GigaOM » Collaboration

Binfire CEO explains his project management philosophy

Terri Griffith — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:02:30 +0000

Project management software Binfire is built on the premise that to make a project team more productive, you need to bring the team together. When projects fail, it’s because of a failure in communication or collaboration. Binfire’s view is that the tighter you can integrate collaboration into the project management, the more likely the project is to be successful.

I recently spoke with Binfire co-founder and CEO David Robins about his company’s philosophy behind project management. (See Amber’s product review..) The focus of the release and our discussion was leveraging the human and organizational activities of collaboration and communication with the tools.

Robins noted:

Everybody has project tools. We’ve had project management tools for many many years, but having the tools doesn’t help you make a project team more productive, they are just a tools. How you communicate, collaborate, get feedback, catalog information and then use that information that is what has been missing.

I asked Robins for an example of how Binfire’s customers are able to blend together people, technology tools, and organizational practice into effective project work. He gave me this example:

We have a customer with offices in United States and employees in South Asia: Philippines & Thailand. They were using tools — project planning and follow up — but still had communication and collaboration problems. What the other side of the team knew wasn’t always communicated. They started using our tools and that helped them make sure everyone is on the same page. They are very enthusiastic. Instead of just the project manager thinking about planning, it’s a collaborative effort. As a team member you finish a task or give a status report and that action is always available to everyone on the team right away [part of this new release is real-time updates]. That has helped them a lot.

Another customer, Arik Gubeskys, founder of Convexicon, Inc., provided Binfire with this feedback on how working with Binfire can reduce complexity, “I work remotely with software developers located all over the world. Binfire allows us a single program in which we can centralize all of our projects and communications with developers and customers. It’s simplified the complexity of collaborating remotely.”

Binfire’s global team doubles as in-house focus group

Collaboration and communication can take a variety of forms: Visual as well as text. Robins explained how they decided to add the whiteboarding feature with real-time chat. The Binfire team has people collaborating from Israel, Romania, and the US. “Five or six of us were meeting to design what we wanted to do. We didn’t have time to bring everyone to Israel to brainstorm. With the whiteboard, we all can see it [and use the chat feature to make comments]. We realized that we needed the same thing for PDF files — not to change the document on the fly, but to visually mark the PDF in real-time and change it later.”

Bake collaboration into early stages of project management

Robins described how Binfire has changed its own practice given their internal use of the technology:

I used to do project planning in my mind and then get the group together to discuss it. Now I just start the plan and rely on communication and collaboration to finish my thoughts. When a few people are thinking at the same time the result is much better than if it’s just me. The whole design of the project… the whole thinking of the project as a system has become more collaborative because of what we do.

Project as a system — that was an important take away for me. When projects are thought of as a system, rather than as a to-do list to be “managed,” I expect there is naturally a stronger focus on communication and collaboration. Tools built with the full system (human, technical, organizational) in mind are more likely to support productive project activities with stronger integration and understanding across tasks and actions.

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Small wins beat stretch goals in collaborative projects

Terri Griffith — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:04:14 +0000

Imagine you’re about to start a new collaborative, cross-timezone project and you are hoping to get the whole team on board with your favorite online workspace. Do you set up the whole space and walk them through each capability: group calendar, project management tool, resource library of helpful documents, collaborative editing, etc? Or, do you begin by sharing a single document that starts out as the agenda and develops into a lab notebook? Do you go for the stretch goal (full-blown on-line workspace) or the small win (starter collaboration document)?

While there is no single accepted way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, my experience and the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project. Stewart Mader, author of the book Wikipatterns, says that you should focus on the work; help people see the value from the work and the rest will follow.

Organizational scholar Karl Weick wrote in 1984:

A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

This still holds true today. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer followed 238 professionals in 26 creative teams across seven companies and three industries, gathering over 12,000 person/days of data. They report their results in the forthcoming book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. In a recent talk I attended, Prof. Amabile described how progress in meaningful work is the most important factor in people’s engagement. This progress doesn’t have to include a breakthrough — just maintain forward momentum.

Keep these ideas in mind when you start your next collaboration project. Go for the small wins, rather than the stretch goal, and focus on the work rather than the tools. Follow Georgina‘s advice and take a “tools last” approach to collaboration. She says, “tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team.” Get the team’s work started, then see what tools will be most helpful.

What is your experience? Do you agree that small wins beat out stretch goals for kicking off a new collaborative project?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Snap.

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Working in Teams: Dropbox to the Rescue!

Pamela Poole — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:00:06 +0000

The work I do is generally pretty solitary, but in the last couple of months, I’ve had to work with teams more than usual, and it’s been Dropbox to the rescue every time. Even if you think you have filesharing handled with networked computers, Google Docs, or something else, I strongly encourage you to check out Dropbox.

Dropbox is simple, yet rich. And it’s got more going for it than simple file transfer and cloud storage. In fact, what makes it really special is the file syncing. You can work with your Dropbox files and folders locally, right on your computer, and they’re automatically synced with the files on the website. And it will also work with the most popular mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

Here are some examples of how Dropbox has come in handy for me lately:

I was part of a team of writers who were covering a major conference. The team leader had a lot of info to organize and share with the writers and her co-leader in advance (session plans, speaker bios, schedules, travel info, etc.). She wanted something that would be more efficient than email, save her some time, and keep her, the team, and the materials organized. I spent 10 minutes on the phone walking her through Dropbox explaining specifically how I thought it would work for her, and she was sold. One of her challenges was that some of the writers were not very tech- or web-savvy; Dropbox’s easy-to-use interface interface was essential to their adopting her system and the tool.
My husband and I manage translation projects. He deals with the clients, I deal with the translators. In the last two months we’ve had to manage 10 projects involving 28 translators, and that can get a little hairy. Even though our computers are networked, we have all the files we use for job tracking in a Dropbox folder. We update the files when it’s convenient, and because the files are all kept in sync we know that we’re working with the most current info. Also, when I needed to get huge PDF user manuals to translators for reference, I just created a Dropbox folder for that purpose and sent them all invites.
A client lost 90 Mb of files that I’d delivered months earlier and needed them urgently. He sent me a Dropbox invite and he had the files in minutes.
I installed Dropbox on my iPhone and another app called PlainText, which automatically creates its own folder in my Dropbox. Twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve jotted down notes in PlainText on my iPhone while at semi-social, semi-work lunches with people. When I got home, my notes were already stored on my computer and I could follow up effortlessly.

If you want to see what else Dropbox can do, check out Scott’s How I Use Dropbox For Maximum Productivity.

A 2Gb Dropbox is free. Pro accounts offer more storage; a Pro 50 account provides 50 Gb and costs $9.99 per month, while a Pro 100 account offers 100 Gb of storage for $19.99 per month.

How do you use Dropbox?

Photo by stock.xchng user tatlin.

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Planzone: A Collaborative Tool that Makes Juggling Easy

Pamela Poole — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:00:39 +0000

A few months ago, I was desperate to find a collaborative project app, so I explored a number of those that had been discussed here at WWD. I was either underwhelmed or daunted by the learning curve (too busy/too lazy). So what I ended up doing was finding a basic mind map to use for brain downloads and to-do items, and creating a Google Group for my team to communicate and use as a shared idea repository. I already had some other stuff for a separate, but related project on Google Docs. Not too efficient. And I am now of the opinion that Google Groups and Docs are totally lame (that’s “woefully inadequate” in good English).

Fortunately, I just discovered Planzone, a new online collaborative project management and productivity tool launched in June 2008. It’s designed for people who need to schedule and monitor multiple resources (clients, partners and vendors, as well as physical spaces or other assets) and tasks in a project.

And, yes, there is a full-featured, free plan that includes two projects, 25 MB of storage, unlimited users, and SSL.

It so happened that I needed just such a plan. So I proceeded to create two separate projects (with a handy wizard) and I migrated (manually) the cerebral overflow from my mind map and the stuff from my Google Group and Google Docs over to Planzone. (By the way, you can import an MS Project file into a new Planzone project during setup.) Now I just have to migrate my team. That’ll be the hard part. They have the same busy/lazy problem I do.

I started with the Schedule tab, taking those floating bubbles from my mind map and organizing them into activities (like “Design”) or sub-activities (like “Logo”). Some bubbles became to-dos linked to the activities (like “Logo due Nov 1″). I started feeling better immediately.

I assigned to-dos to myself and other people, gave them different priorities, and added notes to a few. I entered date ranges or due dates for everything, and then I played with my nice new schedule, toggling from Gantt chart view (the default) to calendar view. I clicked Resource usage to see who was busy and who wasn’t. I then repeated the process for my second project.

It seemed like I received an e-mail alert every time I made a change, which got annoying, so I configured the app to send to-dos and alerts by RSS instead.

More screenshots.

The next thing I did was bring all the pages from my Google Group over to the Planzone writeboard/wiki, which is WYSIWYG. (Say that five times really fast.) The wiki functions pretty much like “Pages” in Google Groups, but with the added benefit that it saves your previous versions. I was trying to figure out what to do with the saved “Discussions” in Google Groups and realized there wasn’t much worth saving. It was all in my e-mail in- or outbox anyway. There was only one I wanted to keep, so I saved it as a doc.

The next thing I did was go into my Google Docs account to bring all the docs I had there (plus that one “discussion” from my Google Group) into Planzone and put them in the wiki or in Documents. I created folders and organized my documents. I configured the access rights on some folders so that only the certain team members can access them. (You can also do that for an entire project, specific tasks, documents, etc.) Now I’m going to start moving some things that are still on my hard drive to the site.

There are some features of Planzone that I haven’t used yet. Most project data can be printed or exported to Excel. There is an extensive help system and a built-in feedback form (Feedback link at top right of page). You can make project templates (duplicates of projects you’ve already set up) to save time. You can also publish your templates (without your data) and use other users’ templates. This is a feature other such tools don’t have.

My absolute favorite feature is the “virtual member.” I created virtual team members and assigned them to-dos and so on. I find this very handy because I can stay on top of the activities of people who are involved but don’t need to access the project through Planzone.

There are a few minor things I would change at this point. I’d like more visual differentiation between activity levels displayed on the Schedule page (deeper indent or color coding). I’d like to be able to move an activity up or down levels (change it from a sub-level to a top-level activity or vice versa). I’d like to be able to import team members from one project to another.

Of course, I’ll just mention these things in the Planzone forum. The Planzone team is as agile as their programming methods! They’re very active on their forum and are constantly improving the product based on user feedback (see their blog).

The app was designed using open source components and remote resources based in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, and Russia to build and market the product. So, as you might guess, the product is available in Dutch, English, French, German, and Russian. (You choose the language in the setup wizard.) More languages are coming soon.

Planzone comes with impressive credentials. The Planzone team and their product benefit from the support and vast experience of Planzone’s parent company, Augeo Software, a leading European project and portfolio management software vendor, whose enterprise clients include Daimler, La Redoute, and Heineken.

Let us (and them) know what you think!

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