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Milestone Slip Charts

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 19:56:09 +0000

Milestone slip charts are designed to give an at-a-glance overview of how your project is doing. They do this by plotting the predicted delivery date for each milestone at every project status report. These charts are ideal for importing into project dashboards because, as we will see, they show history very well. They are also known as Milestone Tracking Charts...

Gantt charts

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:18:48 +0000

The number one requested feature for The Plan Is so far is the ability to display schedules as Gantt charts. A preview of this feature is now being slowly turned on for users - including the ability to set dates by drag and drop and a few other nice things...

Late Stage Investment

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 07:52:02 +0000

I spent some time yesterday talking to an independently wealthy individual who has recently made a late stage investment into a technology company and discussing the factors that had lead to his decision to go ahead. It was enlightening to actually talk to someone who operates on the investment side and see the things he was looking for and how they matched up to the advice given to companies seeking investment. I asked his permission to share the observations I got from the conversation as I thought they would also be interesting to you...

Fixed Date February

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 08:19:30 +0000

Elizabeth Harrin is running a Fixed Date February event over at the pm4girls blog. She is going to be looking at how to deal with projects that have a firm deadline; and as that is exactly the kind of thing The Plan Is was designed for I have donated some beta accounts (including some premium accounts) for her to give away...

Side Projects

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:38:12 +0000

To help keep an eye out for mentions of The Plan Is on Twitter I built a tool to export searches as an Excel spreadsheet. After a little bit more work I'm able to make it available to everyone as a web service. You can try it here.

Disaster recovery projects

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:11:49 +0000

A disaster recovery project is one with a tight deadline and fixed deliverables. If it looks like there is no way for the project to succeed - then congratulations, you have a disaster on your hands...

Crowd Computing

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:39:33 +0000

I have open sourced the code for Really Cloudy, a JavaScript library that lets you process data on your website visitors' computers...

More change

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 19:11:31 +0000

Leaving a job and starting a company is a pretty big change, but I think I can do better. I have been invited to speak at an event in the US so I'm going to make the most of it by spending three months out there...

Finding programmers for your startup

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:07:12 +0000

Because I am starting a company I read a lot of entrepreneurial mailing lists. Sometimes the emails are quite funny, especially when a 'business guy' sends a message to the list asking for programmers to join his start up...

What do I try first?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:44:35 +0000

One of the interesting things about starting up a company is the huge amount of advice on offer. Family, friends, customers and everyone on the Internet has a theory about every aspect of your operations. It's certain that at least some of the advice is good, especially when it's being offered by someone who has used that method successfully in the past. What's also certain is that a one person company cannot can implement all of it...

Reputation tracking

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:02:59 +0000

Last week I wrote a little Twitter application to track tweets with the #pmot hash tag and provide a reputation list of those who had the most influence...

Making EVM more useful for small teams

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:49:14 +0000

One of the problems with Earned Value Management is that it needs some adjustment to make it useful for smaller teams. These teams are facing a different sort of challenge than large companies, and need to adapt their project management tools to match...

Avoiding the waterfall

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:55:38 +0000

This week I have a guest post over at Kelly Waters' Agile Software Development Made Easy blog on avoiding the return of waterfall development after agile has been implemented in your organisation. You can read it here.

Minor release

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:23:48 +0000

A new release just went live that fixes a number of minor bugs with the way dates are calculated. As a result you should now find that adding and removing tasks is much more reliable. There are also a couple of corrections to the Microsoft Project exporter...

Waterfall is the future

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 09:45:32 +0000

I was speaking this weekend about Waterfall Project Management and why your project is probably a waterfall project, even if you think that it isn't. You can grab the slides and a transcript at http://theplanis.com/slides/waterfall_slides.pdf

Service outage this morning

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:02:27 +0000

I apologise for the unplanned service outage this morning between 6:30 and 7:30am GMT. The root cause was a power outage at Slicehost's DFW data centre. This lasted for about 30 minutes. One of our services failed to automatically restart after the outage, which caused the website to remain unavailable until a manual recovery was carried out. As a result of this incident the system recovery service is being fixed and retested to reduce the impact should this occur again. A long term plan is in place to remove our reliance on one data centre, so in the future we will be able to go through an event like this without loss of service. This work is planned for the second phase of the beta in Q1 2010. Individual customers who would like a reliability guarantee before this date are welcome to contact me to discuss how that could be achieved for them. Customer data was not at risk in this particular incident, however a clean back up was made at 6am.

An Introduction To Earned Value Management

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 17:40:23 +0000

EVM, or earned value management, is a method for viewing how well you are performing against your estimates. Unfortunately it gets very little respect because everyone insists on making it more complicated than it needs to be. I have used a cut down version of EVM to demonstrate performance over time to great effect on several projects, which is very valuable for both reporting and control...

Which milestones have to be on your start-up plan?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:13:14 +0100

This week I have a guest post over at Pawel Brodzinski's Software Project Management blog on picking milestones for small start up companies. You can read it here.

New Features

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:36:55 +0100

I have just tested and released a few new things into the beta client. Now you can name and rename your plans, share your plan with other people by sending them a short link and turn on and off public sharing. You can also view and edit plans in Safari and Internet Explorer 8 as well as Firefox. Phew! Back to work on the next batch of stuff. As always your feedback on the features you have and the features you want will be extremely welcome.

New contracts, old problems

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:57:37 +0100

I still occasionally get asked why a company needs project managers. It's a better question than many people realise as a lot of your staff probably know what they should be doing, and are busy getting on with it without any project management required...

Organisational Attention Deficit Disorder

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:29:17 +0100

No organisation is perfect; learning how to use these imperfections to help your project is a key part of delivering on time. One common problem I see a lot is stealing from calm and organised projects to throw attention and manpower at troubled projects. However there is a period before a deadline where attention and help can be commanded and, more importantly, maintained without having resources stolen by another project...

Site redesign

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 18:32:27 +0100

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the old site design, the new version incorporates a lot of the suggestions made. I hope you find it easier to use now - if not it would be great to hear which bits can be improved.

Good days and bad days

Wed, 7 Oct 2009 08:21:52 +0100

I have been talking to a lot of project managers recently to get the trial for The Plan Is under way. One of the things that stands out is that the job is very similar regardless of the field, and that our good and bad days have a lot in common...

Month one, and it's already going wrong

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:54:17 +0100

The end of the first month is in sight and I already know that I'm going to miss at least a few of the milestones in my plan. This is pretty embarrassing for a business that specialises in project management. Fortunately I send out a reporting pack each month and this forces me to be honest about slips and take a look at the root cause...

Perfect versus good

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:45:19 +0100

One of the problems that gets blamed a lot for project failure is 'scope creep'. Scope creep is a diplomatic way of saying that management don't know what they want from a project and keep on changing the requirements until the whole thing falls apart in an exciting blame explosion. Invariably when this happens the project manager is fired, the actual requirements are finally documented, and the project pushes on to either success or another iteration of the scope creep spiral depending on how much work remains...

Getting Started

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:29:10 +0100

It's been a big week as Wednesday was the first day working on my new venture. Quitting was surprisingly hard to do, especially as Truphone was a pretty exciting place and the people I worked with were great. In the end though I really want to get this built and couldn't wait any longer...