Posted by godzhesas on 24 April, 2008 10:10

We are glad to announce that our online project management tool entered the Startup 2.0 competition. You can vote only with a registered and approved blog - http://www.startup2.eu/results.php.It is being judged by an internationally renowned jury.

What is StartUp 2.0?

StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups that work in the field of 2.0 technologies.

Procedure

• You submit your site before April, 30th.
• The advisory board and Internet users will vote for all sites and select 10 among them. These finalists will be officially presented in an event in Barcelona on May, 21st.
• These 10 finalists will present their project in an event in Barcelona on May, 21st. Each team will have 5 minutes to present its website. The jury and assistants will question them and select the 3 winners. Prizes will be given that same day in a special dinner.

More detailed information can be found in their FAQ.

  Posted by andrew on 23 April, 2008 08:47

It is time to enjoy new features!

1. History of all activities in your project from the very project beginning. You may now easily review who did what, when, how much. The history visualizes creation of accounts and projects, invitations to project team, creation and modifying pages, cases, milestones. A history widget is placed onto your global dashboard and every project dashboard. Separate "history" tab is used for filtering activities, seeing what was done in the very past (even 1 year ago!)
2. Search is improved to become even faster and it provides more relevant search results. System utilizes famous Lucene algorithms to boost search relevancy and accurately index every content item created or edited by you. Thus it scans wiki pages, blogs, cases, milestones, accounts and projects to deliver the best match.
3. User Interface is now much faster and more user-friendly. Each item in the system now has toolbox buttons at the top and "more-actions" with list of other important actions which you can do with content.
4. New widgets are created: standard widgets for blog authors and monthly archive - just like in all the blogging software we all got used to.
5. From other features requested by you: it is now possible to just "disable" account without deleting it; user and company profiles now accept more personal information like web-site, instant messenger, fax; lists with cases and pages now show icons for restricted items; additional information is now visible in pop-overs; files UI is improved with extra features and mass-operations.

As usual we appreciate your feedback on Comindwork features to make it better and more useful for you. Thanks for your contributions.

History of Activities

Faster and More Relevant Search

User Interface

  Posted by godzhesas on 22 April, 2008 11:21

Doing business today is tough, it evolves and changes constantly, it’s critical to have good team and good management. Usually project manager is the last person to know, that the project is failling and rarely a project manager admits that he failed, he can find thousands things why the project failed. But real professionals should already have the knowledge and experience to tell that there is something wrong with the project. Why project managers keep going along with the project when they see that it is failing? Maybe because it’s hard to determine what a failure is, and how to determine that a project failing? Let’s take a look at some common issues in projects:

• Poor planning - budget is not defined, nearest milestones are not clear or not set at all, team roles and tasks are not defined. All these mistakes eventually will lead to project failure if nothing is done in time to fix them.
• Unclear goals and objectives – undefined or badly defined requirements is a headache for every project manager. Requirements and objectives definition is very time consuming and requires lot of communication, but it is all worth it at the end. But unfortunately a lot depends on the client and very often they lack the experience to describe what is really required.
• Unrealistic time and resource estimates – you can read my previous blog post: How to Make Your Schedules More Realistic
• Weak executive support and user involvement – mangers are like connecting parts in the company between business and technology, if they lack executive support the projects they participate in are likely to fail. The earlier you will be able to get your end users involved in the project, the better. You need to make sure that waht you're doing is needed and there is a demand for it.
• Team failure – it doesn’t matter how hard you will look for failure reasons, the most important will be people (read “Peopleware” if you haven’t yet). Most common reason for team failure – communications (lack of communication, ineffective communications). Of course to build a good team you need much more then just good communications, but that is a whole different story.
• Risks are not defined and controlled – it does not matter if you missed a milestone, a deadline, or you are over budget, but if you and your team are not ready to make changes when a critical moment comes, the project will fail. That is why risk management is so important.
• Incompetence – whether it’s team members or project managers, you can not have a successful project with an incompetent team. This is the part where team building is invaluable. If you found out that you have incompetent team in the middle of the project – you will fail. You can hire new people, but it will take from three to six month to get them in the project and be productive.

Project manager must understand the strategic value of his project, because if he does not (or if there is no strategic value) the project is likely to fail. I believe that our online project management tool can help you in minimizing the risk of a project failure, though as I’ve mentioned before, if you have a good team and you are a good manager it’s not about the tool, it’s about your productivity. Use Comindwork and stay productive!

  Posted by godzhesas on 17 April, 2008 09:17

When the software project starts one of the critical things is project deadline. But in most cases deadlines come and go, come and go. And as the deadline is missed, it is moved a week or two ahead, but that actually doesn't change anything. That is why we all need realistic schedules and stuff from the management like "CEO said we must build the tool until February 12th" or "our competitor releases in a week, we MUST finish in 5 days" simply doesn't work. You can tighten schedules as much as you want, it won't help. You need a real project schedule (sometime inside the project teams there actually exists two types of schedules: one for the upper management, to make everything look nice, and the other for team members).

It is very hard to define the exact schedule for a software development product, there too many risks to be taken into account, so what can we do to get the best results?

• Set the deadlines and milestones as the project moves ahead. Yes I know the classic software development approach says that all the planning and estimating has to be done before the programming (implementation) starts. I personally think that agile software development approach is the most realistic. Project is conducted in small iterations (1-4 weeks) , where each iteration is an entire software project: including planning, requirement analysis, design, programming, testing, documentation. It is easy and effective to manage your iterations with Comindwork, you have everything you need: wiki, task management, milestones, and all other features available online 24/7.
• Trusted and reliable project team. First of all - all team members should be allowed to estimate the tasks, related directly to them. Secondly - from marketing, to documentation team, an active participation in project processed is a necessity if we want the most realistic schedules. This brings more confident and responsibility to the team.
• There are no identical projects. Every project by itself is unique, and it's a common problem when the managers and project members estimate the new project as it is the "same" as some other project. E.g. if you have create a website using .Net it doesn't mean that you can easily estimate any site that needs to be developed under .Net. Experience in the similar projects is a great of a value for the project team as long as it is not used for 100% comparisons and estimations. Comindworks' colloborative environment will help you achieving  this.
• Work closely with the customer. Effective communication with customers is one of the project success factors. It is ideal when customer participates in product testing, provided notes are very valuable, because they can actually point out bugs that are critical. Usually developers and customers evaluate bugs differently. Close collaboration with customers of the project will help you to avoid developing features that will never be used. Comindwork makes a perfect assistant here, especially if your team is distributed and needs to collaborate real time online.

Unreal schedules forces project teams to waste time, valuable time that could be spent finishing the software. Only when project members, prior project start, will recognize that the projects are hard and that it is hard to create accurate schedules, only then the project can be managed and developed in a realistic way. F.Brooks addressed this issue year ago in his paper No Silver Bullet, and it is still actual today. As well you can read more about realistic scheduling in a software development project here (article from IBM). What techniques do you use? Share your tips with us :)

  Posted by godzhesas on 14 April, 2008 11:52

Following last Fridays post, today I’ll provide you more wiki usage tips. Wiki is all about linking, so it will be useful to know the basics.

Links

Name	Sample	Code
Project Page	COMINDWORK/Help	[[COMINDWORK/Help]]
Project Page with custom title	Custom Title	[[COMINDWORK/Help|Custom Title]]
User page	user/UserName/UserPage	[[user/UserName/UserPage]]
User page with custom title	Custom Title for Page	[[user/UserName/UserPage|Custom Title for Page]]
Project page without project name	Help	[[!COMINDWORK/Help]]
Cases	COMINDWORK/CASE1	[[ProjectAlias/CASE#]]
External pages	http://www.comindwork.com	[http://www.comindwork.com]
External pages with custom title	CoMindWork	[http://www.comindwork.com CoMindWork]
Files on filesystem	NI/COMINDWORK/Help.pdf	[[/NI/COMINDWORK/Help.pdf]]

Please note that red color means that you are linking link to not-existing page or case.

Other general tips

• There should be well-thought implementation of categories
• Each page should belong to at least one category
• Any valuable information should be moved out from User/ pages
• No need to use prefixes (like Prefix/ or Prefix.)
• Any page should be linked from some other page. Pages that are not linked from other pages are called orphans.

I hope you will have use of these tips. See also a very good guide on categorization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization. Do you have problems or questions using Comindwork wiki? I'll be glad to help you, so as our support team :)

  Posted by godzhesas on 11 April, 2008 13:24

Although there are tons of different wiki formatting approaches (traditional wikis, various enterprise systems etc) - we focused on use the most widespread formatting provided by MediaWiki and adopted by the most popular wiki-based resource WikiPedia. Our WYSIWYG editor is being constantly improved, though sometimes it’s useful to know some basic wiki markups. So in a series of posts i'll give you tips how to use wiki formatting if you find that the WYSIWYG editor does not yet satisfies all your needs :)

Including images

To insert an image on a page,

• upload it to filesystem
• use {{\\Path\To\YourImage.jpg}} (Note the 2 slashes before actual location)
• TIP: if you've uploaded file with spaces in name, please refer to it, replacing spaces with %20

Including pages

To insert an page:

• use {{PROJECT/PAGENAME}}
• TIP: If you're referring to a page that starts with user/default/ you may use {{:PAGENAME}}
• TIP: To hide a part of the page when including, use

:: <noinclude> this text will be hidden </noinclude>

Switching off Wiki formatting

You may need to switch off Wiki formatting for some block of text. You can do it using the following syntax:
:: <nowiki>Strange code is here</nowiki>


For some of the users this might seem a little hard to understand, but like I said we want to make it as simple as possible to use all the features of our online project management tool, this is why we are streaming to improve our built in WYSIWYG editor. Expect some more posts how to use wiki soon. Meanwhile keep Comindworking :)

  Posted by godzhesas on 09 April, 2008 09:11

First of all, a little bit history :), so what is wiki? Wiki.org defines wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work.", partially inspired by Apple's HyperCard programming environment, the first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham and named after wiki-wiki (it means quick ''''in Hawaiian).'''''''' Basically wikis are web pages that anyone can create or edit (usually a person needs to have some permissions). Today the most popular use of wiki is Wikipedia - the largest, free and quaity online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by volunteers (as of March 2008, Wikipedia has over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias).

I think that if you ever participated on a project that was using wiki, it will be hard not to use it anymore, though it's not ideal of course, it has it's cons and pros.

Advantages of using a wiki:

• Your central storage system - you can save everything your need, and all the document changes are saved as well
• The ease of use and the ease of linking - this makes your knowledge management and sharing an easier task
• It's online, constant awareness - available anywhere where you have an internet connection; as soon as you update the wiki page, everyone, everywhere in the organization, has access to the latest information
• Instant team collaboration - you don't need to send multiple emails with document updates or goal changes to the team.
• Ideal for distributed teams

Disadvantages of using a wiki'''''':

• If projects are big, and a lot of people are contributing it gets messy
• Security - sometimes one password is used for workgroups, it makes easier to hack the online ducuments
• It's harder for non tech-savvies to get used to wiki syntax
• For some wikis installation and backups are confusing
• You need some maintenance in order to avoid "idea soup"

I personally think that you need wiki, and as you see advantages are more valuable, but it's up to you to decide. If you are a mad scientist, working alone, making the new secret design, maybe you don't need a wiki :), if you are not, take a quick look at some of wiki features that Comindwork has to offer:

• Talk pages'''''' - this extremely useful for distributed teams, because manager and team can discuss documents, project tasks and any other pages created in Comindwork
• WYSIWYG editing
• Online document management'''''' - insert into pages, tasks any documents related to the project: PDFs, spreadsheets, word documents, slide shows; anything related to the project, don't need to keep it on your hard drive
• RSS feeds - you get instantly informed as changes are made. Effective information management and sharing is critical in today's crazy technology world
• Categories and tagging - advanced wiki features for content linking and tagging to keep team memory organized
• Versions - history comparison charts lets you review the changes made to the wiki page, who mage the changes and when exactly did it happen
• Subsection editing'''''' - Comondwork wiki allows editing of a subsection of a page (as identified by its header), this is very useful when editing pages with large amount of information and sections.
• Access - only registered project users can access the documents (roles-based permissions for workflows and wiki pages)
• Backups are made automatically
• Free and no installation needed -'''''' just register for a free account
• basically you will find here all the features available in Wikipedia

Want to manage your information more effectively? Then come and join Comindwork, completely free!

  Posted by godzhesas on 07 April, 2008 13:33

In my previous post about time management tips, I gave you a couple hints about time management. Lets take a quick look how Comindwork could help you to manage time more effectively.

• Deadlines - manage your deadlines effectively with Comindwork, milestones and project tasks (cases) will be your best friends getting organized, ready and prepared for deadlines. Remember that any task that hasn't got an exact or approximate deadline will get lost, till it won't become critical and remind of itself. Give every task a deadline!
• Meetings - usually there are lots of project meetings that aren't actually needed at all. Comindwork will help you to decrease the amount of needed meetings: project blogs is a great place to share project news and announcements, every task and wiki document (page) has a talk page where details can be discussed and all this is instantly available through a password protected RSS feed. For the needed meetings, Comindwork will help you to make them more effective: before a meeting create a wiki page with a short agenda in advance (everyone will get instantly notified through the RSS feed), put a short summary of the meeting after it's done, so that no one needs to make notes and so that the decisions made, the knowledge shared would be available for the team later on, at anytime (it's simple and easy using wiki feature)
• Paperwork - I think that everybody hates it, our online project management tool will help you to keep all your documents, files, questionnaires, reports etc. online, available 24/7 and safe (backups are performed couple times a day). You'll not only save money by reducing your costs related to paperwork, apart from that  you'll create your own knowledge base!
• Panning  - planning isn't urgent, but it's important! The busier you are, the better your planning skills should be, because without planning you'll be just wasting part of your precious time. Try to have a day planned at least one day before.
• Interruptions - it's almost impossible to eliminate them, but you need to decrease their number if you want to stay effective. Comindwork dashboards come in very handy here. You won't need to make a couple phone calls, read a bunch of papers and emails to get in context of the project - quick view on the project dashboard and you'll know what was happening for the last couple days: milestones, tasks assigned, new documents, changes and more. And you don't need to sit in the office, with Comindwork you get the job done when and where it is convenient for you.

Comindwork is at your service :). We give you the tools, that you need, to increase your and your team effectiveness, achieve better communication and make successful projects! Sign up for a free account and start using Comindwork today for better projects.
We're actively accepting and implementing all user suggestions and place them to our features roadmap. If you have some cool ideas that would improve Comindwork, drop a line or two to our support team.

  Posted by godzhesas on 04 April, 2008 09:54

As I have promised in one of my previous posts, here are the other 15 project management acronyms that you might find useful:

• PM (Project Manager, or Project Management)
• CT (Cycle Time) - the amount of time
• BAC (Budget At Completion) - all budgets allocated for the project
• EAC (Estimate At Completion) - actual cost of project work and completed and the work left to complete the project
• FP (Fixed Price) - when you have a signed contract that you'll deliver the project in time, in budget etc. The client does not pay for "over budget", project is completely contractors' responsibility.
• JIT (Just In Time) - no comments :)
• CE (Cost Estimating) - expected costs of a project task
• VAC (Variance At Completion) - if your BAC-EAC gives a negative value, it means you are over budget.
• MPS (Multi Project Schedule) - scheduling technique that ensures the right resource allocations.
• PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) - scheduling technique that determines the duration of a project.
• QA (Quality Assurance) - actions necessary to make sure that the product meets its requirements. Of course there is much then that to quality assurance :), you can expect a separate post on this soon.
• QC (Quality Control) - controlling results throughout the project life cycle, that project deliverables would meet the agreed standards
• RAM (Responsibility Assignment Matrix) - ensures that all activities are assigned to at least on project member (with some level of responsibility)
• SME (Subject Matter expert) - project member is an expert in some part of the project (like planning, or requirements, or charter etc.).
• RRC (Risk Response Control) - controlling the actions taken when risks appear.

Are you enjoying managing your projects with Comindwork as much as i do? I hope you do :) Let us know, leave your comments.

  Posted by godzhesas on 01 April, 2008 12:42

There are a lot of articles and opinions what productivity is and what it is not. In most cases ideas differ a bit from each other. What does productivity mean to you? In this post I'll try to give some of the tips that I use, and some tips how you can use Comindwork to increase your productivity.

• Urgent tasks first - decide what needs to be done first, don't start multitasking, this is a common mistake when you think that by doing 10 things at a time you'll achieve more at the end of the day. Believe me you won't, so better PLAN, do one task at a time and try to stay concentrated if it's possible. Here Comindwork can serve you as a right hand (at least it does for me) - with Comindwork you can easily stay organized, keep your plans and goals up to date, using our "bird view"dashboards and enterprise wiki system.
• Avoid interruptions - the longer you keep concentrated, the better you'll do your work, bright ideas come without noticing them, time flies and look - you just spent the whole day productively, though this never happens if you work in an office, loaded with people (it's great if you spent at least half of your day concentrated). What's great about Comindwork is, that it's online, or you may say web-based project management tool, so you can use it whenever it's convenient for you - at work, at home, early in the morning, or late at night.
• Work early in the mornings. Of course some people just can't wake up early, but if you can, I am sure that you would see a boost in productivity if you'd come to work earlier and leave earlier. Comindwork can be of a great friend in the early morning: go through tasks (review and assign new ones), plan your day if you need, review milestones, etc. I could go on and on :)
• You feel that your productivity is below "zero", but just can't help it? Everyone has moments like this I suppose, if you can't get out of the office for a nice walk, then grab a good book from the office library, find a quite place to read and just hide in their for couple of hours reading :). You'll get your ideas sorted out, get back on track and you'll gain some knowledge!
• Just Do IT. The philosophy is old...and simple, yet not that simple to implement. Like always it's easy to say and hard to do, never the less it's great for improving productivity. Just do it, even if you don't know what to do or how to, do it, try to do it :). Actually there is quite a good post about it on dirtSimple.org

I am sure that Comindwork could increase your and your team's productivity, it's completely free so why not give a shot? Check my previous post about time management, for some more productivity related tips.