Product Review: Bonsai
Bonsai appeals to me both as a project manager AND as a freelancer looking for ways that I can more easily manage client and financial data. If you’re in the business of agency, freelance, or consulting work, Bonsai’s business management offerings in combination with its project management capabilities are downright impressive.
Product Review: Zoho Projects
I’m continually curious to learn more about the enterprise project management software market 🤓 This time, I’m taking a look at Zoho Projects, the project management software solution associated with a much larger Chennai-based B2B software company called Zoho.
The Pitch for Program Management
To prepare for our future, program managers need to educate a generation of executives who didn’t grow up in a waterfall world on the benefits of our role. This is where the pitch for program management comes in.
Product Review: Asana
Asana’s tagline is to “work on big ideas, without the busywork.” How much latent productivity could you unlock if knowledge workers spent more time on their area of expertise rather than on the mechanics of managing and reporting on their personal workloads? This is where Asana seeks to add value.
Product Review: Moqups
Moqups sees its product as a solution to the ongoing challenges around requirements definition. In their view, creating good requirements is “more art than science.” Engaging a diverse swathe of people early in the process and continuing to question and refine initial hypotheses is key to generating the best possible set of requirements.
When to Say No to Things at Work
For the first five to ten years of your career, you should say yes. To everything. You should say yes so much that you’ll want to throw up from saying yes. Once you achieve a certain career threshold, you need to shift from saying yes to saying no. And, if you thought saying yes was hard, it’s nothing compared with the difficulty of saying no.
Product Review: Ricotta
Working with your team to measure progress against your OKRs can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain. There’s got to be an easier way. Enter Ricotta, a Slack add-on for OKRs tracking.
Product Review: CROOW
CROOW is a project management software company that describes itself as being at the nexus of project management and business management. For this post, I had the opportunity not only to demo the product but also to speak with CROOW’s founder to learn about the origins of one of the new kids on the block in the PM software space.
The Unpopular PM
As a proud millennial and child of the ‘90s, I distinctly remember the ubiquitous educational posters adorning the walls of my elementary and middle school imploring us to remember that “what is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular.” What do you do when project stakeholders resist adopting effective program management practices?
Product Review: Nirvana.Work
I am constantly on the hunt for new productivity products, so I was looking forward to testing out Nirvana.Work, which bills itself as the world’s most powerful automated planning system. A lot of project management software can be convoluted, especially for young teams that are starting out. Nirvana.Work could be adapted for small-scale projects with relatively minimal effort.
Product Review: Hive
Hive is productivity and collaboration software that is famously used by teams at world-class companies ranging from Google to Starbucks to Toyota to IBM. As a productivity and community building enthusiast, Hive was on my list of products to try.
Invisible Work
After nearly 13 years as a technical program manager, I’ve learned that program managers and engineers are different people. And thank goodness for that—because our roles could not be more different.