket. Oh, right. So I submitted a new ticket, explaining the situation again. It got closed. The problem was not fixed. I think we’re four business days (Thurs/Fri, Mon/Tue) into the process at this point; it is now April and a new quarter. I decided to call my sales rep over at XO. He got someone to call me back, they got a good line on the problem and they told me it should be fixed by morning. The next morning, I came in to find another email saying that the problem had been resolved. Yay for getting my sales guy to help! I picked up my phone and happily dialed the fax number.

Yes, you know where this is going.

I called my rep back and left him a voicemail. Left several that day, in fact. Left several more later that week. A week later, after I left a message telling him to come get his equipment and that we’re contemplating suing for breach of contract, he called me back. All of a sudden, XO decided to take me seriously, and I got some real techs on the phone. I was finally working with someone who had a clue!

After several technician phone calls (and two more closed, unresolved tickets later), here’s what we know. If you’re calling my fax line from an XO.com VOIP line, you’re not going to get through. Even though you did back around March 25th. They have, at least, conceded that this might be on their side of things.

And you wonder why IT is grumpy?

-The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

April: T.S. Eliot called it the cruellest month. And here in the USA most folks would agree with that assertion, thanks to the dreaded tax day. We’ve already covered taxes pretty well (uno, dos), so let’s talk about something infinitely more pleasant. Miscommunication.

Osmo Wiio^*, the Finnish communications scholar, posited quite a few laws of communication, my favorite of which is the cheerily upbeat:

If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.

Truer words were never spoken. Just ask yourself how you respond to emails suggesting changes to your pet project. Do you take them in positive, upbeat ways are based on the most beneficial possible interpretation of what was written? Or do you instinctively take the darkest view of the communique in front of you? I’m more guilty of the latter than the former, I admit.

The plus side of this personal failing, though, is that I understand that the same tendency lies in the hearts of my coworkers. So I try very hard (too hard, perhaps) to compensate for this in my own communications. But, if we stick with Wiio, we come to the next nugget:

The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.

I’m not sure there’s any getting past that point, so we’ll just move on before we fail any further.

Let’s consider Wiio’s suggestion that when you and another person are conversing, there are actually six people involved in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

Sound like a reasonable explanation for the difficulties you have in communicating with, say, your boss? I could go on for pages about the arguments and difficulties I’ve encountered because #3 and #5 didn’t match up. Actually, I’d be willing to bet that it’s that dissonance that is the greatest source of friction in my business communications.

Or am I just communicating too much and risking failure here?

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

^* Special thanks to Jason at Signal vs. Noise for bringing Osmo Wiio to the forefront of my brain last week.

Hubris, big egos, poor foresight, and lack of humanity kill great companies — small and large — every year. We can learn from their misguided decisions, but we need to do it before more of our businesses fail and more of our country’s leadership is lost forever.

The following list of mistakes represents some of the dumbest thinking by companies across all industries. Read about them and learn from their failures.

#1: “Let’s cut back on customer service levels to save money”

“Due to unusually high levels of calls, we are experiencing long delays before we can answer your call.” What kind of crap is that? What they really mean is, “Because we don’t want to spend as much money on customer service as we should, we’ll put you in a queue for as long as you can stand it before hanging up.” I recently spent 45 minutes in a Verizon queue that never ended. On the other hand, T-Mobile answered my call in under 20 seconds. Guess who has my business and my loyalty now? This is particularly dumb because the cost to acquire a new customer easily offset the costs of having a few more operators.

#2: “Human beings can be replaced with machines to answer our phones”

Today, it’s a treat when we call a business and get an actual employee on the phone. Very few voicemail systems are as smart as they are supposed to be, and these poor tech systems cause untold losses in sales, customer loyalty, and goodwill. I am seeing a lot of real-world evidence that the cost of having a receptionist is easily offset by the improved customer satisfaction generated. My advice: Break away from the crowd and show your customers that you care about how they feel.

Read the rest at TechRepublic.

Most project managers have had to deal with performance problems on a project at one point in their careers. Such issues are usually uncomfortable adventures for the project manager. This uncomfortable feeling usually has two causes:

- The project manager is usually not the functional manager of the team member and therefore does not have total authority for personnel management.

- The project manager usually doesn’t have the right level of experience or training to effectively deal with people problems.

In fact, many experienced personnel managers will tell you that dealing with performance problems are the hardest aspects of their job. It’s even more problematic for a typical project manager.

The first reaction of many project managers is to ignore a performance problem and hope that it goes away. It’s possible that the situation will take care of itself, but unfortunately, this usually isn’t the case.

Read more at TechRepublic.

Naturally, those of us who can expect a refund don’t mind doing our taxes nearly as much as our peers do. Getting money back is always a pleasurable experience… so why only experience it at tax time? Tracking employee time through an automated system can yield financial returns almost immediately in several ways:

- Reduce Float

Small businesses especially suffer from the cash float problem. If you must pay to create something before you sell it, there is generally a window of about 45 days or more during which you have not yet received your money back. This is a large problem when you consider the fact that float is often equivalent to two or three months of income. If your company makes, for example, $300,000 annually, your float will likely be between $50,000 and $75,000. This is a significant amount and can hurt you if you don’t find a way to lower it.

Automating employee time collection is a great way to reduce float. Once you get the paper timesheets off of your floor, you will be able to bill customers and collect payment much faster. Not only that, but automation lowers the number of errors in data collection. Think about it: invoicing is probably the last place where you would want errors to turn up.

- Better Project Management

If you are a knowledge worker-based business, chances are that you don’t know your costs. You might think you do, but consider what expenses are necessary in order to complete the average project. There is time, which means staff resource and labor cost. (The more a customer requires, the more time is expended, meaning that some of your customers are cheaper to work with than others.) Also, have you considered the fact that you pay rent and utilities for the office where the project is done, as well as an IT department to support the technology you use for it? Much more goes into a project than many people realize, and while it is easy for manufacturers to determine their costs on a project-by-project basis, it can be quite difficult for knowledge workers to do so.

The best way for knowledge workers to understand their costs is through effective project accounting. Having a system in place for tracking employee time and expenses is a great way to start. Once you begin doing so, you can eventually implement indirect cost tracking methods for expenses such as rent, lighting and IT. This will lead your company to per-person, per-project profitability, meaning you will be able to estimate project length and cost more accurately and make better strategic decisions, saving you wasted time and money.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO