Herding Schizophrenic Bulls: What Project Management Tool Do You Use?
Published by randp November 28th, 2006 in News, Business, Rand Pipp. Tags: business, business blog, project management, Rand Pipp, software, startup, web2.0, web20.
Glorious Good Day, Rand Pipp here: sharing another story of life at MojoPages. This week’s topic: herding schizophrenic bulls. A startup has many challenging aspects; two of the biggest challenges are too much to do and too little time to do it. Everyone has to perform multiple roles and time is always running out. We all have different learning styles as well.
One of my jobs is to bridge the learning styles and maximize the efficiency with an emphasis on bringing some level of order to the full throttle charge. We are very fortunate here at MojoPages as everyone has a great depth of expertise and experience. We are passionate and we love startups. That does not mean that getting all that experience moving in the same direction at the same time is effortless.
One of my initial focuses with the group was to get detailed assessment of what each of us were doing and to look for holes and then help to fill in the gaps. I did this with MS Project and quickly assembled over 400 tasks that we were working on or soon would be.
After creating the Gantt and Pert charts I realized that I was leaving some of the group behind. Confusion and frustration were rearing their ugly heads: the bulls were starting to scatter. MS Project is very good at managing complex projects with a lot of detail, but it requires an active participation of all members, without which I would soon become a full-time project manager with no time left to support the other critical areas demanding my attention. It was time to get focused on what would work with this group, so I pulled out a time honored management tool: white board and post-its.
Sometimes simple is best. I used line-tape to create a grid with functions and dates and in less than an hour we were able to take the critical aspects of the MS Project task list, with revisions, and outline them on a white board to see the critical path to our beta launch. Ahh… smiles spread where confusion once was and happiness filled the air.
For a brief moment the schizophrenic flurry of action was reduced to a harmonious purr. Then the moment was over and we all charged into the night to tackle our pile of objectives. Now to get this on google calendar, basecamp, worksmart, autotask or some other webased software solution, any recommendations?
business, business blog, project management, Rand Pipp, software, startup, web2.0, web20Bookmark to:
4 Responses to “Herding Schizophrenic Bulls: What Project Management Tool Do You Use?”
Leave a Reply
You must login to post a comment.
dude, you crack me up: schizophrenic bulls. It’s amazing what a marker and a whiteboard can do. I’d say keep doing whatever works and then encourage you to look at dot project which is something we use. it’s free open source and fairly simple to install and use.
Thanks Jonathan, did a little of the demo and am downloading as I type to do a quick tour. Running of the bull may be held off a month or two with this, thanks again, Rand
Hi Rand,
Nice article. We think this situation is familiar to many. With that in mind we created www.paystage.net, we like to think of it as ‘Project Management for the rest of us!’
Building bridges, designing missiles and developing complex software is the realm of high end Project Management tools. But for much of lifes common tasks this is overkill.
We have designed paystage to work with projects that start on the likes of elance and guru, to make users more confident in collaborating with people they may not have met in the flesh, and might never meet!
It’s about easily structuring your requirements and then managing delivery.
The service is free at the moment (and a base level will remain so), we would appreciate any feedback you can give us as we know we have a way to go!
Thanks
Dan
www.paystage.net
Hi,
MS Project is good for project management but for remove collaboration some web-based solution like Clarity or dotProject is more suitable I think.