Project Management is not (just) Task Management
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.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
When talking about risk management, its key to keep in mind that managing projects and getting projects done come down to managing people. Its important that a project management software be about making people’s job’s easier, being easy to use, well-supported and that it be built (and implemented) with an understanding of the things people need to do to get their job done. -Sometimes, software is written to make the project management specialist’s job easier without regard for the non-specialist managers or team members that get projects done.
January 20th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
If you want a fast & simple mpp viewer, which can recall your plans online and to all your Team Members, then I recommend www.egantt.co.uk ;This site will read 2000, 02, 03, 07 mpp formats and then store a plan to your repository account, synchronising regular updates. Your team members can then be updated via the website. Try it out, its totally free.
www.egantt.co.uk
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:26 am
Mpp Viewer (100% Free). View 2000-2007 mpp files with this online gantt chart, without the need to download an application.
http://www.egantt.co.uk/mpp-viewer.htm
Fast and simple, very effective when you need to share/communicate task data to your team members/clients without the cost of extra Microsoft Project Licences.
June 20th, 2008 at 9:26 am
For task management you might try out this web-based application:
Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts (GTD), use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.
As with the last update, now you can add or invite Contacts, and share your Projects and Contexts with them.
Hope you like it.
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