Project planning is something that requires time and focus. Effective project planning goes along way towards completing a successful project with a positive outcome.
Whether you plan using the infamous gantt chart, write the plan down in a notebook, pop it into a spreadsheet or use a project management tool, the accuracy and detail behind that plan will determine how well you run your project.
I won a copy (thanks Andy Beal) of “The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch (which was nice) and it is a great read for anyone interested in growing their business through referrals. One section starts with the sentence “People don’t talk about boring companies..”. He’s right, they don’t!
This is a challenge that I have faced since setting up MyProjectTracker. For months, it was all about features and capabilities. The 15 second pitch included the words project management (and yes, I could see peoples eyes glaze over!). In other words spoken like an IT person selling to an IT person, not as a marketer or sales person to a business owner.
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We thought long and hard about going for an open beta test on MyProjectTracker. On the plus side we felt we’d get honest feedback from people who did not know us i.e. not the friends and family brigade. On the negative side, we were putting the product out there and leaving ourselves open to criticism.
We elected to go for it and opened up the product so anyone could sign up to and have a look around. We felt the benefits of open and honest feedback far outweighed the risk of exposing ourselves to potential criticisms.
We pushed the product for exactly one week directly to companies and via the usual social media channels. We decided to ease off once we had about 125 users signing up. We had a target of 20% of those people to actually go beyond the look around and actually get themselves setup and using the product in anger.
We hit our target in less than a fortnight – delighted. We got our sign-ups and our 20% of active users – a mix of businesses from single person consultancies to our largest, a company with 30+ employees. A good cross-section we felt.
This morning, I was reading a post on Bloggertone that reminded me of our own journey to get where we are at the moment.
When Eoin and I presented the concepts for MyProjectTracker to our friends in Contrast, we had already written down to an implementation level i.e. dictating (almost), how we wanted the product to be built. We had gone the direct route to come up with an answer for how the product should be put together based on our own experiences up to that point. Oh, and to ensure it was deployed as fast as possible (in our eyes).
Our call to arms that made the Dragons Den application suddenly very real. We were lucky though. We found out in early November so we had time to prepare.
To me, value proposition is simply the value a customer receives when buying a product and/or service. It applies to both new business and to servicing existing customers. A business has to create this value proposition for its customers and make sure that the value proposition is viable and sustainable.
How do we translate the concept into our pricing models and offerings?
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Hello Everyone.
We felt it was about time we shared a bit of an update with you to let you know what’s going on in MyProjectTracker world.
Well, the beta testing is going well and we have had a great response from the folks who are “using it in anger” – of which there are a fair number. As expected, we have hit a few bumps in the road that we are working through at the moment, but thankfully nothing awkward – just a bit time consuming.
We are looking at our marketing site again. The message coming back is that it is brilliant in design but to subtle in its approach. We need it to be more like a shop than it is at the moment so we’re working hard to see what we can come up with. We’ll probably pop a couple of ideas up on Facebook at some point to see what you reckon – we’d love your opinions.
We were on the Irish version of Dragons Den the other day. Grateful for great editing. It was a fun experience and we’ll put up a post about it in due course.
What else. Ah yes, the road-map for the next while is effectively finished. We have some exciting things in the pipeline and once we have our ball-park dates for when we are going to pop them into the product, we’ll let you know. If your using the product, let us know your thoughts for possible inclusion too!
We’re enjoying the blogging as well. Hopefully you are as well. We tend to write a little about a lot of different things that come into our minds – but this means it’s from the heart and not contrived (we hope!). It also means we don’t run out of things to write about!
Commercial launch is approaching, but we need to iron out the bits and bobs first. We’ll keep you posted.
That’s about it. Looking for any information, sure let us know at info@myprojecttracker.com.
Best Regards
The MyProjectTracker Team.
Photo : Our own project on MyProjectTracker 
Collaborative project management is a term that has derived from the ability to manage and share communications and information relating to a project delivery on-line. As a term, it has become a fashionable concept as the business world has moved to the internet to run itself and as teams become more dispersed.
But is collaboration sufficient to effectively ensure a successful and profitable project for your business?
The premise here is that the project manager is capable of course, the tools are simply that – tools, not project management.
We were contacted one afternoon by Des from Contrast to make the decision on the payment solution for MyProjectTracker. Payment Server Provider or Payment Bureau.
Myself and Barney sat down one afternoon to trash out the pro’s and con’s of using a Payment Server Provider (RealEx) or a Payment Bureau (PayPal). To be honest, Barney favoured PayPal and I favoured RealEx.
A well formulated guide that helped us make sense of the online payment choices was www.webpayments.ie. This should really be the first port of call for anyone creating a website that will be required to take payments.
Here is a summary based on our discussion that day and our discussion of this topic with others who have setup website that require payment:
Project managers are consumed with processes and complex tools to help their projects along. Project management is described as an art form and a huge industry has grown out of this whole space.
Our project managers are producing report upon report, continually seeking to learn the “latest trend” in project management thinking and talking in a language often lost on the customers with whom they are dealing.
They are acting like this because, in my view, the whole system has completely lost focus on what being a project manager is all about.
Sure, process is good (when it delivers benefit and is not a hindrance) and the latest thinking can indeed bring those benefits. Tools are prevalent and offer varying levels of capability and function but cannot cover weakness in the area of communication. Process and tools are a means to the end, not the end itself.
We need to re-focus. (more…)
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