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SharedPlan Connect, December 19, 2005
 
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
– Douglas Adams  
 
Happy Holidays, Everyone!  
 
I hope this newsletter finds everyone well and enjoying your preparation for the upcoming Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa holidays.  The challenge around my house is always finding the time to manage all of the opportunities to see friends and family while still preparing for our own holiday.  It’s a very busy time of year.  

Cool Plan

Occasionally, we receive a customer support request that requires us to look at the customer’s project plan to diagnose potential problems.  I enjoy looking at these plans because it provides a window into the way our customers are using SharedPlan products.   
 
We received a terrific example of this recently when a customer sent in a very detailed plan (with more than 200 tasks!) for building a house.*  I was amazed at the level of detail involved in the plan, and as we reviewed it it became clear that this wasn’t just any house.  We contacted the customer, who is in the UK, and he told us that the plan is for a zero-fossil-fuel house.   
 
The house is designed to provide the amenity levels you would expect from a 21st century home without the need for fossil fuels.  It uses features such as photovoltaic panels for electricity generation, thermally massive materials for heat storage, and a solar thermal array for hot water to provide a 100% reduction in fossil CO2 emissions.  You can view this plan on one of our PM resource pages under “House Construction Project.”  
 
As you've heard from me in the past, we promote project collaboration as a way of improving the success of your important projects, and the sharing of projects is another form of collaboration.  So, send us your projects and we'll share them in this forum and on our web site.  We’ll be glad to anonymize the project or you can consider this a means to impress prospective clients or employers … all while helping others benefit from your knowledge.  

Continuous Improvement

This month we released SharedPlan Pro version 2.2.2, which provides users with more project editing flexibility.  This includes an oft-requested feature, the ability to move tasks among subprojects by simply dragging them to the desired place in the Gantt chart.  (Detailed instructions are on the support page under Professional->Gantt Chart).  Also, there are many, many copy and paste improvements.   
 
In the collaboration area, we have improved the process of emailing tasks to individuals identified as resources.  In the past, executing the command “Publish Assignments to Resources” would only send the tasks from the level the user is currently viewing.  Pro now sends the tasks from all project levels, making it even easier for this collaboration tool to be used.   To download the latest version of SharedPlan Pro, you can open SharedPlan and select Help->Check for Updates.  

Response to October Newsletter

In my October newsletter, I discussed what collaboration means within the context of project management.  In response to that discussion, I received the following from John of Silver Streak Partners:
“In our analysis, if the organization has defined the project manager's value around the notion of hierarchical command and control, that really hinders the fluid communication that makes companies agile and projects successful.  So in order to change this problem, companies need not only new tools, but also new organizational and individual perspectives on the role of the manager -- organizational development.”  
If any newsletter readers have comments (positive or negative – and the negative ones are often more educational, and certainly more entertaining) on the material I publish here, please email me.  

Great Time-Wasters 

A while back, Time Magazine published their list of the top 50 websites of 2005.  Included in their arts and entertainment category are the following gems:
As always, thanks for reading,
 
Tracy

* The customer questioned whether our critical path algorithm was working correctly because it appeared to be highlighting a noncritical path.  Because of the sheer size of the plan, Lourdes spent most of two days painstakingly manually computing the critical path, ultimately determining that the algorithm was correct.
 
 
SharedPlan Software, Inc. | PO Box 18073 | Boulder, Colorado USA 80308 | www.sharedplan.com