Project Management for the Rest of Us …

A topic near and dear to my heart as I am always following developments in this area … it was prompted today by a great information piece that got me thinking again … in today’s post by Celine Roque called “Create Effective Project Milestone Sheets” in WebWorkerDaily .. she describes her system of utilizing a Milestone Sheet as the document that would interface with a client so as to bridge the gap between a formal PM presentation that tends to cause non techie clients to immediately move eyes to the glassed over state … (you know what I mean …) … too many times to be isolated …

The Milestone Sheet is like a PM tool for the rest of us … I took the article and created a map of the highlights to allow for a quick highlight of the article (technique I use often with things I want to summarize) … using this I then move to create a milestone sheet with dependencies using MindManager 8 that becomes the basis of the rich formal PM based application ….

By using MindManager to become my PM tool of choice allows me to use all the utility of the desktop on the web by utilizing MindManager Connect and the ability to have a full tool on the web with the MindManager Web client … It is truly amazing as you never skip a beat there as all of the normal tools and utility are as if you had never left the desktop … by using the tasks, resources and dependencies … you have a full PM solution that is both visual and simple to grasp but still having the ability to run and keep track of even the most complex of projects … I use the browser feature of the new MindManager to open a window and flesh out my companion software in the web that becomes my active milestone manager ….

I take the map and translate the milestones, etc into a web based project management tool that integrates into my flow … I have been trying out all sorts of tools and have found manymoon to be an interesting choice that I am using now … the highlights that have made this valuable to me are that manymoon integrates tightly with google services … I can place the milestones into my google calendar and tasks .. I can attach files and google docs (including doing new ones) to a milestone or discusssion ..

Another post in WebWorker Daily by Daniel Etherington brought me to Manymoon and is worth reading …. it shows how you may use the many other features of this new application that moves more utility into the cloud … (note that I access docs, calendar and manymoon from by blackberry for mobility …)  this is one you can play with to suit your flow and needs ….