{"id":966,"date":"2008-04-01T02:19:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T02:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/2008\/04\/01\/can-using-pm-tools-come-more-naturally\/"},"modified":"2019-08-07T14:35:24","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T21:35:24","slug":"can-using-pm-tools-come-more-naturally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=966","title":{"rendered":"Can Using PM Tools Come More Naturally?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Between my <a title=\"Project Management 2.0\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gantthead.com\/blog\/Project-Management-2.0\/\">blog<\/a> and my role at <a title=\"Gantthead.com\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gantthead.com\/\">gantthead<\/a>, I probably get two or three meeting requests a week from Project Management tool vendors. The general trends these days (or at least what they punch in demos) seem to be toward:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Software as a Service (making implementation easy and quick)<\/li>\n<li>Portfolio Views and Back End Data Mining Capabilities<\/li>\n<li>General &#8220;Ease of Use&#8221; and Simplicity<!--more--><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In my mind, the one that really matters most is the last one.  Dozens of application developers who barely know what a project is have  developed a sea of &#8220;task list makers&#8221; and call them Project Management tools.  They are cheap and people love a simple task list &#8211; so they buy them &#8211; AND THE END &#8212; USERS &#8212; USE THEM.  Increasingly, I&#8217;ve seen departments  within large organizations set aside expensive PM shelf-ware in favor of tools that they can buy on a credit card and not have to install or train people on.  They lose some pretty major functionality, but let&#8217;s face it &#8211; it&#8217;s functionality that only a few people use.  In other words, &#8220;ease of use&#8221; is the oddly revolutionary &#8220;functionality&#8221; that some vendors have used to change the PM software landscape as we know it &#8211; moving us from &#8220;highly-capable, rarely used&#8221; to &#8220;minimally-capable, frequently used&#8221; project management tools.<\/p>\n<p>While ease of use is important for getting new PMs on board with tracking basic progress on projects, there has to be a bridge between the tools you can learn in a day and those that can handle robust reporting and complex projects.  I personally think that building this &#8220;bridge&#8221; involves building software that is more fully integrated with the places you &#8220;live&#8221; on your computer.  It also involves an &#8220;Amazon One-click&#8221; style transition to a more robust tool if and when it&#8217;s needed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Where do you live?<\/strong><br \/>\nI spend a lot of time in email and in an internet browser, but email is the one application I really can not stay away from. That&#8217;s why I got really excited when Microsoft announced <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gantthead.com\/blog\/Project-Management-2.0\/195\/\">integration between  Outlook Task List and MS Project<\/a>.  Recently, I thought it was pretty cool when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gantthead.com\/blog\/Project-Management-2.0\/762\/\">Project Insight (and SaaS vendor) did essentially the same thing<\/a>.  These approaches let you keep on &#8220;living&#8221; where you do now as an apprentice PM, then let you move up to the real tools once you start feeling the need.  Companies like Daptiv have taken a parallel approach using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.daptiv.com\/solutions\/daptiv_platform\/index.htm\">widgets<\/a> to integrate their tools into your Yahoo (or other web-based) home page.  So companies are starting to try to make it easier for you to gain a foothold in PM and move up as it makes sense.<\/p>\n<p>Where do you &#8220;live&#8221; on your computer?  Do your PM tools live there too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Between my blog and my role at gantthead, I probably get two or three meeting requests a week from Project [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":385,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,8],"tags":[1373,343,344,38,345,339,338,342,341,340],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-goals","category-priorities-2","tag-goals","tag-pm","tag-ppm","tag-project-management","tag-project-management-ease-of-use","tag-project-management-software","tag-project-management-tools","tag-project-portfolio-management-software","tag-project-portfolio-management-tools","tag-saas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/385"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24675,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions\/24675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}