Weekly Posts on the LiquidPlanner Blog - Page 78 of 79

Go Barney, Go!

January 8, 2009 | Charles Seybold

Today we are congratulating LiquidPlanner’s adviser and board member Barney Harford as he is officially announced as the new CEO of Orbitz.com (press release.) Barney has been a great member of our team and his connection with the LiquidPlanner product dates all the way back to when he and I (as well as LiquidPlanner’s Bruce Henry) were building the...

Holiday favorites, the simpler the better

December 10, 2008 | Charles Seybold

The holidays are meant to be warm times and a time to be close to the ones you love but so often circumstances conspire to interfere with that. This year is especially interesting as we are all more introspective about over spending and what is really important. Modest gift giving is part of my family...

What is Wrong with Percent Complete?

November 17, 2008 | Bruce Henry

The last 20% of the work takes 80% of the schedule. How many times have you heard of this happening? The project is cruising along. Work is getting done. The percent complete steadily rises until it hits about 80-90% and then it stalls. It just sits there at 90%. Days go by. The team is...

Cure for project politics: Estimate in realistic ranges

November 12, 2008 | Charles Seybold

At most companies, we have to deliver or lose our paychecks. Yet, we are so focused on results that we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that, if we just wish hard enough, it will become a reality. This wishful thinking (plus the bad habit of single-point estimation) creates major political stress between project teams, their...

Project Management 2.0: We’ve seen this shift before

November 6, 2008 | Charles Seybold

Cross posted from Cloud Ave. A brief history of typists Back before the 1980s there used to be these people called “typists” and they often worked in a “typing pool”. What did they do? Well, when someone had a document that they needed typed they would give the handwritten draft to the typist and she would...

Blurb – hardcopy done right

October 18, 2008 | Charles Seybold

It’s Friday night so no work stuff in this post. I want to share the word on one of my favorite tools, Blurb.com. This online service lets you make your own bookstore quality books. It has a downloadable layout tool that uploads your design and content and bada bing, 7-10 days later real books shows up...

Producing Camtasia Videos for the Web

October 16, 2008 | Bruce Henry

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about how I produce the videos for the LiquidPlanner tutorials so I thought I’d take a minute to blog the notes that I passed on to Kevin Merritt (founder of Blist). I use Camtasia Studio 5 from TechSmith. The folks at TechSmith produce great tools. Just like SnagIt, I’ve really got nothing but good...

Time Cards should start at the Top

October 11, 2008 | Bruce Henry

Today we were going over our time card design. It is really coming along nicely. We’ve been strongly influenced by a few assumptions that we made early on and I’d like to get them out there and see what our blog readers have to say about ’em. One of the primary assumptions that we made...

Malcolm Gladwell and the Desire for Certainty

October 10, 2008 | Bruce Henry

I watched Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at the 2008 New Yorker Conference. It is a good talk and you should watch it. He’s talking about something he calls “the mismatch problem”. While quite interesting, I really have nothing to say about it. Rather, I’d like to riff for a few minutes on a couple of things that...

The High Cost of Missed Deadlines

September 16, 2008 | Charles Seybold

The 2006 film “Who Killed the Electric Car” explores General Motors’ tragic decision to pull the plug on the EV-1, it’s pioneering purpose-built electric car. We all know what’s happened since then. Now, GM is making a big bet that the Chevy Volt, its new plug-in hybrid will reverse years of balance sheet bleeding and...

Google SketchUp, my newest planning tool

July 29, 2008 | Charles Seybold

I rarely pass up a chance to play with a new software tool, but with all the work on LiquidPlanner I’ve not had that much time for this interest. Fortunately a project found me. In this case, planning for a kids bedroom remodel. Finally I had an excuse to stay up to 3:00 in the...

Prioritizing for Real

May 21, 2008 | Bruce Henry

After talking to a bunch of users I feel compelled to write this post on getting real about prioritization. Folks, saying project A is higher priority than project B but you’re doing B first is ridiculous. Project A may be more important than project B. Project A may be of more value than project B. But by definition, the one that...

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