We’re getting into full swing here at LiquidPlanner. The application is pretty solid, there are a few features we’d like to add (aren’t there always), but for the most part it is ready for prime time. So we’ve been beating the bushes to get some of our better beta customers to sign up to actually give us money. This is a big thing. While people are willing to put up with quite a bit when using free software, if they’re willing to pay for it that really says something.

But there’s one thing that’s been bothering me during my conversations with folks about what they want from a project management tool. They are looking for a new tool because their projects are out of control, late, over budget, under scope, or… well… let’s just say that if there is a way that things can go wrong someone somewhere is experiencing that particular flavor of train wreck. Almost uniformly what they want is a tool that they buy, turn on, and magically their problems are solved. They want a silver bullet.

There are no silver bullets.

No tool or piece of software can make you more efficient or better at what you do unless you change the way you do it.

This isn’t some great revelation. I’m certainly not the first to say it. It continues to amaze me how many people say, “Our projects are not running as well as we’d like so we want a tool to help and we don’t want to change anything.”

If you don’t change your behavior then things will stay the same. A good tool helps you (and your organization) understand what needs to change. A good tool shows you the effects of any changes you undertake. But notice, the tool doesn’t do the changing, you do.

When I was a kid I was into ski racing. No really, this is relevant so just stay with me.

Anyway, I knew I had a problem with starting my turns too late. I knew it because my coach said so and my times were slow and not improving. Then one day a better tool showed up. The coach brought a camcorder up to the hill.

He would record us coming down through the gates. At the end of our run we would watch the recording right there. And then we’d go up and do it again.

I swear to you that I was faster within the first two runs. I could see what I was doing and get nearly instant feedback. I made more progress in that two hour session than I had made in a month of the coach telling me what was wrong.

But the camcorder did not make me faster.

It wasn’t the tool, but rather the change in my behavior that made me faster. If I had said, “Just give me a tool that will make me faster but I don’t want to change the way I ski at all” the coach (and I suspect all of you) would have laughed at me.

Project management software is like that though. People are always looking to the software to adapt to their pathological, dysfunctional ways of executing projects. They don’t want to change the way they do projects. If you don’t change the way you’re doing things you will continue to have the same level of success (or lack thereof).

There’s a great list of 50 reasons not to change that sums up just about every one that I’ve ever heard. Thanks to Raven for pointing this out to me.

I’ve been doing a little bit of usability testing recently and stumbled on Morae from the folks at TechSmith. They’re the same folks that make Camtasia and my favorite piece of utility software SnagIt.

Now I’ve sat through a couple of usability studies in my time at Expedia but I never really thought through how the heck you go about capturing and scoring all the feedback that you get during a usability session. I’ve gotta say, Morae has completely exceeded my expectations for things like ease of use and intuitive interface. I guess one would hope so since they do make usability testing software.

The general idea is that you write a simple set of tasks that you want the user to try to perform. Then you record several people doing them (or trying to). The recorded files can then be pulled into a manager application that helps you score how the easily the users performed the tasks. You can also get timing information about how long it took them to do the tasks and a whole buncha other automagical data capture like mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, pages viewed, time between inputs, etc.

There’s more data there (fo’ free!!) after recording a session than I’d ever know what to do with (okay, I exaggerate, I’m a total data junkie). But you get the idea.

Anyway, I have nothing but good stuff to say about this thing. The tool itself is so cool that I’m actually looking forward to doing some more usability testing.

One word of warning; Watch the demo videos! I’m not kidding, you’ll miss a good half of the awesome that is this product if you don’t. While the basic stuff is pretty self-explanatory, there’s all kinds of features for tagging parts of the video of the session and for scoring how the user was coping with your application (or whatever) that you’ll totally dig once you figure them out. And the videos really help get you up and running fast.

Well, I’m off to SXSW this week. If you’re going to be down in Austin feel free to look me up in the SXSW member directory and hit me up for drinks. I’m buying, but you’ll have to sit through a 20 minute LiquidPlanner usability test.

Since we launched our beta program at the DEMO conference in January, we’ve been thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for LiquidPlanner accounts. Many of them are already actively managing projects using LiquidPlanner, but of course, as with any new service, some of the new accounts are not yet in use.

This past weekend, we sent out a brief survey to a few of the folks who signed up for LiquidPlanner but weren’t yet using it to manage their projects. Could they not figure out how to use it? Were we missing critical features? Or were they simply too busy to try it out? The answers were varied, with the majority responding that they haven’t had time since signing up to really see what we were all about.

Interestingly, the answers to another question in the survey validated an assumption we’ve been working against for a few months now: that most people haven’t found a project management tool they like yet. We asked these same people what product they were currently using to manage their projects, and over 50% responded that they weren’t using any formal project management software. (?!?!) Maybe they were building lists in Excel, writing milestones on whiteboards, or sending task lists around in email. This percentage is amazing, given that the SimpleSpark catalog alone lists nearly 250 project management apps. One might think that, by now, everyone would have found the tool that’s right for them.

This is like hearing that someone hasn’t found the right bank yet, so they’re just keeping their cash under the mattress in the meantime. For serious projects, those types of tools just don’t scale.

Edited for clarification on February 22.