SharedPlan Connect, April 11, 2006

 

 

“The pathos of man is that he hungers for personal fulfillment and for a sense of community with others.”

~ J. Saunders Redding (1906 - 1988)

 

Hello ,

 

Sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while.  When this edition was due a few weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family in southern California.  We did lots of cool things, but I have to say that as far as theme parks go, Legoland is awesome for younger children.  If you’re not familiar with it, this park is all about Lego construction toys and it is the ideal destination for my three- and seven-year-old boys.  Legoland has several miniature cities built from Legos:  New Orleans, Washington, D.C., New York City (including a 10-foot version of the new Freedom Tower design), a New England seaport (including various boats moving about in the harbor), and others, all remarkably built from many, many millions of Lego bricks. 

 

My personal Legoland favorite was the “You Build It, You Race It” activity center.  This was a room where kids build racecars from an endless variety of Lego bricks, then they race it against other kids’ creations.  Of course, there was no clearly defined age of a ‘kid,’ so I was eager to pit my youthful demeanor, relative immaturity, multiple engineering degrees, and decades of experience against some of the best six-year-olds in the business.  I won’t bore you with the results but suffice it to say, they’re a creative crowd.  Wily.  Nasty.  My wife made me leave.

Community

I have talked a lot in this space, and on our website, about communication and collaboration.  However, at SharedPlan we’re also keenly interested in community.  With the upcoming release of SharedPlan Central (the early access program is going amazingly well) and some other changes we have planned, we’re going to be establishing the concept of a project community.  In advance of all this, I’d like to explore the concept of community a little.

 

According to dictionary.com, a community is “a group of people having common interests.”*  Wikipedia similarly states, “The definitive driver of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common.”  While that’s fairly straightforward, what’s even more interesting is what they have to say about the context of community (my emphasis added):

“From the days of the hunter-gatherer culture, individual humans have formed communities. A sense of community is the aspect of giving of one's self to others. Related etymology for munere expands the meaning to include something prized, precious and worth defending. It is the same root as used for the word munitions (defences). Sharing in this "common defence" incorporates a balance between self-interest and shared-interests within and among members of a group and is a crucial factor in community formation. When enough participants in a group develop an attitude of caring for the well-being of the whole, or the common good, the prospect of community is present.”

 

I believe these major characteristics of community – shared interests, giving of one’s self to others, and working toward the common good – are developing in the project management arena.  The rise of project management discussion groups, like those in Yahoo and Google Groups, is one indicator of this.  These groups do not provide the depth of communication and collaboration that we think will lead to strong project communities, and this is what we’re trying to address. 

 

Initial successes in sharing project knowledge will feed on itself.  As Wikipedia asserts, “Successful efforts by a mix of participants tend to attract the attention of other less connected individuals who may seek to join the group that is succeeding.”  At SharedPlan, we’re looking forward to helping provide the products that ease that joining process. 

 

In the next newsletter I will provide a detailed description of what we’re doing with Personal, Pro, and Central to enable project collaboration, communication, and community.

SharedPlan Tip of the Week

Many people ask how to name their reports something other than the file name.  You can customize the report titles by selecting Tools->Project Information. The project name you fill in is what will be printed as the title of your reports.

Related Applications

We occasionally get requests for complementary software applications, including time-management tools.  Well, one of the valued contributors to SharedPlan, Dave Taubler, has created a couple of tools you may be interested in:

 

TimeBox:  The TimeBox application is a new time management tool for contractors and consulting professionals. Features include a built-in web server, a punch-clock metaphor, a report generator, and advanced editing capabilities. 

ClokBox:  ClokBox is a new easy-to-use, server-based time management application. It is web-enabled, which allows individual team members to submit their time automatically over the Internet. ClokBox allows expenses and fees to be tracked, and invoices to be generated. Additional features include a built-in Web server, 'QwikMessage' instant messaging capability, advanced reporting features, and easy backup capabilities. 

For those of you interested in these types of tools, please check them out and let me know what you think. 

 

Thanks for reading,

Tracy