Customer Forum by Invision Power Services, IP.Board

After much reading, searching and questioning, I finally settled on a user Forum from Invision Power Services called IP.Board. It's quite flexible, and Invision Power offers fairly cheap hosting for the size of board we're looking at.

It supports, amongst a lot of other features, Sub domains (forum.kadonk.com), although the setup required a few tickets to Invision. However their support seems impeccable, and I received answers and fixes between 1 minute and 2 hours at the most. It feels good to have such responsive service, so we're excited to be launching our new forum with them.

Check it out: http://forum.kadonk.com

Great source of PM Information

A while back I discovered PMFORUM. They have a bunch of Project Management articles, look in the 'library' section. They also do a pretty good job of collecting news and events from the PM World. I wrote an article for them about Agile Project Management, which can be found here:
December issue of PM World Today
Article by Anders Heie in PM Forum

Great site for Marketing !

A friend of mine recently pointed me to marketingsherpa, and having just embarked upon the perilous journey of marketing kadonk, I must say I am impressed.

marketingsherpa often have recent articles available for free for 7 days, and their blog contains an astonishing amount of tips and tricks.

Currently, we're in the process up fine-tuning our Google Adwords campaigns, and I've discovered it's quite a science... When I'm done I shall post what I've learned here.

The Fake reviews at microsoftprojectviewer.com

It is no secret that I am the President of KaDonk, Inc. As such, I am looking for other competitors, reviews, and blogs that are concerned with Project Management.

Today I came across an interesting one, microsoftprojectviewer.com. At first glance, this very basic webpage seems like a great place to compare project viewers, and get a recommendation on which one is best... However, after reading a little more, it seems to be rather doubtful this is anything else than a great promotion for Steelray. Let's analyze it a little deeper.

1. Obviously, Steelray is the highest ranked viewer.

This is fine if course, if the website is truly impartial. However it is also the only review with positive mention of... well, anything. All other reviews mention "doubtful legal territory", "unnecessarily complex, " or "doesn't feel finished." One of the other reviews even mention Steelray positively. Hardly fair. Read them and see yourself.

2. The reviews have many facts wrong, for instance, Seavus IS in fact a Microsoft partner (as far as I can see on the Microsoft partner sites). The UI comments are clearly off (I've tried several of these viewers myself, and they're pretty good). In fact, Seavus is a CLEAR winner over Steelray any day, which is clear for anyone who tries the two.

3. The fake form for contacting the non-existing editor of this seemingly objective 3rd party evaluation site always fails with a note about an empty "comment" field. It is almost as if no comments are wanted.

And of course the nail in the coffin:
4. The Domain microsoftprojectviewer.com is registered to Brian Leach at GoDaddy.com. Interestingly enough, Steelray.com is also registered to Brian Leach. Coincidence?

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mind that you blow your own horn, or try to sell your own product. But presenting what looks like a 'fair' review, which is obviously nothing that a scam, that I don't like.

I've tried a number of free viewers, and compared them to ours (LiveProject). I urge you to make your own comparisons !

Brian, come on, take that scam down, it's embarrasing.

Thoughts on Google Docs

Tom Taulli asked me for the BloggingStocks interview, what I thought of Software as a Service. Like Google docs. My answer never made it to the article, but I kept thinking about the question.

I have a theory now, a litmus test of online services if you will. Imagine the following scenario:

You have spent 2 weeks preparing a huge presentation for a client. As you leave your office to meet the client, you have two options (you can't choose both, for the sake of argument):
1. You can store the presentation on your laptop and launch it directly from there, or
2. You can store your presentation in google docs, and launch it directly from there.
Which one do you pick?

Today, I cannot imagine anyone picking option 2. What if google docs is down? What if you can't get an internet connection at your clients offices? What if you forget your login? On the other hand, you run the risk of having a hard-disk crash, or having your laptop stolen. Yet, I think I know what choice I would make...

LiveProject 2.0 is out in the wild...

This week we finally release LiveProject 2.0. In that regard, we sent out a press release, and I got interviewed on BloggingStocks.

Release 2.0 was major for us, since we revamped large parts of our UI, fixed numerous bugs, and of course added major features such as the Gantt Chart. Now we'll go back to posting more frequent updates, every few weeks, with some cool features some of our customers have requested.

On the business side, we decided to offer up a free Microsoft project viewer version. The code is the same as the professional version, but users won't need an account, and they can use it as long as they wish. Our purpose is to get LiveProject on as many machines as possible. Once it's there, we hope that at least some customers will realize the great value we also offer with our collaboration features. Those collaboration features are what we sell of course, but a free project viewer is an amazing offer. Steelray and Seavus are our main competitors, and they each charge well for a project viewer.

It shall be exciting to see what the future brings, so far our downloads and response have been great.

And now, registered on Technorati see my Technorati Profile.

New Features

We're working hard on the next version of LiveProject these days. Our development is going well, and our initial reactions have been very positive. We're also planning a bit of a 'splash' in the industry, so stay tuned.

This would be a great time to send us any suggestions or ideas for new features, and you just may get lucky to get then included. Let us know at suggestions@kadonk.com.

Online Payments

We've decided on a set of Online Transaction vendors. This include an engine for embedding payments on our website, a vendor for handling credit card transactions, and a merchant account. Turns out there are so many options and combinations it's quite overwhelming, but also fun to figure out. Our solution should be pretty smooth, and allow recurring payments and international transactions. Just what we need, since customers are calling from Europe these days...

Jari's working on integration our choices, and the payment pages should be ready shortly. Exciting.

One Project, Multiple Managers = Dynamic change management

One of our customers has development centers in San Diego and India. They have a project where the top-level manager is located in San Diego, while sub-projects are delegated to teams both in San Diego and in India.

When they first started using LiveProject, the top-level manager uploaded one project file, and participants through the organization started filing changes. As a consequence, this manager had to approve (or reject) all of these, even changes he did not know anything about. The situation became worse as he had to follow-up with sub-managers to check that changes were correct.

After a bit of consulting, we were able to advise him of a better solution. He split his Project file into a main project, and added 4 sub-project files to that. He then uploaded all these 5 project files himself (thus effectively becoming the manager of them all). Subsequently he manually assigned each of the sub-projects to each of his 4 sub-managers.

Participants would still 'monitor' the main file (which contains the entire project), but changes that happened within a subproject are now routed to the correct sub-manager. LiveProject does this routing by default, so the resolution was quite simple.

Interesting article on SharePoint

I found this interesting article from WSJ, which describes the spread of Collaboration software from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Adobe. The article highlights how installations of Microsoft often have SharePoint services 'built-in' but fails to mention the price for these, and the learning curve. For organizations with specific needs, and with limited funds, specialized tools can be a great alternative to these behemoths.

Customers....

After our launch in January, the first evaluations of LiveProject have started to come back favorably. We have gotten several orders, and customers are responding really well to the tool. Here's a comment we received recently:

[E-Mail]
I am a PM for a healthcare IT firm, managing 14 simultaneous implementations, plus countless other small projects. I have tried to get something rolling on Sharepoint, but found it cumbersome for PM, and MS Project Server too expensive and not worth the IT time to setup. [snip]. I think you guys have a tremendous opportunity to fill the niche between bare-bones sharepoint and MS Project Server. I have been looking for years for a product like this.

It is feedback like this makes it all worth while.

Some days..

When you're starting a new company, some days are better than others.

A major wireless broadband company in Del Mar is currently evaluating LiveProject. Their main manager has forgot her password, and tried to reset it, but she failed every time. So, I took a look, and sure enough, I quickly discovered we had a bug in the 'reset password' functionality. So, trying to help her, I call my IT support person,"John," to have him manually reset the password. At the time, I did not have access to our Administrator tool as I was OoO.

John looks at the Administrator, and realizes we have forgot to add that functionality. It simply never came up, since users can reset their passwords themselves (when it worked). Since the users passwords are encrypted in our database, there is no easy way to quickly reset the password, except to store a known, encrypted one in the users record.

John resets his password, and enters MySQL to perform the necessary update. Meanwhile, I'm trying to log in. As I try, my login fails. I try again, same result. A sense of despair fills me up, as I slowly type the password I know John was using to reset the users account. Sure enough, that works. I call John, and say "You know, my password was reset, did you just change all the users password?" There is a dead silence in the other end of the line, I can almost hear John's thought process. "Yes" is all he can get out, and that is with a deep, dark voice full of depair and disbelief.

It was just one of those days, and never again will the Database be updated free-hand, without rollback enabled.

Thoughts on Collaboration

I have for some time now thought about the concept of Collaboration in regards to Project Management. While I worked for my old company, I had the "joy" of managing small projects. In all honesty, I am probably not a very good project manager. At the time I was not an expert in Microsoft Project (Can you ever truly be?), and I tended to fall into the "Static Burst Project Management" category. Once, I think I accidentally turned on baselines, and by the time I realized it, my project file was around 100Mb, and I was unable to even open it, much less mail it to others.

My team was called Archimedes, and consisted of 5 senior Software Architects, which I had hand-picked from throughout the organization. These guys were absolutely brilliant, and I soon realized that for me to sit and create a project plan, or update it, without the help of them all would be crazy. I ran the team for about a year (Before an organization change disintegrated us), and I had quickly realized that to get the absolutely maximum result from these people, I had to give them the maximum amount of empowerment and impact that I could.

As a consequence, I regularly told them things I was not supposed to. For instance, at one point our executive management team told me about a new feature and thus architectural change that was coming down the pipeline 6 months later. For reasons I don't quite fathom, this was to be secret (There are way too many things that are secret in organizations). About 10 minutes later I had my team in a meeting room, closed the doors, and told them what was happening. I told them not to tell anyone, but that they each should consider how we could support this new feature, its impact, and so forth. By the time we received an official go-ahead, we already knew what to do, how to do it, and which teams would be impacted. My guys felt very important, and they all contributed to a great solution. This is just how it worked. I felt I could trust these guys with any task and they would figure it out (In fact I did, and they did).

Thus, while creating a project plan, it struck me how insane it was that I could not continuously pick the brains of my team. I could of course call meetings every week, and ask for email updates, but what a pain. I wanted a way to keep my project up-to-date at all times, ready for the popular request from management: "Could you give us a quick update..." I also wanted my team to be able to see pending changes from other members, and so be able to react, even when I was traveling or out of town.

It started to dawn on me that I had 5 of the brightest guys in the company, and no efficient way to capture their many years of knowledge while planning.

Another truism about project plans I had realized is that they are all subject to continuous changes. Requirement changes, tests can introduce new bugs, marketing conditions changes. The one static thing about a Project Plan is that it will change. I needed a tool that would allow the team to be aware of these changes, react on them, edit existing tasks, and even add new tasks. And this needed to happen live, as soon as a change occurred. Not because the projects were all that urgent, but because there seemed to be no reason to make it slower than live.

At the company, we also had a UI team, consisting of around 30 people. Imagine the gargantuan improvement on project plans that could be achieved if every member of a team could view changes at any time. See the project status at any time, and comment and collaborate in a dynamic environment. The more I discussed this with others, the more convinced I became that this is the way to do project management.

Instead of alienating team members by pushing a plan on them, I wanted to share a plan, and encourage feedback. Who better than the team would realize the a task was missing, a duration wrong, or a dependency wrong. After all, the team had to do the work - they were the experts.

Thus, after years participating in projects, running projects, seeing project after project fall behind schedule, I have devised the following recommendations/thoughts about Project Collaboration:

• Share plans, at all times, as soon as a change is known, with everyone. Hide nothing.
• Allow team members to provide feedback. Challenge if necessary, but encourage feedback.
• A team that participates in planning feel empowered. Empowered people work harder and better than non-empowered people.
  
• Anyone who has estimated their own tasks will work hard to meet their own deadlines.
  
• If a plan falls behind schedule, the team will work together to pick up the slack if they feel ownership for the plan
• An up-to-date plan makes you sleep better at night (Literally).
• With empowerment comes responsibility. With responsibility comes resolve. With resolve comes results.
• Be honest when something goes wrong. Ask for advice.
  
• Never, ever, unless there are legal reasons, hide information from your team. Use their brains to help find a solution, and they will jump at the chance to help their manager, and the entire team.
  

To me, Project Management is all about empowerment, sharing, and allowing people to feel responsible and be accountable for their own work. Granted, some people will not work well like that, and your style may have to be adapted to individuals. My own experience in Scandinavia, and in the US tells me that most people will perform miracles when allowed to provide significant, relevant input.

Features for LiveProject Version 2.0

As we have finished version 1.x of LiveProject, we are reviewing our roadmap for version 2.0. We have a lot of features planned, as we collected the more advanced ideas over the past year while focusing on getting version 1.0 out.

If you have any requests or ideas, we would love to hear about them. Send a mail to

suggestions@kadonk.com with your input.

The start of KaDonk and LiveProject

At my previous job with a large telecommunications company, I was constantly involved with projects of all sizes. In some, I was a mere pion, in others I was the manager. In most cases, including my own, a project more or less went through the same steps:

1. A Manager is assigned to develop a new feature.
2. Manager talks to a few developers to get input, then sits by himself to write the plan.
3. Project Plan is reviewed with a few select others, and eventually accepted
4. A group meeting is called, where the plan is 'revealed' to the entire team.
5. More changes to the plan, as the team starts working
6. After a few weeks, updating the plan becomes hard. There are so many changes, it is not kept updated.
   
7. A top level manager asks for an update. This most likely happens friday afternoon, and is needed by monday morning for an executive meeting. The reason for this is a bit unclear to me.
8. Manager frantically mails everyone for an update, calls India sunday night, updates the project, and monday morning sends the new plan to the top level manager.
1. (At this point, there is a 50% chance the executive meeting is delayed, but that is beyond this post)
9. Go back to bullet 5.
10. Someday the project ends. At this point it is probably running late. Very often, projects are canceled very late, because their delay was not visible to anyone.
    

While it is certainly possible to "squeak by" using this method (or lack thereof) it certainly is not the best way to work. A few problems comes immediately to mind:

• The plan is created once, and then not maintained. What a waste of time.
• Team members do not give input, and can rarely influence the plan once it is created.
• Feedback is manual, using meetings or emails.
• Team members cannot see what is happening with the plan. Late or on time (or even early)?

Or put simply, in one all-encompassing word: There is no collaboration !

As the years went by, I was not the only one to notice this trend of what we came to call "Static Burst Project Management." Static in this sense means that once the project is created, that's it. Burst in the sense that updates only happen when someone request them.

Since we used Microsoft Project at the time, this was really all we could do, unless we spent a huge amount of money on a Microsoft Project Server. Some teams started using the Project Server, but most gave up after a while. It was too complicated to install, and the team still needed Microsoft Project in order to make changes. While this is a great tool for project management, it lacks a bit in simplicity, and few wrong edits can seriously wreck havoc on a project plan.

Having mulled over this problem for a few years, two friends of mine and I finally decided to start our own company to solve this problem of collaboration. Our goal was not to create a new project management tool, but instead to enable collaboration using Microsoft Project files. We wanted to build on top of its success, and enable existing users a tool to collaborate on their existing projects. We also wanted to create a tool that was focused on the team members themselves, rather than the manager.

After 2 years of hard work, evenings, weekends (and lots of coffee), we finished version 1.0 of LiveProject on January 2nd 2007. Our company was called KaDonk (Funny story, maybe another time).

At that time, we had been beta-testing LiveProject for 8 months. Thanks to our excellent beta-testers and project managers, we had gotten a huge amount of feedback that went straight into the project. We use LiveProject ourselves every day, and we all know that if we were still working for a large company, this is the tool we would use.

On this blog, I will attempt to capture my thoughts on Project Management, and maybe a few anecdotes on starting a new Software Company in San Diego.