ZCOPE Blog

Some time ago, I asked some people what would be there wish to the project fairy and wrote a post about it: 25 wishes to the project fairy. Here are some interesting new wishes to the lovely little helper:

1 Stefan Kalteis, CEO, www.dealhamster.com, Austria
My wish is… that the project fairy keeps all administrative activities at bay.

2 Sigrid Hauer, CEO, Consulting4Quality – Blog Projektgeschichten, Germany
My wish is… that even stakeholders understand that good collaboration tools are essential to keep the communication up & running, but don‘t solve communication problems itself.

3 Christian Gaisberger, Developer, Dorner ASP AG, Switzerland
My wish is… that solutions will be searched for based on the experience of the single team members and nevertheless an authority takes the final decision. The right ones and at the right time!

4 Blundstone Osterberger, Engagement Director Europe, huge, US/UK/FR/SWE
My wish is… that everyone understands contingency when doing time, cost & material planning is there to account for unexpected turns a project takes, and not just to blow up budgets.

5 Marina Zubcic, Consultant, ICG Infora GmbH, Austria
My wish is… that people focus on developing and discussing solutions rather than explaining at length why they are behind schedule and how it sure isn’t their fault and that everyone shows up prepared.

6 Mark Buzinkay, CEO, Idea Lounge, Austria
My wish is… that the fairy turns into Herman Dune, gives everybody a good reason to smile and a sense of humour to work enthusiastically on the most boring tasks, because we know that there is more in life than this project.

7 Alexander Aberer, Senior Developer/Scrum-Master, LearnLift, Austria
My wish is… that client and project team don‘t talk past each other or don‘t address acute problems. They should talk fair and square and aks all questions so that they will be answered  to the utmost satisfaction of all involved parties.

8 Benjamin Spiss, Producer Gambling, Rabcat Computer Graphics GmbH, Austria
My wish is… serious effort estimations instead of tossing a random figure thus I won‘t be annoying any longer.

9 Andrea Hammer, Project coordination, Blog projektlotse, Germany
My wish is… that every sub-project has exactly the status given in the status report. All this should be visualised as dream sequence in a movie (my favourite director would be Hitchcock :-).

10 Jürgen Pansy, Board member, sms.at, Austria
My wish is… that she does us a disservice and clears all elephants out of the room – at least for the meetings.

11 Sebastian Heinzel, CEO, www.tripwolf.com, Austria
My wish is… that the project fairy speaks all the languages on this planet – if she‘s tiny enough, one could put her into the ear.

[Constance: A nice idea... must be from the famous book „The Hichthiker‘s Guide to Projects“ ;-)]

12 Tathagat Varma, Senior director business operations, Yahoo – Blog Manage Well, India
My wish is… that the project fairy takes care of all risks that I forgot to identify :)

13 Marlis Rumler, CEO, uboot.com, Austria
My wish is… that every member of the team, no matter what his job description is, gains the ability to look beyond his/her own nose, so solutions with foresight can be found quicker and easier.

14 Oliver Merz, Operations Manager, Venyon GmbH, Germany
My wish is… lesser meetings that are lengthened due to unnecessary information and discussions that should better be discussed in private.

15 Sebastian Manhart, CEO professional group, Wirtschaftskammer Vorarlberg, Austria
My wish is… the guarantee that all members of my project team -  no matter if internal or external – have all the necessary information about the current project status available.

In ZCOPE you can connect documents and blog posts with task lists and tasks.

I will illustrate this tip with a case study. Let‘s suppose the task list is called „Design website“ and there is a task called „header image“.

The design company uploads a draft for the image and connects it with the task. At the same time a conversation resp. feedback is started in the blog. The design company writes that the first draft was made according to the requirements mentioned at the last meeting but that it became obvious during the design process that the text was too long and if it could be shortened. Also this post will be connected to the task. The customer sends a suggestion for the shorter text and wants the font colour to be slightly darker. The design company edits the image and uploads the new version.

A corresponding icon will be shown with the task if it‘s connected to a document or a blog post. By clicking on the icon one gets to the latest version of the document or the blog post.

As it becomes apparent, tool that can be used in combination with conventional resp. already adopted programs have a higher shot at being accepted.

Therefore milestones and dates in ZCOPE can be imported into the own calendar (Outlook, iCal, Google calendar, etc.). These programs are used a lot and thus reminders are in effectively noticed. Additionally it’s possible to be reminded by e-mail of course.

Imho tags are a fantastic invention. But one must know how to wisely use them to get the most out of this function.

In ZCOPE, task lists, tasks, milestones, dates, budgets, documents and blog entries can be tagged. You may want to apply a unified wording as to find all the relevant elements. Best to have a look into the existing tag cloud if an adequate term has already been used.

By experience I can say it is always good to have several tags with one element. It helps also with inconsistent wording – via one of the possible terms you mostly find something.

Besides the positioning of task lists and tasks according to their priority, it‘s possible to prioritise via tags as well: we use e.g. „important“, „urgent“ and „earmark“ in our further development project.

The tags can also be renamed or deleted, if you misspelled a word or don‘t need the term any longer.

A small tip for the tagging outside of ZCOPE: on del.icio.us I work with e.g. „2read“ oder „2blog“. Over time a quite considerable collection arised in this way – in case creativity leaves a lot to be desired ;-)

What tips and tricks do you have when it comes to tagging?

Thanks to the authors of the Manifesto for agile software development the term agility has become increasingly popular in the last 5 years. The Manifesto states explicitly what they believed, their core values and enduring purpose. It pushed the agile software development movement. The Manifest established a set of 4 simple rules or core values for developing complex innovative systems. Following the co-author Jim Highsmith with his book “Agile Project Management” we can easily apply these core value statements to Agile Project Management:

Responding to change: Don’t plan. Explore.
Reflects the agile viewpoint to focus on envision-explore not on plan-do and on adaption rather than anticipation. Innovative projects are characterized by envisioning and exploring rather than detailed planning and task executing. Thus the team has to see changes as a friend not as an enemy of the project.

Working products: Documents don’t work. Products do.
Describes the idea of delivering iterative versions of the real product according to the motto: “Documents don’t work. Products do.” With the side effect of lowering the cost of change or failure following the theory of early failure detection: “the earlier the cheaper”. In the field of Software Engineering the advantages are common known: Requirements are changing and large design and concept phases leading to massive failures, because then the linear implementation of the requirements without feedback and reliable tests often ends up in a disaster.

Customer Collaboration: Confidence over Contract Negotiations.
This value describes the importance of a close partnership to the customer in which each person has a specific role and responsibility. To prioritize the human aspects of a partnership more than it’s contracts means to find a collaborative relationship to the customer marked by confidence not driven by contract disputes. Because the goal is to deliver value to the customers, the customer defines the requirements that provide value and the business objectives quantifying it.

Individuals and Interaction: Making Participatory Decisions.
This value focuses on the importance of skilled peoples within agile projects. Without the right people all processes and tolls won’t produce results. Tools are very useful for speeding up efficiency but rely on knowledge and capabilities of the team. “A fool with a tool is still a fool!” The agile movement supports the individuals with the concept of self-organization, self-discipline and respect for the individual. Attaining this value is one of the most difficult in practice. The team has the autonomy to organize itself to fulfill the requirements in a best possible way. That is not common! At the end it’s a part of a new project culture, a new type of leadership that has to be implemented with lots of experience, discipline and social competence.

So let’s go for it ;-)
Yours,
Oliver Pretz

I found some very tricky job interview questions in Jochen Mai‘s blog karrierebibel.de, here are the ones I find most interesting:

• How do you know you did a good job?
• How do you think about being managed?
• When was the last time you broke the rules and why?
• What will your colleagues learn from you?
• If I consult two of your former colleagues – a friend of you and a person who‘s not really a friend of you – what would both of them say about you?
• If we hire you now: what will be your first actions in the next 90 days?
• What do you expect from a company you invest your talent and time in?
• Which of your qualities is the most misunderstood by other people?

Some headscratchers, right? But what would be even more interesting for me are the questions the other team members (same job and subordinates) would like to ask their soon-to-be-colleague…

What would you like to ask?

You may start your projects in ZCOPE as you wish, one possible start is the to do list. Here’s a short instruction how we do it:

For this purpose I create a task list and fill it with all the tasks that come to my mind. Once this is done I think of an appropriate grouping of tasks and create new task lists based on that. Then I move the tasks from the original to do list into the corresponding new task list: in ZCOPE you do that by drag & drop, it’s as simple as that.

We used this approach also for a SCRUM sprint: the single task lists stand fort he calendar weeks (CW), where we placed the tasks from the original to do list. In this way we could even image dependencies: What must be finished at first, goes into an earlier CW as the one depending on it. At the weekly meetings we talked about the tasks still open and moved them in a future CW if necessary.

All in the purpose of agile project management changes appeared during the sprint and we had to redispose. Thereto we created new task lists (Sprint 2 CW Y, etc.) and moved some of the tasks from the old sprint (Sprint 1 CW 1, etc.) into them. All the remaining tasks from the old sprint now are in one single task list (Sprint 1) until needed and planned.

Conclusion: The rescheduling was done in very little time, tasks of the postponed sprint won’t be lost, but aren’t in the way. Well, a successful experiment ;-)

If you have seen this screen on our website, you probably surf with IE 6 or 7 and lost all faith in our math abilities.

But trust us, we know how to calculate. A little bug in the site moved the image too far left. The correct display is of course this:

Consultant Dirk Ploss lists on ibusiness.de some prejudices that still haunt the heads of numerous businessmen (comments by me):

1. Innovators are squanderers: they are paid to do things – and not to bother about new products.
Some entrepreneurs don‘t tolerate the slightest thought „out of the box“, as it‘s not daily business. And that‘s what they pay their employees for, at the end of the day. That goes on until the business of today becomes the business of yesterday and they need some good advice how to generate new ideas in almost no time.

2. Innovators are ungrateful: they are unsatisfied with the status quo.
If the status quo gets criticised, that undoubtedly means one thing: the employee criticises the management. Because they know best and are always right. Always right until they are wrong, that is.

3. Innovators are troublemakers.
New things confuse the flow of the entire company. As long as each and everyone knows the ancient procedures by heart, nothing can go wrong. Until it goes wrong, that is.

4. Innovators don‘t turn to account: they don‘t generate an immediate ROI.
Some people don‘t see further than the end of their nose. If it‘s not successful right from the beginning, it can‘t be of value. And quick wins are all they believe in. But keep in mind: it‘s not a nice sound when the (mostly a lot more successful) mid-or long-term wins swoosh by.

It’s ZCOPE’s first birthday
After a promising BETA-phase with over 400 participating companies, the 19th of September a year ago was the day: ZCOPE was officialy launched – and since then a lot happened:

• Right in October ZCOPE won an ebiz egovernment award.
• In November we were contacted by the busiest project manager of the world: Santa Claus.
• ZCOPE was available in English for some time and on the 1st of July 2009 also the website was internationalised.
• Still in the same month, on the 22nd of July, ZCOPE started in the first group of the XING Social application Partners – as the first and so far only partner from Austria.
• Since the official start there have been eleven bigger and smaller updates.

We’re proud to have achieved so much in the first year and look forward to an exciting second year!

Birthday promotion – we have a present for you!
An eventful first year with ZCOPE closes, for us a reason to celebrate. We would like you to celebrate with us, that’s why we had the following idea:

Until the end of October ZCOPE is offering the BASIC plan for 50% of the normal price: € 24,50/month instead of € 49/month. For a whole year.

Create your own account and enjoy the advantages of the BASIC plan at the low price:

30 projects, 6 project managers, unlimited users and 10 GB file storage. In addition the features time tracking, project templates and data export. And for further questions you have the ZCOPE support via email.