Mike Coyle’s Weblog

How did The Little Ol’ Company From Redmond set the project management world back decades?

They named their product Microsoft Project when it should have been Microsoft Tasks.

This marketing coup has has a profound impact on the business world, because many people now think that a project plan is a file with .mpp extension. The focus on Task Management at the expense of Risk Management has profound implications on the way projects are planned and executed. However, it’s Microsoft’s implicit market dominance, not some evil conspiratorial plot, that has inadvertently led the world astray.

Let me give you a quick, hypothetical example. Let’s say that Wal-Mart grew to the point where they were responsible for 90% of all retail business. In this world, Wal-Mart isn’t a place to shop, it’s the place to shop. When people think “store”, or “shopping”, they equate it with Wal-Mart. In fact, a majority of people have never seen a store that wasn’t a Wal-Mart.

Given this virtual monopoly, Wal-Mart then goes and builds out a very successful private label line of products. Lots of people shampoo with with WM CleanHair, kill insects with WM BugZap, etc.

Unfortunately, when they release their new private label wood stain, they call it WM WoodRefinish. Their market dominance has most people equating the job of furniture refinishing with the use of the WoodRefinish product. Heck, lots of people buy the product, and it turns their wood table into a slightly darker wood table. Success-amundo in their eyes.

Now you have lots of people who think that refinishing a piece of wood furniture is a matter of using a bottle of WM WoodRefinish. They don’t realize at first that stripping, sanding and surface prepping are the important parts of a good refinishing job. Maybe that’s why over 80% of all furniture refinishing jobs seem to take longer and yield poorer quality than expected.

But it’s not the fault of the WM WoodRefinish product. It’s perfectly good wood stain. Plus, the focus groups and marketing folks thought that “WoodRefinish” was a good name for the product.

The catastrophic failure lies in the false perception of the consumer that “applying stain” == “refinishing wood”.

Which brings us back to my central argument: Project management is not about task management, it is about risk management. Using the above analogy, the Gantt chart is the wood stain, but dependency analysis and risk management is the sanding and stripping. They are the time-consuming, labor-intensive precursors to a realistic, good looking Gantt chart.

This is why ProjectPipe is Risk-based, rather than Task-based. It intentionally isn’t centered around building Gantt charts, instead integrating with MS Project for Gantt chart creation.

Rather, ProjectPipe focuses on helping you build links and dependencies among your requirements, issues, tasks, etc. Once you understand how everything fits together, you will have a much better sense for the real tasks that you need to execute and the milestones that demonstrate real progress.

Using a risk-driven, dependency-centric approach, your task list and risk list probably won’t be perfect out-of-the-gate, but they won’t be arbitrary either.

Or, you could just just bang out a list of tasks, guesstimate their duration, wire up their finish and start dates, generate a pretty picture of cascading rectangles, then kick back and call it a day.

It’s up to you.

Our August newsletter is now online.  It is our first issue.   In addition to covering company news and ProjectPipe updates from the last couple of months, we also provide a sneak peek at our new hosted data syndication application, AtomAntenna, which will be in beta shortly.  Check out the newsletter for more info.

If you own a Mac and haven’t tried Quicksilver, you may be doing yourself a profound disservice. Quicksilver is a smart application switcher / desktop workflow tool. Here’s a better explanation.

I’m pretty much using it for doing simple stuff like opening apps and finding files, but it seems that once you achieve Quicksliver guru status, you could rip through reasonably complex multi-step workflows like kids pull off long Tekken combos, in that the heavy lifting can be relegated to muscle memory.
After using it for a few weeks now, I’d have a real tough time getting rid of it.

I just installed the Cube interface, and although it’s arguably just eye candy, that UI seems more Quicksilver-ish (or true to itself) than the other interface options. Here’s a movie of the cube in action, recorded by Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings.

One of the benefits of having Approach.Botonomy.Com (A.B.C) up and running is that the A.B.C site is now the repository for much of our reference-worthy content. A.B.C is where we are communicating our opinions and beliefs on topics ranging from the rise of folksonomies in project management to the mainstreaming of dynamic programming languages.

That frees up my weblog for much more casual personal observations and such. A quick analogy: If Approach.Botonomy.Com is the legitimate theatre, then my personal weblog is late night basic cable reruns of Sanford and Son.

Or so I would hope.

So, speaking of of uninteresting things that I do, I was at Costco over the weekend, picking up a few gallons of relish and a 12 pack of fire extinguishers. As I was making my way past a throng of 20 people waiting in line for a spoonful of lentil soup, I ran into a guy that I went to grade school with. He too is working on a online startup. He said that he was looking to launch in 6-8 months and is keeping the concept very close to the vest.

Mmm, stealth mode.

Been there. Done that. Have the “I missed out on important early feedback” t-shirt to prove it.

Now, in all fairness, I had already told my former classmate that my company was in the online app business. Perhaps if I was a podiatrist or was slinging hash at the local Denny’s he’d have been more open, but that’s irrelevant. This is not about being nosy, and I wish the guy and his team all the luck in the world. Rather, I bring it up because it was a moment of clarity for me, as I realized how my views on the nature of the “killer idea” has changed over the last year.

Here’s my current take on running your micro-ISV startup in stealth mode: At first glance, it seems kinda cool. Just like cranking the radio on your car stereo when you’re cruising around at the ripe old age of 16 maybe seemed cool at the time. If you don’t get loud music out of your system early on as a teenager, you’ll do irreparable damage to your hearing.

Fast-forward the clock 20 years, and if you’re doing a small startup and don’t get the mystique of “stealth mode” out of your system early on, you might end up figuratively too deaf to listen for early stage questions, comments, and concerns. Maybe even some that might otherwise have a profound impact on your business model and prospects for a timely success.

In hindsight, I now realize that the incremental benefit that you receive from getting an arbitrary outsider’s initial reaction to your idea far, far outweighs the low incremental risk of someone ripping off your idea and beating you senseless with it in the marketplace.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I have to run back to Costco.  We are going to have hot dogs for lunch, and l must have left my gallon of mustard in the cart.

Here is the article.  It also has a pretty good comparison between TurboGears and Django at the end of the article.  Django, another Python web framework was the subject of the first part of this two-part series.