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Our marketing holds forth the notion that PositiveWare is a project management application. And yet at first glance it seems to be missing a lot of features that conventional project management applications have. Here we explain why that is and encourage you to try our approach.
We believe that in the project management world there is an excessive emphasis on tools and techniques, and not enough on the basics. This belief is hard won - in 2004 and 2005 we tried to market a sophisticated project management software application that we believed would find a ready market among MS Project users.
What we learned shocked us. First, we found that most people in the role of project manager came by it accidentally as they were trying to do their day job. So the engineer becomes a project manager, the account exec becomes a project manager, and so on.
Second, we found that to the extent that the pm's used software tools, they used them badly. MS Project may be the most misused software in the world. This comes from trying to put way too many features into the application. It does not help that for these features there is usually a sophisticated theory behind the feature that has to be grasped before the feature can be used.
Third, we found that to the extent that project managers were trained in project management, this training tended to focus on 'hard' skills like defining a critical path. Conversely, the 'soft' skills of project management are generally not trained. And yet it is the soft skills that make or break a project.
Thus our reductionist approach to project management . No lags, no dependencies, no critical paths, pert charts, or a whole host of other stuff that is generally misunderstood and misused if is used at all.
With PositiveWare we want you to define a project (and who owns it), define the supporting tasks (and who owns them), create time budget, and keep everyone on the team continually up to date on the status each of these items. We also try to make it as easy as possible to create reports. We want our accidental project managers to overcommunicate, understand status, and keep their projects on time and under budget.
Of course by making the back side of the technology easy we also hope to make the project easier to manage. No fretting about databases, routers, backup, permissioning, and so on.
We believe effective project management comes from communicating as much as possible about the project in order to let those involved come up with solutions. Let us know how we're doing.
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