I’m going to be on the Project Management 2.0 panel at the Office 2.0 Conference next week in San Francisco. I’m totally looking forward to discussing what the next generation of project management practices looks like. The panel will be moderated by Bay Area blogger Zoli Erdos.  It looks like it will be an interesting panel with some great panelists with whom I’m honored to be sharing the mic.

I think that the new tools that are coming on the scene are radically changing the way that project teams interact. Project management started out as a top down, planning and oversight activity designed to coordinate teams on large projects and monitor the status of said projects. The old paradigm of a project manager using stand alone software to do these functions is falling by the wayside.

More recently people have begun to realize that this centralized function was not just a bottleneck for reporting, it was severely limiting the success of the teams and their projects. Distributing many of the project management functions and allowing the entire project team to collaborate and communicate effeciently is what the next generation of project management tools is all about. This improves project execution and make teams more accountable for hitting their targets and deadlines. Zoli does a great job of summing the key question of “What is the Promise of Project Management 2.0?” in his blog post about the project management 2.0 panel.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to meeting Zoli and my fellow panelists. Hopefully we’ll get some time ahead of the panel to interact and give the audience something to think about.

Gnomedex was fantastic!

I’m serious, this conference is like a two day, one track, SXSWi. There were great talks (and not all of them were in the conference hall itself), great food, great parties. Much like SXSW, I left the event feeling totally energized and ready to go out and DO stuff.

The theme was “Human Circuitry” and I certainly felt plugged in.

The most emotionally charged talks were Sarah Lacy’s talk on the state of blogging and Scott Maxwell’s Mars 3.0 presentation. The blogging talk had a bunch of tension in the room for reasons that really are not that clear. The Mars talk was one of the coolest, most hopeful things I’ve seen in years.

Mars is cool. I have a special warm spot in my heart for that cold dry planet. Back in 1976 my father worked on NASA’s Viking project to put two landers on Mars. I was a little kid sitting in an auditorium waiting for the very first picture after the Viking 1 Lander touched down in western Chryse Planitia. When the first lines of that picture rastered out across the screen the crowd, quite literally, went wild. While not at that level of electricity, the standing ovation that Scott Maxwell received was most assuredly well deserved.

Matt Hartley posted his Top Five Gnomedex Tips which I think should be retitled Top Five Conference Tips. Number two is “Stop Twittering every so often and listen.” The twitter army was out in force and I felt from time to time that it was rather impolite to the presenters to see a sea of the backs of laptop screens. Looking around I’d say that at any given time about half the people were heads down typing away. If the talk was boring I assume they were browsing for something more enterataining. If the talk was electrifying I assume they were blogging/twittering/noting that, “Wow, this is great.” It seemed like a waste to me.

Entrepreneur Mark Bao did a great two person panel with Francine Hardaway (Chris Pirillo served as a kind of moderator and straight man). Mark posted some great observations about speaking and networking at Gnomedex. I got to talk to Mark at the pre-registration party on Thursday. He’s a great guy and his blog is definitely worth reading. Like many others at the conference, I’m really glad to have met him.

Those were the high points for me.

The internet connectivity the first day was pretty spotty. So if you’re really relying on having a solid connection get an EVDO or something like that.

Overall my first Gnomedex was a great experience. Will I be back next year? Damn right I will!

LiquidPlanner is hitting the road once again! First up, our team will be exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, September 16-19. This year, Web 2.0 is expecting over 100 exhibiting companies and 5000 attendees. We hope you’ll find time to stop by and say hello.  (Find us in the Long Tail Pavilion, Booth #2.)  We‘re excited to show off our new features (coming soon!) and meet some new and current users face to face.

If you’re planning to attend, you can get a free expo pass or $100 off a full conference  pass with the following  code: webny08com

If you can’t make it to New York, you can still meet us in person and learn more about LiquidPlanner at the Defrag 2008 Conference, which will be held in Denver, November 3-4.  At Defrag, a few hundred influencers will be gathering to discuss how individuals and enterprises are struggling with the increasing fragmentation of data. The LiquidPlanner team will be addressing the role project management software can play in bringing teams’ project information together in one central place.

If you want to attend Defrag, we can hook you up with a discount here, too. Hurry, this code expires on August 15th: lp1

Well, we’ve wrapped up the Enterprise 2.0 conference and officially launched!

We got covered by a buncha folks. TechCrunch wrote a little piece about our online project management solution. We also got some love from Kristen Nicole at Mashable who was one of the people I talked with at the DEMO conference back in January who really seemed to “get it”.

Liz took off to fly home a couple of hours ago and Jason and I finished the last few demos then broke down the booth. Just as we were wrapping things up and getting ready to shut down the computers Ameed Taylor from the OnDemand Beat Blog showed up. He asked really good questions and I’m looking forward to see what he writes about LiquidPlanner.

Overall this conference was pretty good. We launched our public beta at the DEMO conference and that set a really high bar for conference quality. But overall I feel pretty good about this one. We had good exposure to enterprise customers and what they are looking for in the next generation of project management tools.

The big take away for me has been the desire for integration between tool sets. Yeah, I know, people have been saying this forever so it ain’t any great revelation. But more than ever before I heard people being really specific about what they meant by integration. How they wanted each of their tools to play together.

Like many other venues the “2.0″ness of this conference tended towards the “we’re building social applications” and “employee genereated content” ends of the spectrum. But there were a few other folks who were doing things that didn’t (on the surface) look too 2.0-ish. Atlassian for one was there with a great integration story that included more than just their great tool set but “in the cloud” hosted stuff too. If you haven’t taken a look at JIRA Studio you should.

Anyway, I’m off to bed. We’ve an early flight tomorrow and I am still wrestling with the internet access in this darned hotel.

(Note: I had to post this later because of the Westin’s damned internet. Internet should be free in a business hotel just like the lights and the heat. Oh, and it should work too.)

After a relatively late night we got up and headed down to the booth.

While setting up the computers we lost internet connectivity. Turns out, many people had lost connectivity. Poor internet connection at a conference where cloud computing and SaaS is at the heart makes for very nervous, irritable exhibitors.We got things up and running though and then did lots and LOTS of demos.

I ran into several people that we met before at DEMO and at Under the Radar.

Jive’s booth is beautiful! The Blogtronix folks (that seem to be everywhere we are) were gracious and friendly as always. The more I work with tech people (particularly startups and small companies) the more impressed I am with just how nice and genuinely interesting most folks are in this crowd.

On the note of meeting lots of people… I need a better way to organize and process all the damned business cards I collect. Want a great startup idea; make a device that does this for me. I don’t care how, just make something cheapish that works and that is quick that I don’t have to think about. Please make it plug into my iPhone. That’s all I ask. Oh, and I want it yesterday.

Anyway, we wrapped up the day and then pretty much skipped dinner and went straight to the drinking. After spending the early part of the evening on a lovely downtown rooftop deck courtesy of Liz’s friends (who also fed us tasty snacks) we retired to the hotel bar.

After several hours, several drinks, and several interesting tales from some new Swedish and Norwegian friends we retired to our rooms to hydrate and prepare for the morning.

We’ll be up and at ‘em early tomorrow for the last day of the conference.

(Note: post publication delayed by Westin’s crappy internet access)

Well, we made it to Boston!

We all took the red-eye from Seattle and got right to work finding a grubby downtown diner to have breakfast in. Max’s Cafe… you can’t beat 3 eggs, homefries, bacon and toast for $5.00! No frills and quite tasty. However, it is friggin’ hot and humid in Boston. Liz thinks it’s just fine, but Jason and I are both thankful for the whole air conditioning thing.

The booth is roughly as we imagined it would be however none of the rented hardware was there. After a couple of quick phone calls it turns out that they just hadn’t gotten down the line to us yet. Note to fellow conference exhibitors… if this is one of the first times you’ve done this you should make sure you know what you’re renting. After the DEMO conference rental experience we thought that all items were ala carte. Turns out most computers usually come with those little things like keyboards and mice. So I didn’t really need to pack those all the way from Seattle.

Eh, live and learn.

I finished an interview with a podcaster. It went pretty well, but we’ll see what I sound like when it’s all edited down and posted. I’ll link to it off one of my next posts.

My friend from a conference at Penn State, Mary Sobiechowski, is here. She’s on a cloud computing panel where the CXOs (like her) get “pitched” cloud services by the likes of Google and Amazon. Considering Amazon’s down time recently they better have their rude Q&A practiced. Mary was nervous about the panel but she’ll rock it because that’s how she rolls.

We’re in the lobby right now eating some tasty, tasty calamari! Really, this is great stuff for hotel lobby fare. Liz and Jason are taking off to go to dinner with some of her friends from college.

I’m meeting up with someone I met at SXSW this spring to go get dinner and visit (at least one) dive bar. This is sounding like a perfect start to the conference!

Once again, the LiquidPlanner team is hitting the road! This time, we’re headed east to lovely Boston, Mass., for the
Enterprise 2.0 conference, June 9 - 12. If you’re attending, please stop by booth #707 to say hello.

We’re excited to show off the new features we’ve added since launch and talk to people about how LiquidPlanner can work in an enterprise setting — either by replacing or complementing existing tools sets. We’ve talked to hundreds of customers at businesses large and small, and one thing stands out: no matter the size of the company, the problems plaguing project managers and their teams are the same. We believe that finding project management software that works the way you work can be a big part of the solution.

What is it about that number?

Next week, LiquidPlanner will be presenting at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View. And just like at DEMO 08, we’ll have exactly six minutes to pitch the company, the product, and the business opportunity. (By the way, look closely at the rotating banner ad on the DEMO site to see a shot of Charles and Bruce in their on-stage glory.)

The audience? Press, investors, analysts, private companies, and other service providers. We’ll be sharing the “Work Together” session with our friends at blist as well as Cozimo and SlideShare. We’d love to meet you if you’re attending.

Today is just fun.

The “How to Rawk After SXSW: Staying Insprired” was much fun. Candy was thrown to/at the audience. I won’t go into details but it was basically a big geek lovefest. Totally sweet!

I’m in the big ballroom (A) waiting for Jane McGonigal to talk. I’m about written out. My fingers no longer talk to my brain before writing. This’ll be my last post from the conference. I may or may not write an overview or retrospective later.

There are some key take aways that I have for anyone thinking about coming to SXSW. These are colored by my position evangelizing a product at a conference where I am just an attendee.

1. Don’t focus only on “relevant” panels.
   Branch out and try a bunch of different panels because SXSW is really about inspiration and ideation. You never know where you will find “relevant” material.
2. Don’t skimp on the nightlife.
   This is where the magic happens. I had the best conversations with people that I met in bars. And on that topic, get to your venue about 30 minutes before the party starts. You will really want to get in and start mingling. Talk to everyone you can. Everyone here is friendly.
3. Don’t friggin’ pimp your product every damn time you get up to a mic to ask a question.
   In fact, if you don’t have a question (as in, ends in a question mark) don’t go on some long rambling discourse about how open source software is changing the world through social networking for the good of children in Angola on SourceForge. Get up, ask your question (one or two sentences at most) and then sit down and listen to the answer. We’re at the panels to hear the panelists, not you (so much).
4. Get lots of business cards.
   LOTS!
5. Get familiar with Twitter.
   Sounds weird, but I really get Twitter now. It is one of the coolest productivity tools for conferences ever.
6. If this is your first SXSW, there will be others (hopefully).
   You don’t have to do it all. Meet people, see a few good panels, learn how SXSW works. This conference is more like a romantic relationship than a business one; you need to woo SXSW, not power sell it. You are building a long-term relationship.

Later I’m going to hit the futurist talk and then… well… there’s just the one more night in Austin with my friends Jerry and Shiner.

My morning started off with a bang. Thunder. Yes, it is raining like hell. Big fat drops and lightning strikes.

The first panel was good too.

Eric Hellweg of Harvard Business Journal Online moderated a great panel on “The Care and Feeding of a Startup“. He was the most dynamic moderator I’ve seen at the conference yet. He did it “Jerry Springer style”, walking up and down the aisles with a mic. I actually found this very effective and would recommend it to confident moderators in the future.

One of the key points that I got from this panel was that the founding team needs to focus on building out a strong core product feature (or small feature set) and that VC funding can be quite distracting if you let it. In particular, Blair Garrou from DFJ noted that early stage VC funding for web startups can distract from listening to your audience.

Then it was “Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR“!

Arrrr!

While tempted to write the rest of this post in Pirate Speak, I think I’ll continue in more modern parlance.

This was a very entertaining and fairly informative too. The deck can be found here and is well worth your while to read.

The key take away from this was that you want to find a small set (like say… one) of actionable metrics to gather and monitor. If you can’t make a decision with a particular metric then it is not actionable.

They talked a bit about tools for metrics. Of course Google Analytics was in there but there was also CrazyEgg.

Okay, maybe I’m the last to the party but CrazyEgg is just incredibly cool! It does click tracking on your pages and allows you to slice them by traffic source. They has some really good examples of using the CrazyEgg data to redesign a webpage for a gaming video site. Totally sweet (and you know I’m a data visualization junkie).

Unlike yesterday’s keynote (the social media reaction to which was actually called out by the conference organizers before this keynote) Frank Warren rocked the PostSecret presentation. Totally inspiring. Totally uplifting. His speaking style is perfectly fitted to the subject and the message. He is a master of handling questions (some of which were only kinda questions) and setting everyone at ease even when you were quite uncomfortable. Amazing.

Thence to the “Boostrapping 101” panel. Damn. Philosophically interesting, but practical and useful as ice skates on a pig.

Now I’m just waiting for the “Stories of Failure: Surviving Start-up Mistakes” presentation. (Picture at bottom)