I’ve been reading the excellent book Product Strategy for High-Technology Companies, and the three elements the book suggests for a company’s visions statement are also quite apt for a project team. While I’m paraphrasing a bit, those three questions are:
What does success look like?
How do we get there?
Why are we uniquely positioned to get there?
While seemingly rather simplistic, these questions call for some critical thinking and decision making as a project is initiated. Let’s review each in more detail:
What does success look like?
Many project managers fail to ask this most basic of questions, and may even be smirking a bit that one would suggest asking what should be such an obvious statement. “Success is meeting the objectives of the project, and checking off all the nice little boxes on the project plan,” they quip. Not so fast. While carefully tracking and monitoring deliverables, managing critical resources, and sticking to timelines...
As a consequence of the IT consumerisation trend, users to a greater extent demand user friendly tools in their workplace. They require tools that match the way they want to work. People are used to quick, social and collaborative tools in their private lives and it’s only natural they want the same easiness at work. A security survey from Crypzone made me realize that the urge to get the job done, in a less complicated way, has forced users to break IT policies for document security. The survey focused on the security aspects of how SharePoint’s users handle documents. SharePoint is Microsoft’s collaboration platform that is to 60% steered by IT dep’s as they are admins, no external users are allowed. So, the security is set to be higher than the clouds.
The results from the SharePoint security survey showed:
45% of the Sharepoint users responded that they had copied sensitive and confidential information...
Hi all iPhone users,
We have just released a new iPhone/iPad app on the appstore. You can find it by searching for Projectplace Documents. At the moment it focuses on access to your projectplace documents and seeing what happens with them. You can for example tag documents for offline viewing. When introducing the new app we decided to withdraw the old app from the appstore. If you already have the old app installed it will keep working the same way as before. Our mobile development team are now focusing on getting the most popular features of the old app into the new one. Which is your favourite feature of the old iPhone app? Head over to Projectplace Ideas and browse through the improvement ideas and feature requests for the mobile app and vote and comment on the ideas there. Or why not...
In late October, we arrived at the Projectplace Stockholm office in time for the weekly Monday briefing. We were two engineering students straight from university and didn’t really know what was waiting for us. All we knew was that our job was to develop Projectplace’s Android application, without really knowing what Projectplace was. Working close to the iOS team we were able to get off to a quick start, as well as the advantage of having their iPhone app to work against and receiving lots of help from more experienced coworkers. Projectplace is an agile company, which made it easy for us to get involved in the design and development processes. In our small team, just the two of us, we used a super agile approach; claim a task, implement and then push it. This is probably the main reason we could build and publish the Projectplace Documents app in...
Projectplace started in 1998 which makes us one of the first Softwares as a Service. In the late 90's, when dial-up was still the prevailing method of connecting to the Internet, it was a cutting edge feature to be able to access your project from any computer (with an Internet connection). More than a decade later, that is no longer the case.
Wifi, 3g, 4g, laptops, and above all smartphones mean that these days we are connected to the Internet practically all the time and the way we work has changed with it. We expect to be able to answer our email and keep up to date whether we are at home, in the office or on the move. This means that it did not come as a complete surprise to us that one of the most requested developments on Projectplace Ideas - our forum for customer feedback - is to...
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