For longer than I can remember Project managers have used Microsoft project to manage or better said mismanage projects. MS project was written in an era when collaboration was not in the lexicon of project managers. The manager would sit down. Create a plan out of thin air, will do everything possible to sell the plan, milestones and the deadlines to the team and upper management. Then he or she would hire a project admin to manage the MS project file. This admin would go around get status reports from every single member of the team, will update the plan, print it on a very large piece of paper. In the weekly project meetings, everybody would go over this plan. Since the data was gathered from single islands, nobody could agree on the millstones or what the objectives of the team were. The admin will take the data from the meeting, try to make sense of it and would update the MS project. This process was and still is exhaustive. The MS project file is never in sync with the reality of the project. It is a rat race that never ends.
Now picture new application for managing projects which was written from beginning to incorporate communication and collaboration. It frees the project managers and its teams to be slaves of a rigid methodology envisioned by people in Microsoft project. There is no need to an admin, since everybody has access to project and can input data. The PM can still create a project blue print, but his team can modify, enhance and complete the tasks. To give an example. The project is broken down into tasks. Each tasks is assigned to a member of a project. Each member can estimate the hours or days it takes to finish the task. All this data is entered in the system by each individual and displayed to all in real time. Eureka! no need for Admin, no need to chase people for updates, no need to constantly print paper and take it to meetings. We have brought project management and managing projects to the 21 century!
Try Binfire to see how much money and effort you can save by switching from MS project to Binfire’s cloud base collaborative project management.
Cheers,
David
