Your All-In-One Web Based Project Management Tool

People who actually like coffee - 5%

People who would like anything with a truck-load of cream & sugar in it - 95%

Source: thedoghousediaries.com

Just wishing everyone a happy and safe halloween. There is only one person who dressed up in our office. She is a cat!

Also just letting everyone know that SantexQ works on all holidays, including Halloween AND Christmas!! It’s a web-based project management tool, it has no other choice. Happy Halloween!

- The Santex Team

Need help with your social media campaign? If you haven’t yet heard of The SEO Rapper, then you’re in luck! We’ve got the video right here. Amazing I know. The SEO Rapper actually raps some extremely useful info on each of his SEO topics. After seeing this video, you’ll be a Social Media pro. You can see the rest of his videos, including Link Building 101 and Conversion Closing, on his website, www.theseorapper.com. Enjoy!

Pretty cool huh? Maybe his next video will be on the many uses of online project management tools…we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Here are nine ways to be a successful and effective project manager:

1. Be a Leader and a Manager: This is the ability to direct your group of people towards achieving the final goal. Leaders communicate a defined and organized vision to motivate others, which managers must also do. A good project manager will constantly switch from a leader to a manager as necessary.

2. Be a Team Builder: Successful projects are delivered by successful teams and successful teams have skillful team leaders. As a leader, you must set the tone for the team and create professional camaraderie between your team members. Because projects often have people working with different functional expertise, it is up to the project manager to lead them through the various team development phases to the point where they perform as a team.

Let’s take this Dilbert cartoon for an example:

He is not a good Team Builder or a Team Leader and, as you can see, his team is not exactly productive. (Okay, the comic was mostly for a laugh.)

3. Be a Problem Solver: As a project manager, you’ll have to put your detective skills to the test. A project manager must find the source and solution to many types of group work related issues, such as:

• interpersonal problems
• internal sources
• external sources
• technical sources
• management sources
• communication
• opinions or perceptions
• and many more!

Being a problem solver is all about analyzing possible alternatives and determining the best course of action.

4. Be a Negotiator and an Influencer: Work together with other people with the intention of coming to a fair joint agreement. Learn to judge, sacrifice and compromise without threatening the overall project and final goal.

Influence is getting events to happen by convincing your team that your way is the better way, even if it’s not what they want. In short, influential power is the ability to get people to do things they would not do otherwise.

5. Be an Excellent Communicator: Being a communicator means recognizing that it’s a two-way street. As a project manager you will have to deal with both written (in documents and through technology) and oral communications. A good way of summarizing this is: all communication on your project should be clear and complete.

6. Be a Good Organizer: Let’s just think of the aspects you will need to organize: documentation, contracts, reports, meetings, tasks, reviews, requirements and completion.

It’s almost impossible to stay organized without having time management tools- so add this to your list- get an online project management tool, such as SantexQ, that will help with organizing tasks. Features like client/contacts info, calendar, time clock and other organizational tools help clarify communication and stay on track.

7. Be Aware that Planning Should Become Second Nature to You: There are known and logical steps in creating plans. As a project manager you will certainly own the Project Plan and are responsible for thinking it out and executing it.

8. Be Able to Setup and Manage Budgets: At the heart of this skill is estimating, particularly cost estimates. The project manager will need certain knowledge of financial techniques and systems along with accounting principles.

Part of the Project Plan will be the Spend Plan. This will show the planned spending against a time-scale. The PM will want to get involved in purchasing, quoting, reconciling invoices, time sheets, labor costs, etc.

The project manager then needs to establish what has actually happened and forecast the expected final costs. In many cases, accounting and project management tools will help significantly.

9. Be On Top of Your Reports: Characterize your information and watch your progress along the way. Make sure your team is on the right track and on time. Find software that allows you to watch and run reports on a myriad of subjects for your development team and prove your progress to meet your final goal.

These are all very valuable skills, but are certainly not an exhaustive list. What do you think? Are there any any skills you would add to the PM Be-attitudes?

For more information on free project management software visit: www.santexq.com/

Let’s face it. Reading about project management is boring. I’ve looked at several other project management blogs and I can’t help but feel my eyelids start to droop every time I see the word “project.” Are people out there really reading these dry, lifeless articles on “how to be an effective project manager?” Or is it all just SEO stuff (please see our article on how to be an effective project manager project manager software online tools free)?

I think we need to find some new ways to get the word out - follow in the footsteps of The SEO Rapper, write a catchy song a la creditreport.com, make an interesting viral video (one that has some useful information), draw a funny daily comic, make up a Jeopardy-like game where the winner gets a CAR! I’m going to make it my mission to do all of the above. Toy car.

Okay, all the hoopla aside, while learning about project management can be a bit tedious, where would we be without someone or some program to manage our projects? We’d be in an office full of chaos, that’s where. What project is the team working on? What project are YOU working on? What project am I working on?! He said that you said that she said that her manager said that we said all of the above…

I guess the conclusion I’ve ultimately come to is that even though project management can be boring, it’s worth blogging about because it’s essential in making a business work and can always be improved. And improvement means better business, happier employees and excellent overall health. Project management = life. Amazing! So keep learning, keep sifting through articles, keep up the good work, and start using an online project management tool like SantexQ - we’ll try our best to spice it up a little for you.

For more information on free project management software visit: www.santexq.com/

You’re traveling through another dimension - a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land; whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead, your next stop: The Project Management Zone!

We have all had them, those horror stories of problematic projects, bad clients, missed details, wayward employees, endless meetings and much worse. Here are a few work place and management horror stories that I have collected, sit back and enjoy!

Story #1

I was assigned to take over a project that had been running for over 2 years with very little to show for it. The week before I took it over, the two programmers had given the client a demonstration of the application. The client was pleased… so pleased they wanted our company to take it over and make it viable as quickly as possible. [Interesting to note that the two programmers where working by themselves and with no administrator, project manager, etc.]

I immediately went looking for documentation - there was none. I talked to the programmers and they were very close lipped about what the program actually did. As I began looking further and further into the application, I found that there was no application. The demonstration was a “shell”. Everything was hard coded. There was no database.

That day both programmers quit without notice, it then became my job to go to the client and explain to them why their $400,000 project was nothing but hard code. In the end, the client was so impressed with our honesty that we were given a 6 million dollar contract over the next three years to “do it the right way”. -www.bad-managers.com

Moral: As a project manager, you have an important place and companies rely on you. Good project managers are imperative when it comes to keeping people on track, using tools like SantexQ will help. Moral #2, honesty is the best policy.

Story #2

I had a manager for a group tasked with writing software. She spoke little broken English making her difficult to understand. Upon starting the project, I asked her for a project GANTT chart [a common project planning tool used by most software developers] and a list of tasks that I was to work on. She didn’t know what a GANTT chart was, instead, her idea of good software development practices was to send daily emails to developers saying “Oh and one more thing…” She got to go home at 6 every night so she could watch TV while we had to stay until midnight to struggle with the ensuing chaos she created. I wasn’t there for much longer. -www.zazona.com

Moral: Be a good communicator and understand the expectations of your employees. It’s amazing how organizational tool like charts, reports and online project management tools can help the vision of the project and your employees.

Story #3

Our consulting person got a call to rebuild a server farm “from scratch.” That surprised us since we’d done some business with this client before and the client’s on-site guy was decent. Follow-up calls to the on-site employee for an explanation went unanswered. So we showed up and found out why: they’d fired him.

This didn’t come as a complete surprise, as he did have personality issues that might have made him unpopular. But as it turns out -allegedly, they didn’t just fire him, the CEO (who had personality issues too) fired him during a staff meeting, embarrassed him in front of everyone, including screaming at him.

So, the system admin is hurt and angry and they let him walk back to his office to spend the rest of the afternoon “packing.” Five hours after he left, two hours after everyone had left for the day, every server in the server farm began to rebuild itself, as did the CEO’s, CFO’s, and office manager’s desktops. This was a small development shop, so the guy not only took out e-mails and doc files, but all the recent code, too. -cio.co.nz/

Moral: Don’t torture and publicly execute your employees, be respectful. Also, make sure they don’t have unsupervised access to the system after that. Moral #2: Backup tapes might not be such a bad idea either.

Story #4

I oversaw a project of building an off-site data center’s framework, close to completing construction (this included overseeing and acquiring racks, UPS, cable management and basic monitoring). However, the IT staff can’t make these purchases, they can only make requests. Requests are approved and implemented by the purchasing exec. Unfortunately, the purchasing exec left the order until the last minute, and decided to overnight the delivery (adding a few grand to an already strained initial budget).

On the following rainy Saturday a truck arrives at the construction site. No execs, no IT staff, not even any construction workers were there - just a security guy, who at least knew to call someone. But I lived two states away and wound up calling anyone I knew in New Jersey to find a fork lift or tarp so I could rescue $300 grand worth of IT equipment that’s sitting outside on a loading dock, in the rain.
Adding to the budget-busting corporate credit card charges, a number of local movers had to be called to the site on a rush order to move all the stuff inside. -cio.co.nz/

Moral: If you’re spending significant dollars on any kind of specialized equipment, make sure the order gets tracked by someone who understands what’s being bought - whether or not that person can actually place the order.

Think you have a worse story? Share them here, I would love to post them.

For more information on free project management software visit: www.santexq.com/

Today is not a day for many words. Instead, here’s a funny little Dilbert comic we stumbled upon. See? Project management can be funny too!

For more information on free online project management tools visit: www.santexq.com/