Episode 24 – Holiday Gifts for the PM

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to discuss what matters to you as a professional project manager.  Whether it’s how to get certified or how to create successful projects, we get input from leaders in the field and draw on their experience and accomplishments. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, it is holiday time.  It seems like every time I turn on the TV or the radio, I hear somebody talking about finding the perfect gift for that person on your list. ANDY CROWE:  And all the sleigh bells in the air that you can hear.  Let me ask you a question.  Has anybody else had an issue with really well-targeted ads coming at them over the Internet? NICK WALKER:  Oh, oh. ANDY CROWE:  It’s been alarming this year how well they’ve figured out what’s going on in my head. BILL YATES:  They know Andy.  They know what Andy wants. ANDY CROWE:  They know.  That’s correct. NICK WALKER:  They know it before I know it.  All right.  So we’ve got gifts that we want to talk about for that perfect project manager on your list.  I guess we want to answer the question:  What’s in your stocking? ANDY CROWE:  You know what, Nick, one of the things we’re thinking about here, some of the project managers get to give a gift to themselves through some of this.  So it’s not so much that maybe you’re buying these for somebody else, but maybe you’re buying it for yourself.  And Bill and I were talking about this as we were preparing for the podcast.  You know, it’s funny, as we look at tools, as we look at technology, one of the things that really always resonates with me is the fact that it’s the process underneath it that really matters.  The technology just facilitates that process. When I started my career in project management, somebody handed me a copy of Microsoft Project and said, “Go and make a project plan.”  Nobody ever taught me how up to that point.  Nobody taught me how to estimate, how to schedule, how to even think about decomposing the work and putting the fences around the scope.  And suddenly I was expected to make a project plan.  So the idea is we’re going to cover some tools.  We’re excited about this episode because this is a lot of fun.  But at the same time, if you give somebody a better word processor, it doesn’t make them a better writer or a better communicator. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  If you give somebody a better tool, it doesn’t make them a better PM automatically.  And these things will just facilitate getting them there once the process is in place. BILL YATES:  And we get mesmerized by these new tools.  Sometimes they’re... NICK WALKER:  Oh, yeah. ANDY CROWE:  They’re shiny. BILL YATES:  They are shiny, and they come in nice boxes. NICK WALKER:  You can geek out. BILL YATES:  Yeah, we get geeked out.  We think, this is the coolest thing ever.  This is going to change how I do my job and make my life that much better.  And, dang, I just like every feature in it.  I’m going to go deep and figure all this stuff out.  And we lose, to Andy’s point, we lose the big picture.  What are we doing?  How much time am I spending on the tool, just for the sake of me enjoying the tool?  Or is the tool really – am I serving the tool, or is the tool serving me? ANDY CROWE:  Mm-hmm. NICK WALKER:  So with that in mind, do you have any applications that are must-haves, some that you have to have, that you really can’t do without? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  We had fun reaching out to the community and asking other PMs, “What resonates with you?  If you were alone on an island, and you had a project you had to manage, what tool would you want to have on your last two hours of computer life, you know, before the battery dies?”  And so we got some nice feedback from people, from practitioners.  We thought about our own experiences, as well, and did some research, just to see what’s out there in the community.  And we have different categories that we’ll go through.  I think we’ll start with the big stuff, kind of the scheduling and planning tools that most people are going to use on a daily basis as a project manager.  Andy, what’s the one that you’ve used most in your experience? ANDY CROWE:  You know, it has to be Microsoft Project.  That’s kind of the gold standard out there.  It’s something that a lot of people are familiar with.  It runs in different platforms on the cloud.  You can have it installed on your desktop.  It’s a Windows-based application that just does heavy lifting for schedule development. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I know for back early in my career here at Velociteach we would talk about integrating a work breakdown structure with Microsoft Project.  And at first that capability was kind of clunky, and it wasn’t there.  And through the different versions through the years they’ve made that very seamless, as well.  So that’s an aspect that we like about that, too.  With Microsoft Project you can integrate work breakdown structure.  We talk a lot about, in our classes, when we’re teaching, we talk about the ability to assign work to individuals or team members and then be able to track that back to the work breakdown structure, integrate that with Microsoft Project, and be able to really see if our estimates are accurate and if the resources are doing what they said they would do. ANDY CROWE:  So I have a trip scheduled to Redmond in the first quarter of next year.  And one of the things I’m trying to do is get with some of the people in the Project team.  I want to discuss a little philosophical issue I have with the way they do the WBS to schedule transition. BILL YATES:  Okay. ANDY CROWE:  And just talk through a little bit about, hey, are there better ways to make that turn because they make it in a rather unusual way.  We won’t get into the details of that, but maybe we’ll have something fun to report in Q1. BILL YATES:  Excellent, yeah.  You know, another, with Microsoft Project, many are probably going, “What about Primavera, you know, that’s what we use.”  So I think we should mention those are really – we probably have two 900-pound gorillas in the room.  And I had a suggestion for Andy.  Nick, I know you’re probably a big fan of the Epic Rap Battles that are on the Internet. NICK WALKER:  Epic Rap Battles of History. BILL YATES:  So I think when Andy returns from Redmond we need to have an Epic Rap Battle with Primavera and Microsoft Project. ANDY CROWE:  There you go.  We’ll do that.  You know, Primavera has a really good customer base.  A lot of people would argue that Primavera does better ERP integration. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  And so, if you have a large ERP system – SAP, some of those, Oracle – that Primavera ties in really nicely.  I don’t know if that’s the case.  I haven’t dealt with it on that level.  But that’s one of the arguments people will make for it. BILL YATES:  You know, that’s something that I’ve heard those complaints over and over and over, which is, “I have to maintain things in two or three different systems.  I have to track time over here.  I have to track my project in Microsoft Project or Primavera.  And then I have to interface with the financials with ERP.”  And, yeah, so that’s a constant complaint that I hear.  Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy answer to that.  I’d love to hear if somebody has opinions on that. NICK WALKER:  There’s one on your list that I have used a lot for communication, and that’s Basecamp.  But there’s a whole lot of things that Basecamp can do, specifically for the project manager. BILL YATES:  Basecamp started right here in Atlanta.  It was incubated here in Atlanta.  So they’ve got quite a history here. NICK WALKER:  How about that. BILL YATES:  And that is, when you look at what is being used most, what’s the most common, Basecamp is right up there near the top. ANDY CROWE:  It’s a jack of all trades. BILL YATES:  It really is.  And it’s a simplified version.  You know, you’re not – if you can live without the complexity or the features and functionality of Microsoft Project or Primavera, Basecamp is one that bubbles towards the top.  We see a lot of our partners using Basecamp.  Matter of fact, this morning before recording the podcast I was on Basecamp, tracking some of the issues that were up. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, and I might suggest that Basecamp is a collaboration tool. BILL YATES:  Exactly. ANDY CROWE:  More than just a scheduling-type tool. BILL YATES:  Right, right. ANDY CROWE:  It’s something that you can share files.  It’s something you can start discussion threads.  It’s something you can assign tasks, things like that, which is a little bit different than Microsoft Project, which is a sort of a top-down view of the schedule and all the resources on it. BILL YATES:  Yeah, that’s a great distinction.  And it brings up to me a strength and a weakness with Basecamp, just from my own experience and from others, which is the threads.  The thread capability is excellent.  It’s great if you have an issue that’s been assigned or a task that’s been assigned to someone, and they need some input from other team members.  So they can ask a question and easily collaborate and let people know to notify them of the need for their input.  However, here’s one of my complaints.  If you create a project in Microsoft or, sorry, in Basecamp, and then you have several activities or tasks that are in there, how do you prioritize or rank those? ANDY CROWE:  Right. BILL YATES:  And that’s – you can do it.  You can actually drag and drop to the top of the list, that kind of thing.  But as soon as you start to have multiple projects within Basecamp and trying to prioritize resources across those, it gets very difficult. ANDY CROWE:  Well, it gets difficult because it’s not terribly actionable.