Author: Brad Egeland

Brad Egeland is a Business Solution Designer and IT/PM consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management, and project management experience leading initiatives in Manufacturing, Government Contracting, Creative Design, Gaming and Hospitality, Retail Operations, Aviation and Airline, Pharmaceutical, Start-ups, Healthcare, Higher Education, Non-profit, High-Tech, Engineering and general IT. He has been named the “#1 Provider of Project Management Content in the World” with over 7,000 published articles, eBooks, white papers and videos. Brad is married, a father of 11, and living in sunny Las Vegas, NV. Visit Brad's site at http://www.bradegeland.com/.

5+ Reasons Why You Should Try FunctionFox for Remote Work Productivity When Managing Projects

Written by Brad Egeland on March 10, 2021. Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on 5+ Reasons Why You Should Try FunctionFox for Remote Work Productivity When Managing Projects

The unprecedented global health crisis is changing the way we work at truly astounding speeds.

Suddenly, whether by choice or necessity, many of us find ourselves negotiating the new reality of remote work. As a technology supplier to the creative community FunctionFox wondered how they could best support their current users, and make the transition to remote work easy, affordable, and intuitive for those that haven’t worked in this way before. With a recent survey* showing that up to 90% of creative companies are working remotely during the crisis, FunctionFox wondered how they could help teams to ride out the storm and prepare for recovery.

Starting Smart

Managing the transformation of a traditional to remote workforce raises several issues, not least of which is how to get started without adding to people’s workload or incurring excessive costs. For FunctionFox, this means keeping things simple and affordable, with an easy-to-follow set up procedure. FunctionFox is committed to being a valuable extension of your business. They help creative companies get setup to manage their businesses better in 30 days, or your money back.

Keeping Time

FunctionFox’s technology is founded on their quick, accurate timesheets. For teams with remote workers these are invaluable. Everyone can enter their time and expenses from any device with access to the Internet, and each time record is immediately available for reports, charts & graphs throughout the system.

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Connecting Teams

With collaborating team members scattered across the continent or around the world, keeping everyone connected is a huge challenge. Because it is so important that remote teams share project knowledge, FunctionFox created a Project Blog that gathers and updates project information in one central place. All revisions, changes and comments are centralized and available to the whole team.

Communicating Clearly

In uncertain times, clear communication becomes more important than ever. The risk of miscommunication increases when people are not able to meet in person, so it is important to build in opportunities to schedule virtual team meetings, and ‘office hours’ that are consistent and regular. FunctionFox enables everyone to stay on track toward common goals and objectives.

Controlling Privacy

FunctionFox guards confidential customer information carefully. They have also built into their technology both User Groups and Access Rights – features that put you in control of which people have access to what information.

Staying Creative

The more time that remote team members spend on administrative tasks – keeping paper timesheets, recording expenses, developing reports, or making sure time is allocated accurately, the less time there is for the lifeblood of every creative company – creativity itself. FunctionFox helps remote workers put time to its very best use.

Encouraging Each Other

This is a time to lead with honesty and conviction, to convey optimism and encourage others. It may not look like it from the middle of the current storm, but the sky will clear, and those who have kept building strong, remote teams will be ready for a bright future.

Try their free Demo today at: Https://www.functionfox.com/demo

*Early Impacts of COVID-19 on the BC Tech Sector

5 Reasons to Consider Making MindGenius Your PM Tool of Choice for 2021

Written by Brad Egeland on February 24, 2021. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on 5 Reasons to Consider Making MindGenius Your PM Tool of Choice for 2021

I’m starting a new series here on Project Times – a series of articles on PM tools and services.

Basically, I want the leaders at these organizations to tell us in their own words “5 Reasons Why” we should be demo’ing or downloading a free trial or purchasing their software to use for some or all of our project related needs.

Think of it as their “elevator speech” if that’s all the time they really had to tell you why their software or service is great and you need to check it out.

I did a series like this for several vendors on my site awhile back and many found it to be of great value to them and their search of that right tool to meet their team’s needs.. I wanted to bring it to a bigger stage because there are so many new, small, great players in the genre that many of us have never heard of. And many long-established software and service solutions that we had heard of but never tried. Plus, we are living in a world now that has seen the workforce change in terms of needs for remote work, virtual teams and extreme collaboration. You might find your organization’s needs will be met by one of these options…

I hope you find this series a rewarding and informative one to follow… I will be contributing new ones every week so keep an eye out for the next one. For now, we will start out with this great offering from MindGenius – an organization who I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with off and on for the past 5 years so I can vouch for their personnel and say they fully stand behind their product and for the product itself being something that I find to be being able to fill many needs of PM organizations and infrastructures. In fact, I won’t be including vendors who I do not personally feel good about or software I don’t believe to be worthy of this series.

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5 Reasons Why you should consider MindGenius for your projects in 2021…

Remote Working capabilities – in today’s world remote working is slowly becoming the norm for many organizations. With MindGenius Online you can work with and manage your team remotely and with ease. You can assign your colleagues tasks, give them completion dates and, most importantly, organize your workforce to get the best out of them.
Customizable – MindGenius Online is a highly engaging product and allows you to customize your project in a number of ways. Select a cover image for your project, as well as being able to customize the tasks and the Taskboard itself. Adding colours and images to projects help keep things fresh in your memory, engage your brain and keep you focused on the task at hand.
Mind Mapping – using Mind Maps is a great, intuitive way to manage your projects and see the bigger picture. MindGenius Online is simple in its design but very powerful in terms of being able to manage your projects from beginning to end. This allows you to focus on your work and not on how to get to grips with our product – simply type and return to get your project started!
Templates – MindGenius has a wide variety of templates for you to use for FREE. Choose from a wide range of subjects such as sales strategy, marketing plans, event planning & so much more! MindGenius know how difficult it can be to start a project, so you can use their templates to get you off to a good start and achieve your goals! Just starting the project can sometimes be the hardest part.
Organization – Use MindGenius Online to organize every inch of your project from start to finish. Set out your goals and use the timeline view to set dates for certain tasks to be completed and then you can assign those tasks to the members in your team.

Don’t just take their word for it, sign up for FREE today! See how MindGenius can make a difference for your projects and teams.

How Will a Global Pandemic Affect Project Delivery

Written by Brad Egeland on March 25, 2020. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on How Will a Global Pandemic Affect Project Delivery

The Coronavirus is here and greatly impacting the majority of the world right now. Organizations around the globe are shutting doors completely or sending workers home to work.

Restaurants are closing, grocery stores are either closing or limiting hours and can’t keep products on the shelves long enough for panicked shoppers to get what they are there to buy or stock up on. Schools are closing. Universities are closing. Sports leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL) have suspended play. Even the casinos here in Las Vegas are starting to shut their doors. The idea, of course, is to avoid gatherings of people where the virus can spread. It’s the only way to win and eventually stop the virus from spreading.

Big tech corporations are taking it seriously as well. Workers are being sent home to work. Giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter wisely started the mass exodus and others are following suit. The worldwide numbers of infected individuals and deaths is still rising daily, but these measures will help.

But what how about our tech projects? How does this virus and the movement to work remotely affect projects starting up or that are in process? If you’re a project manager or project centric organization, you know full well that risk planning is critical. If you haven’t already been sent home to work, let’s consider what the overall affect to tech projects and project managers and teams will be in project centric organizations today and when the next emergency like this comes up…

Project opportunities will dwindle.

There’s no doubt that project opportunities will dwindle and therefore tech revenues will dwindle. The tech team and tech organizations are going to have to look hard at finding ways to grow more projects into new business and extended opportunities for more projects from existing clients. I’m not saying that remote project managers need to make sales, but every project manager should be eyeing potential needs within their client’s organizations for need gaps they can fill with new project opportunities or change orders on current projects that expand the revenue footprint of the current projects in motion.

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3rd party vendors will be closed or will not have available supplies to ship.

This is going to have to be a major concern and one looked at as a very likely risk and planned for as well. What if you can’t get that critical database update from a 3rd party vendor completed in time for it to be used on the project in May as documented in your project timeline? Timelines are going to slide – no question. But how will that affect the project overall? Have you planned for that potential issue? Will the end users still be able to get project delivery from you within the necessary timeframe? When we are faced with these situations then sometimes the timeline will need to be put together with the thought of “under promise and over deliver.” Don’t set customer expectations too high from the beginning. Be sure they also know and agree to the risks.

Remote work must happen.

Again, when it is serious and people need to be separated from each other, remote work and remote projects will happen. Be sure you have the right people who can handle it and won’t fail under the pressure. Organizations in the future are going to want to consider stocking their teams – at least to some degree – with individuals who have experience with being very productive and effective in the work from home environment. Look for project managers who have successfully led projects while possibly never having met their team face-to-face. Not everyone can do it – organization is key and being an excellent communicator is critical.

Virtual teams will be the most productive.

If you have virtual teams already in place, then you are best prepared to immediately realize efficiency and productivity in your project delivery. That equals project success and customer satisfaction. Remember, the customer is affected as well and very stressed in situations like this. You want to ease their minds that your project will be successful. Having talented individuals working remotely already delivering projects will help them stay confident and stay long term project clients for your organization. Be ready to deliver when events like this happen. Use it as selling point going forward. Embrace the fact that when this is all over remote projects, remote workforces and virtual teams may be the new normal and it’s a good thing. You can get the best workers now without having to bring them onsite to work. Costs can go down while productivity goes up. It can be a win-win situation.

Organizational leadership will be affected.

No doubt that organizational leadership will be affected. Will senior management be available to help make decisions on projects? Do you have great communicators and experienced decision makers in place leading teams and projects so reliance on senior leadership during emergency situations like this is kept to a minimum? They are going to have many things to worry about and remote teams that are prepared to run with the project and make key decisions are going to win and keep the project on track as needed. Plan for that in the organization’s workforce makeup and teams must plan for that as a potential risk.

Summary / call for input

This pandemic is going on right now and more and more organizations are taking the drastic measures necessary to help begin to mitigate the spread of the virus. Will this happen again in our lifetimes? It could. Will a movement to remote work and remote teams and virtual workforces help on project delivery? I think so… and I believe this current move will leave us in a new situation or scenario where work from home – especially for project delivery – will be the new norm. Organizations will see the benefits and productivity gains and employees will be confident that they can make it work and achieve a nice work/life balance.

Readers – what are your thoughts? Do you currently work from home? Does it work well for you? What issues do you see from remote work and remote project management that could make it fail or that need to be addressed and planned for? Please share your thoughts and experiences and discuss.

Will AI be Part of Your PPM Tool

Written by Brad Egeland on March 11, 2020. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Will AI be Part of Your PPM Tool

Artificial intelligence is everywhere in the news. Will people eventually marry robots, can AI be responsible, what is AI going to do to jobs, people, cars, houses… even project management.

What are the trends? Are we going to make good use of AI and keep it in check, or will we end up in a Matrix-like environment in the year 2100 or beyond? Scary, thought provoking stuff, right? But none of it is far-fetched at all if you really consider it.

First, though – let’s think short term. Will artificial intelligence be part of your next project portfolio management (PPM) tool? Can it be? Should it be? Let us first consider the general functionality of a project portfolio management tool. What should it do for you? What do you want or need it to be for your PM infrastructure and organization?

By definition, a project portfolio management tool refers to “a software tool that helps an organization through the process used by project managers and project management organizations (PMOs) to analyze the potential return on undertaking a project. By organizing and consolidating every piece of data regarding proposed and current projects, project portfolio managers provide forecasting and business analysis for companies looking to invest in new projects.”

Artificial intelligence, sometimes called machine intelligence, is “intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans.” Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of intelligent agents: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term artificial intelligence is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic cognitive functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving.

Next, let’s consider what are the key features of a PPM tool? What are we asking it to do for us in general terms?

We ask our PPM tools to:

Plan work and schedule resources
Prioritize our projects in the hopper based on need and resource availability
Help us strategize which projects we take on and which we skip over based on our missions and goals for the organization
Be scalable with our growing project portfolios and changing organizational directions and needs
Re-align periodically with strategy and execution. Again, the product will flex with the changes and changing directions and needs of your organization
Provide useful reports that help with forward thinking decision making for senior management and project management offices (PMOs)
Create flexible workflows in projects and across projects
Create the tried and true Gantt chart functionality
Allow for project resource and planning collaboration
Offer a useful mobile capability for on the go decision makers and project players
Help manage and track risks across the portfolio of projects for an organization

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How can artificial intelligence help?

So, given this list, what can artificial intelligence do to help? Over time, probably everything. AI grows, learns, scales and makes decisions as it continues to work. Our Alexa in our house is getting better… slowly… learning more details and facts to answer our questions with as well as understand our music and information preferences. Slowly, but surely, we have to give it less detail in our requests to get it to understand what we want and what we need it to do with many of the commands and questions we ask of it. What can a much more powerful AI experience do for an IT shop with a growing project portfolio that needs help managing information, making decisions and providing detailed status reporting to help all the stakeholders and decision makers in the organization?

To do this, artificial intelligence can step in and provide in the following areas…

Manage financials, financial planning and budget performance.

Anything numeric like project financial tracking, analysis and forecasting can very successfully utilize artificial intelligence to provide meaningful up to date reporting in this very critical element of managing each project and the portfolio as a whole.

Meaningful reporting.

Reporting is a perfect use of AI. With existing project reporting available as history and company guidelines to meet up with, AI can assist the project managers and the project management office with the weekly reporting requirements for status calls, team meetings and customer needs and requirements. Perfect – and error free – unbiased reporting will likely be the result much to the delight of customers, project teams and senior management in the organization.

Decision help on prioritizing projects across available resources and skill set needs.

If AI knows what each project needs – and it can because PM’s and administrators will tell it that from project requirements and statement of works – then it can consider what’s available when and tell us what projects to go after next and avoid mistakes of starting projects without the available resources to ever complete them.

Do the grunt work on scheduling tasks and creating Gantt charts.

Nothing says boring in project management like creating Gantt charts. Right? Or is that just me? I’ve done it for 20+ years and for me it has never been the exciting element of project management. It’s part of the necessary planning and management of projects, but it is what it is – a necessary task. A required element. Managing the team, engaging the client, making the tough decisions. That’s what makes me tick as a project manager. Let AI take care of the Gantt charting and it can do it – just feed it the existing Gantt chart info and let it learn how best to handle tweaking it on a project by project basis. It will improve and perfect over time.

Summary / call for input

The bottom line is this – there is no doubt that artificial intelligence is in everyone’s future. In many ways, it’s in our “today” as well, we just don’t realize it because we are accepting and utilizing simple AI in many products and forms already. We are just calling it something else, but it is there in Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and others that are providing us daily with information. What’s more, Siri was initially developed by the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. Its name speaks for itself. To summarize everything said above, yes, Siri and those other devices are all great examples of AI creeping into our daily lives.

Readers – what’s your take? Are you ready to embrace artificial intelligence and all it has to offer as we know it today? Do you fear the future or are you confident we can use it wisely and keep it in check? Do you think it has its place in project management and project portfolio management and associated tools and services?

The Who, What and Why of PPM

Written by Brad Egeland on December 4, 2019. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on The Who, What and Why of PPM

You say you need a project portfolio management tool by next Friday, so you ask someone to evaluate the options, try a few out and write up a cost benefit analysis.

Is that necessary or is just it buying you time in your procrastination of the decision-making steps and process?

You’re an organized, efficient and skilled business analyst in your organization and successful on most projects… yet there is something missing. You get frustrated because it feels like sometimes you’re spinning your wheels when you’re asked to perform on projects and be a great leader and be successful when you are feeling uneasy for a few reasons…

Are we ready to take on this type of project?
Do we have the available resources?
Do those resources have the needed skill sets?
Are we taking on these projects in the proper order so we can learn, grow and perform better on each project while still gaining valuable footage in a new genre or technology?

What do you need to help with all this frustration? All this doubt and questioning and concern for the projects and the customer on the other end as well as the good of your project teams and project managers can be very distracting. Do you need a hug? No… well, maybe. But be a big boy. What you probably need is a great PPM tool – a project portfolio management tool – to help you sort out the resources the projects, the technology the prioritization the “yes-no” and “go-no-go” decisions and the “go-live” timing. It may mean the difference between the project management infrastructure you need for your growing, successful, project centric delivery organization and increased failure on projects you’re taking on before you’re ready. Better to skip over the ones you’re not ready for than to stupidly and blindly take them on with a high failure rate possibility. Right? Yes… say “right”!

PPMs are becoming more popular and more plentiful and software providers look to not only meet an organization’s PM oversight needs but also help in many difficult project engagement decisions that prior to recent years was more like throwing darts at a wall. By definition, a project portfolio management tool – or PPM – is this…

“Project portfolio management (PPM) refers to a process used by project managers and project management organizations (PMOs) to analyze the potential return on undertaking a project. By organizing and consolidating every piece of data regarding proposed and current projects, project portfolio managers provide forecasting and business analysis for companies looking to invest in new projects.”

Project portfolio management gives organizations and managers the ability to see the big picture…

Executives – know what project managers to reach
Project Managers – easy access to team members
Team Members – improved communication with leadership and other teammates
Stakeholders – kept in the loop with reliable and consistent feedback

So, let’s consider what this article set out to do – discuss the Who, What and Why of PPM.

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Who?

Who needs a PPM? Leaders of projects in a highly project-oriented delivery organization as well as those resource gatekeepers for the projects that need staffed. And the decision makers in the organization need a PPM. Where do we spend our very valuable project dollars? Are we ready to take on these projects at this time? Do we have the right skill sets and resources to be successful? Or are we setting ourselves up for failure?

What?

What are we going to do with the PPM once we acquire it? What does the enterprise rollout look like? And should it be an enterprise rollout or just a leadership tool? Is it going to be interactive with the overall landscape of the organization where projects are born and requested or just one to help the senior leadership make decisions and plan dollars at a high level?

Why?

I think we’ve covered the why, but let’s consider. Why PPM? Because your organization needs it to effectively and efficiently manage the flow of projects through the organization. Your organization needs it to properly keep resources fully utilized and projects fully staffed with the right resources and right skill sets and not take on projects that they will not have resources available for. And your organization needs it take on the right projects and in the right order to realize the most success.

Summary / call for input

Is a project portfolio management tool necessary and is it a guarantee of project success and PM infrastructure success? No and no. A PPM is not necessary and there’s probably no reason to randomly spend money on one just because you’ve been told you should have one. Though as with all PM related tools, there are free ones to check out the PPM landscape and some are pretty good with lots of features as long as you aren’t licensing tons of users to begin with.

Certainly consider your growing needs and whether you need to seek a scalable PPM tool that will grow with your organization and whether you need a more specific hybrid PPM tool that works great for both waterfall and agile software development and project management organizations because those exist as well. Yes, much to consider. Don’t just jump into the fire… take time and examine your own needs. But, as I see it, most growing and successful project delivery organizations are eventually going to need this – I’ve worked as a consultant with several overloaded PM delivery organizations and a PPM was definitely a great choice for them in the end.

Readers – does your organization have a project portfolio management tool? If yes, tell us what you’re using and if it’s good or bad… seems to be the wave of the future and we all want to hear about the good ones to help in our decision-making processes. If you chose the wrong one, then we want to hear about that, too, and why it was a bad call. What’s it’s failure point? If you don’t have one – do you plan to make the leap? Is your project backlog a mess or struggling? Please share your thoughts and discuss.