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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In a press release, Teambox said that private elements “allows users to conduct private conversations within a project that can be restricted to certain individuals. This new functionality is ideal for internal teams that want to bring outside vendors into Teambox for project and task management, but also need the flexibility of private internal conversations.”

This is an eye opening combination of a collaboration tool supporting modern organizational practice – creating circles of communication. Transparency design choices are explicitly in the project management mix with the addition of private elements. Information can be transparent across all members of project — or not — as deemed appropriate by the project administrators and the task at hand. Karl Goldfield, Teambox vice president of sales and marketing, explained it to me with an example:

Wedding planners, like an Internet marketing lead, or any other general contractor, have lots of clients and subcontractors.  When it comes to certain things, you want open collaboration. A wedding planner doesn’t always want to filter [limit] information to clients and the florists or the caterers they work with. They invite the client to a project where they understand the different subcontractors they  can work with (for example, seeing all the information for all four possible caterers) — they all get to see things and discuss. Everyone is in this open place focused on working on what the client wants.

Think about that: The client, and all the bidding florists, caterers, etc. get to see the information from the others, though this level of transparency isn’t fixed. The conversation can go private, tighter circles can be created, perhaps as the bids come in, or perhaps only after particular bids are accepted.

I asked Karl about the response from the subcontractors.  Are they comfortable with this cross-organization, cross-competitor transparency?

Karl responded with a perfect Enterprise 2.0 answer:

People can already contact a [competing] caterer and find their pricing — and if [the competitor] wants to keep it private they can just not answer. But, if I’m a good wedding planner and work with a specific set of caterers and do 100 weddings a year and 25 percent of the projects come to you — I’m the caterer’s best buddy — even if 75 percent of the business goes to others. The caterer knows the final decision (the clients’) will be personal preference. This isn’t a question of the technology system, but one of the relationship.

Makes sense to me. Yes, I’d be giving information to my competitors, but I’m also learning through the process. If this work process brings us into a community, the benefits may outweigh any costs. We all become better caterers or florists.  We learn our own competitive advantages.  We have community members to cross-sell with and or to ask for help.

But not all wedding planners, Internet marketing teams, or other Teambox users may understand these community issues straight away. I asked Karl how Teambox helps people come to understand this. How do you help users learn how to manage all these options and strategic choices?

My goal for 2012 is an education campaign. Online videos, best-case scenarios. Eight to 10 core [types of users with demos on] how to make Teambox the central resource for communication…. We want to find ways of keeping the noise off your plate.

Karl had me think of two different types of project collaborators to clarify the information noise issue. The first is a highlevel manager who doesn’t want details. This manager just wants to follow a dashboard and a timeline — no drill down — as clean and quiet an interface as possible. That manager wouldn’t be part of the private elements until he or she asked for details and then the manager could be invited in. The second type might want a more micro understanding of how the project is going. It would take too much time to play middle-man with this manager so nothing in the project should be private; let him or her see everything as it happens.

Karl also talked about the evolution of how Teambox is used and how this helps people come to understand the value in their particular setting. Initially they might manage Teambox information completely from their email inbox (using Teambox’s notification and response systems). As their use becomes greater they will find value in managing Teambox content from the activity stream. But Karl suggests that you don’t push this approach to happen overnight. Let circle techniques evolve as use grows.

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Updated: The release will be generally available on August 17.

The “work graph” approach

Wrike is built on the idea of the work graph, like the social graph, as a key organizing feature of the tool. What’s new in this release is the flexibility and the speed. Wrike’s customers are managing up to 70,000 tasks and 5,000 projects. In the demo I saw, users could switching instantly between across task lists, spreadsheet view, timeline (Gannt chart), list of backlog tasks (tasks without set due dates), folders (attached files), and activity streams. The work graph approach means tasks can cross projects, similar to how your friends can cross circles in Google+.

I asked Filev how Wrike was in terms improving work. He replied that Wrike is more of a:

[M]anagement solution — geared more toward managing organizations and people — than just project management. Top down and bottom up. Project management works in ivory tower to create plans for next quarter and then sends those plans to “resources” (team members). In another approach, people do the work, and then managers try to figure out what is going on and aggregate.

We combine both. In our case we shoot toward real time enterprise. Real time visibility to work.

Wrike at work

Filev told me about how The Project Management PrepCast, a five-person startup, uses Wrike as a “unified collaboration, coordination and management platform for the virtual team.” The founder, Cornelius Fichtner, is a certified project management professional with 18 years of experience. His challenge was that running a startup with multiple projects is very different than running a project. The work graph came to the rescue. Cornelius is able to provide foundations, but his team can also create tasks and share them “up” then update tasks on their own — with much of it happening through Wrike’s email integration (which many users may find more convenient than visiting the Wrike site). This is crowdsourcing project management work, empowering project management where the work itself is happening.

Wrike provides an excellent platform for modern transparent and more virtual organizations. Sharing is flexible and can include everyone or just some of people on the project. Wrike can also take on underlying workflows that are very connected and complicated, but reduce the clutter through filters and search tools. Slicing and dicing seems to happen instantly and is reflecting the real time nature of the work.

The Wrike approach is responsive to the needs of people and the modern organization: Complexity can be managed, work can be shared, and transparency supported — all at blazing speed.

Image courtesy of Flickr user aresauburn™

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Shared to-do lists

• Wunderlist. Wunderlist is a simple task manager that works on the web or your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. Your list follows you and stays synced across all your devices, and you can even share your to-do list with the Wunderlist via URL or Twitter.

Project management

• Reverb. Reverb is a project and task manager that allows you to collaborate with your team and stay organized. Similar to Basecamp and other popular project management solutions, Reverb offers the ability to upload files, host discussions, and manage tasks within one interface.
• Splendid Bacon. Splendid Bacon is a stripped-down version of project management that lets you see, at a glance, what’s going on with your projects. Don’t expect elaborate functionality or a complex interface; Splendid Bacon is straightforward and concentrates on one main area of project management, status updates. Post short, Twitter-style status reports to let team members and clients know where you are with a project, and use the simple dashboard and timeline to see which projects are moving forward and which are on hold.
• Client Stat.us. If you like Splendid Bacon’s Twitter-style approach to project communication, another option is Client Stat.us, and this one doesn’t even require log-ins or passwords. Just share a link to the project status page, and your clients stay in the loop. I love the simplicity of this interface that takes the intimidation factor out of client updates; just post what task is in progress and brief (140 characters or less) updates as you move the task forward.

Online meetings and conferencing

• Vyew. Vyew is an online meeting room application that allows you to collaborate with your team visually and in real time. You can upload images, files, and videos into your meeting room, and up to ten participants can access the room and contribute. Conferencing features include a whiteboard, video conferencing, screen sharing, and VoIP. You can even add text or voice comments to the pages of your room, so the interactive features make for truly dynamic presentations and meetings.

Collaborative social media

• CoTweet. CoTweet allows business teams to engage in social media as a group in a unified way. Team members can publish updates to Twitter (and Facebook with an Enterprise account), collaborate on responses, track engagement, and analyze campaigns. All conversations are combined into a single, unified inbox. Work groups can be formed in order to focus on a specific brand or product within the company. Plus, there’s the ability to create and control roles and permissions within the company so that team members are allowed specific access within social media accounts.

Mobile communication

• Mobiola Headset. Mobiola Headset is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app that both records calls and also acts as a headset for your PC or Mac. It works with a variety of VoIP applications, including MSN/Windows Live, Google Talk, AOL IM, and Skype, and you simply use the screen to control recording or playing back conversations.
• IM+ Talk. IM+ Talk allows you to make Skype calls from your smartphone. Depending on your phone, you can receive calls to your SkypeIn number, see who is online and chat with other Skype users, and make free VoIP calls in half-duplex mode (similar to a walkie-talkie).
• Smart Scanner. Smart Scanner is an iPhone app that captures and recognizes scanned information, such as articles from magazines, notes, or other printed information. Once you scan it, you can copy and edit the text, access email or make a call, and open URLs within the text. The application recognizes phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses and QR codes, and it works in five languages.

As tools and technology evolve, communication among distributed teams is becoming easier and easier, making it possible to work from anywhere, literally from the touch of a button.

What online tools and applications have most helped with your communications?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Pixel Addict

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RedCriter Tracker makes skill sets visible on employee profiles to make it easier for management to select appropriate team members. They app comes  with a default “master list” of typical software development and management skills but these can be customized to match company needs. Skills can also be embedded in email signatures and blogs so that competencies are kept top of mind during communication.

Management can guide employee activities through awarding of points: do this, get these points. These points can then be used in a “reward market,” with rewards determined by management. Rewards could be as simple and inexpensive as a gift card or office toy, or as heavy-duty as a trip or ticket to an event; it’s up to the company. Long-term efforts are acknowledged by cumulative points.

The badges (of which there are 50 different types) show off accomplishments automatically. Some expire (such as the “weekend warrior” badge, which expires after the week), while others can only be held by one person at a time, or may take six months to earn.

I love the transparency and self-selection of rewards that RedCritter Tracker supports. This approach takes a formal business need — project management — and integrates it with human interest in games and rewards, enabled by a clean-cut collaboration platform. The approach is thoughtfully applied in a way that allows management to guide efforts but still allows individuals to make their own choices.

Beatty offered this explanation as to the app’s approach, “Engage employees, support workplace morale, and subtly drive behaviors that affect the bottom line.”

RedCritter Tracker is set to launch later this month. If you provide your email address pre-launch, you’ll be offered a free four-user license.

See this video for a walkthrough of RedCriter Tracker and its features:

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The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents spend between one to four hours per week just preparing for status meetings, and 59 percent said that preparing for status meetings often takes longer than the meeting itself. In addition, 57 percent of those surveyed indicated that they multitask during status meetings — so maybe there’s more work getting done than one might think!

The survey was conducted online within the United States from June 6–8, among 2,373 information workers. It was undertaken by Harris Interactive on behalf of Clarizen, the project management system that Thursday covered a few months ago. The survey defined a status meeting as one in which team members are updated on progress and completion of tasks. Brainstorming, strategy and planning meetings were not included.

If you’re finding your meetings unproductive, there are a number of tools available to help, including meetin.gs and yaM. Many of the project management apps that we cover are intended, among other things, to help keep team members updated on project status and what their colleagues are doing and so reduce the time spent in meetings. And there are some techniques, like the Google system that Imran reported on last year, for making meetings more productive.

How much time do you spend in meetings? Are they productive?

Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66

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Choosing institutional knowledge tools

Picking the tool your organization uses for knowledge management can be complex. There are a variety of approaches to knowledge management that different tools take, from simply letting everyone add information to a shared database to a carefully curated and approved set of knowledge. It can be a question of what works with the tools you already use, what can manage the types of information you need to keep at hand, or even what is available to you. Two organizations told us what lead them to make their decisions.

Angela Carr, the VP of information technology for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) works with AssociatioNet, a version of the Presto knowledge management application designed specifically for use by associations. She told us,

AUVSI’s vision is to be the focal point for information and updates on the unmanned systems global community. That means we want to be the preferred resource for information seekers: academia, researchers, scientists and the media. We chose AssociatioNet because of its ability to streamline the information gathering process and link this abundance of information with AUVSI member data. The system allows [us] to provide additional benefits to . . AUVSI member [companies] by showcasing the[m] alongside important research. In addition to features . . . that . . . improve staff and organization productivity, AssociatioNet provides a low cost of ownership, flexibility, ease-of-use and rapid deployment that differentiates it from other, more costly and cumbersome tools available.

Ken Carroll is the mentoring network administrator for URS Corporation, which uses Triple Creek to manage knowledge. He describes the choice:

URS [has a] wide scope of services and highly specialized talent, [so] intentional learning and knowledge transfer are strategic priorities. Triple Creek’s solution is dynamically aligning and matching our talent to the immediate learning needs across our organization. Progressive organizations like URS and Triple Creek create ah-ha moments at every turn. Our latest ah-ha moment is to pair Open Mentoring with our classroom training events bridging the gap between learning and execution. The ability to keep the group connected as they apply the learning concepts allows these peer groups to speed up learning by asking each other questions, collaboratively solving problems, and reinforce the concepts learned in the classroom. The partnership we have with Triple Creek is a competitive advantage for URS.

Institutional knowledge management is crucial to ensuring that businesses continue to thrive even if that one coder who’s the only guy that knows how the software was created or that one saleswoman who knows how to perfectly sell the main product leave the company. Across different companies that we’ve talked to, the main criteria for choosing a knowledge management tool are:

• Ease of use. A knowledge management tool isn’t worth anything if you can’t get people to use it.
• Specialized knowledge. In many industries, the types of knowledge that must be managed vary dramatically. Even something as small as the ability to upload video can make a world of difference for some industries.
• Technical management. Setup can be a crucial issue, especially for companies without large IT departments. So can connecting a knowledge management tool to the other software an organization already uses.

How does your organization manage its institutional knowledge?

Image courtesy Flickr user cybershotking

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Innovation management is not that different from sales management. You start with leads. Leads and ideas are raw concepts that don’t have current value — a company can’t invest time and effort into them.

This analogy resonated with me: By putting innovation management in parallel with a well-understood organizational process, like sales management, you can see possible metrics without having to start from scratch. It opens the concept of innovation management to anyone who has ever thought about sales management and optimization of the sales process.

Continuing the sales analogy, once the good ideas have been identified, innovation managers can merge them into a proposal for further vetting and qualification, like leads would be combined into an opportunity in the customer relationship management process. Carbone noted that it is in this proposal stage where the company has reason to contribute resources, and additional participants are invited. Feasibility and financials are considered, and there can be multiple rounds of scorecarding, if required. He also suggested that companies may want to rank a set of proposals based on the scorecard and then use that to decide what new features or ideas to continue in development for their project or service.

Carbone went on to point out the importance of social networks in preparing people for this kind of innovation. Facebook has gotten people interested in sharing and collaboration, while Digg gave us expectations around mass sharing how to surface good content:

It’s because of tools like Facebook and Digg that companies became able to manage ideas. Before that it was a very cumbersome workflow as people were trying to track every idea that came in using email and spreadsheets. The collaboration social front-end helps you weed out ideas at a minimal resource requirement. But it’s not collaboration for collaboration’s sake. You need to tell people what you want them to collaborate on, i.e. going green, cost savings, new products, process improvements. And once you do that, still no-one makes a business decision just based on the crowd.

Carbone’s take is that innovation management might just be the killer app of the social software revolution. That said, his perspective is also realistic — and it should be, as Brightidea was founded in 1999 and has grown through some tough times:

There’s nothing in our software that is going to magically motivate people to use the software and make people contribute. You’re going have to set the incentives and the programs. The software is a facilitating factor in the equation. It’s a utility for managing the innovation process which has never really been tracked before.

Client examples

I asked Carbone for an example of a client that had integrated Brightidea with its innovation management process for a great result. He named two very different companies: Robert Bosch Tool Corporation and BT.

Bosch has used Brightidea both internally and with customers. For example, you can submit your ideas for new Dremel tool or accessory, and employees can submit ideas for RotoZip improvements. What stuck with me was how thoughtful Bosch was around blending their aspiration for internal participation with the realities of their performance management system. Their call center employees are encouraged to submit ideas, but call center employees have quotas for the number of calls they handle. How do they balance time for ideas with time for calls? One manager is asking for ideas, another is asking for high call volume. The company put these issues on the table and worked with the managers of the call center to highlight the importance of innovation and asked that innovation be considered along with calls, not as a formal policy, but part of their overall approach. This approach is working, and I expect allows more flexibility than would a formal policy.

BT also implemented Brightidea along with other organizational changes to support innovation: the company locates “innovation scouts” around the world, and provides significant incentives for innovation. A case study from the Brightidea site notes that, “[t]he new internal system with its dedicated innovation team, clear incentive structure and the easy-to-use software platform changed the generally pessimistic  attitude of employees towards new ideas into a positive corporate energy that keeps motivation up even in a challenging business environment.” The company reports added revenue and cost savings in excess of $100M.

The innovation/collaboration ecosystem

How does an innovation platform like Brightidea fit into the rest of a company’s collaboration space? Carbone explained, “We really buy into the idea that there’s going to be a corporate feed, like from Yammer, and we see products like ours passing information over to them.”  He acknowledged that many enterprise collaboration tools can provide basic ideation support, but for full innovation management you’ll need a system focused on the process.

I also asked Carbone about mobile access. He said, “our goal is to continuously get closer to the moment of creation. As soon as [users] come up with the idea we want to make it easy as possible to share that idea.” Mobile apps are one approach, but Brightidea also has clients using 800 numbers, voice-to-text translation, or special email addresses.

I’ll leave you with Vincent Carbone’s thoughts on success in innovation management:

Success means people are happy with giving ideas, and that those ideas can easily be routed to those that need them, and that decision-makers have the tools to involve [the broader participants] in the decision-making and implementation roadmap.

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Solo’s main screen is its dashboard, shown in the image above. It’s dominated by a message display that offers things like tips and updates about upcoming deadlines, with infographic-like charts below that provide at-a-glance details of project status, as well as turnover and hours recorded over time. You can also start and stop the task timer from this screen. Accessing the other areas of the app, such as the planner, timesheets and invoices, is done through the tabs at the top of the screen.

Designers and other creatives who take aesthetics seriously will appreciate Solo’s beautiful interface. That’s something I rarely get to say about project management apps, which are usually functional rather than pretty. Microproject, a scheduling app I reviewed recently, also has an attractive and well-designed interface, but it really can’t come close to Solo’s data-first design and attention to detail.

Solo’s a lovely product to look at, is quite easy to use and has a good set of features for freelancers, but there are a few potential issues with it. First, there doesn’t seem to be any way to export data, nor is there integration with any existing accounting, CRM or invoicing apps, which is disappointing. There isn’t even seem a way to import contacts from CRM or email apps that I can see. Second, it’s unclear how the product will scale if a freelance business expands to take on additional staff. Thrive’s Jerome Iveson says that the company is working on a multi-user PM app called Studio; hopefully it will be possible to migrate accounts and data between the two products. Finally, once you move beyond the dashboard into other areas of the app, some areas aren’t quite as polished and aren’t all that intuitive in use. It’s not clear how recorded hours are moved from timesheet to invoice, for example. Hopefully, those areas will be cleaned up over time; the app is still in development with several new features due to be added, such as a client area, blog feeds and messages.

Solo costs $10 per month, with a 14-day free trial available.

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To use Tom’s Planner on an iOS device, no app is required; just load up the Tom’s Planner website in mobile Safari. Tasks can be scheduled by dragging and dropping on the chart, while accessing the context menu items is achieved by a “long click” (tapping and holding for longer than a second). I’ve tried it out on my iPhone and it works pretty well, although the small screen makes it quite fiddly, and the long click does take a bit of getting used to. I’m sure it’s much easier to use in the iPad’s larger screen, though. Android support is apparently also in the works.

The ability to import Excel and MS Project files should be useful for teams who aren’t starting a project from scratch, and could be especially handy for users who occasionally get emailed a Project file but don’t have it installed themselves.

Despite facing some serious competition in the simple online collaborative planning tools market from the likes of Ganttic (reviewed here) and Microproject (reviewed here), Tom’s Planner is still my favorite. While it doesn’t have all the advanced features offered by its competitors, it’s well-designed and simple, which makes it really easy to use, even for complete project management novices.

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