Projects Possible

I stumbled upon the Xobni (Zob-nee) website when I was looking for email productivity tools.  After reading all of the pages, watching the video (see below) and signing up for the beta I was a bit disappointed that I could not immediately begin trying out what appeared to be a great tool.  They did however offer a “priority” beta and all I had to do was put their logo on my blog.  I’m thinking that they wanted to get links back to their site to increase their search engine rankings.   I finally got my invitation a few days ago and now I have an opportunity to comment on my initial impression.

The download and installation of the Xobni application was quick and relatively seamless.  Xobni does need to perform an initial synchronization with your email and on my machine with tens of thousands of pieces of email dating back to 2003 this process took about 35-40 minutes.

Once the installation was complete,  I had a new, minimizable window attached to my Outlook that was providing me with absolutely amazing analytical data about the emailer and other “associations” that are tied to the piece of email.

For this Initial Review I will highlight just a couple features that I have been using daily if not multiple times a day.   Remember my goal was efficiency and productivity and I can honestly say that in just one week’s worth of use, Xobni delivered!!! 

1. Search - As many of you know, I use 2 Outlook Add-ins.  I use Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) specifically for it’s Search capability.  What I don’t particularly like about NEO is that it really isn’t integrated into Outlook, it is a separate application that loads on top of Outlook.  With Xobni, I now have search capability available to me ALL the TIME in the Xobni side window.  Unlike an Outlook search, the Xobni search is also lightning FAST.  Additionally, the Xobni search results are displayed in a single pane and match not only email messages, but individuals as well.  Extremely impressive to me and in the first day of my installed Xobni I probably used that feature alone at least 2 dozen times. 
2. The Xobni email tab -  There are two tax on Xobni.  On this tab you get a graphical representation of when (times of the day) you exchange email with the emailer, other people who exchange email with the emailer, conversations being held with the emailer, and files that have been exchanged with the emailer.   This tab really helps see what is going on with the person.  In my first day of use I was able to determine if I had sent specific files to individuals that I should have sent to them.  
3. The Organize Tab in Xobni is like a small dashboard of what is going for ME in Outlook.  You will see on this tab section your Upcoming Appointments, and Tasks.  There is also a section at the bottom of the tab showing people that you haven’t emailed with recently so you can “stay connected”.

I must say, in just a few minutes of my beta review, Xobni is going to be an Outlook tool that I will NOT be able to live without.  It makes my email time so much more productive, but beyond that it really helps to make it more organized.  The toolset and functionality is something that I wish that ClearContext would have thought of so that I could get it all in a single interface.   Since they didn’t, Xobni is where I am at and I hope they are successful.  I know I will be a customer!  Get signed up to download the beta here.

I’ve heard many different things being compared to herding cats…  Project Management is Like Herding Cats, Managing Programmers is Like Herding Cats, Leadership is Like Herding Cats, Teaching is Like Herding Cats, Getting My Family Together is Like Herding Cats. (You’ve probably got a few things in your life that are like herding cats as well.)

The interesting thing for me as a NON-CAT person is I really wasn’t sure what that whole phrase implied…so I thought I might take a look at it from the standpoint of why I don’t like cats.

1. Cat’s don’t “need” me in the truest sense of they word.  They tend to do just fine by themselves and really to me only seem interested when they need or want something from me.  I’ve been told they “sense” that I am not a cat person.
2. Cat’s never seem to focus on anything.   You can easily distract them with a ball of twine or some other toy.  They can bounce from distraction to distraction and seem to be quite happy doing it.  I’ve been told they focus on the distractions… that’s what they are good at.
3. Cats will climb all over everything.  Boundaries don’t seem to matter.  My kitchen table, the stove, bathroom vanities, you name it and it is their territory. 
4. The incessant need to make sure that you know they have claws.  When you push them away or put them down, they will let you know that they also know how to use these claws.  Make sure you provide them with an acceptable scratching post or they will use whatever they can get those claws into.
5. Cats want to be awake when I want to sleep and if it’s mating season it is absolutely amazing the amount of noise that you can get out a cat when they are on the prowl.

So now look at your [Job or Task] and look at some of the reasons above…  I’ll use Project Management since I am a bit familiar with it…

1. Team members will often think that the PM is really not needed and that their job is to make their life miserable, holding them accountable for their portion of the project.  When people want to go it alone in a project things will quickly start to become problematic.  The sum of the parts is much better than the lone wolf.  (ummm cat)
2. Projects need to be organized, well communicated, structured, etc… If you are easily distracted or have team members that are easily distracted the project becomes at risk.
3. Everyone needs to know their boundaries and work on the things that they have been assigned.  I am a firm believer that you can’t manage ever single task.  You need to allow your team members the flexibility to do their task and all of its sub-tasks in the time allotted, holding them accountable.   
4. Having claws… In a project I might consider this to be the hidden agenda.  Either the project sponsor, the team members or in some cases even the project manager have an agenda that they want to accomplish that is not part of the project but they will wield their claws to get it accomplished.
5. Time management in projects is so important to meet the deadlines agreed upon.  If we aren’t meeting the deadlines we end up with again a project at risk.  Doing things “on your own time” never works well with projects.  I don’t care if you do it at 2am as long as I don’t have to get a call from you at 2am that you are running up against problems or need to discuss a change order.

So I guess the reasons I hate cats can be fit into the analogy…  I wonder if it would work with dogs?  Perhaps another day!

There was a super bowl commercial that was done a few years back by EDS… It was absolutely one of the funniest and well done!  I’ve included it from a YouTube search below… enjoy!

This is the first in a series of a few articles that I will be sharing on little tips and tricks in Microsoft Excel that I have accumulated or built over the last few months.  I’ve incorporated most of these into an Excel workbook or two to meet my specific needs.  I’m not really a Visual Basic for Applications programmer so I probably won’t be able to help out much in customizing…I just tweak things a bit here and there with help from online resources like Excel Forums. 

In this post, I want to show you how you can have a series of checkboxes in a column and when you “check” the checkbox it populates the cell directly to the right of the checkbox with the current date.   I use this in a project management spreadsheet where I have any number of projects all with common tasks that must be completed.

If you look at the spreadsheet above you will see that there are 3 columns… what you don’t see over to the far left in column A is the name of the task that I want to complete…  When I create a new project this portion of my spreadsheet is populated with a series of expected dates based on a set of known criteria.   I want to be able to come to this worksheet and not only quickly review a project and what needs to be completed but I want to be able to quickly update the “work” that was done on a project and have it give me the date that it was completed.   This is where my checkbox routine comes into play…  by simply clicking on the checkbox I can indicate the task is complete and it will make a permanent record of when it was completed… If I check it by mistake I can uncheck and it will also remove the date.

So how do I do this?

Sub Process_CheckBox()

Dim cBox As CheckBox
Dim LCol As Long
Dim LRow As Long
Dim Rng As Range

  LName = Application.Caller
  Set cBox = ActiveSheet.CheckBoxes(LName)

'Find row that checkbox resides in
  LCol = cBox.TopLeftCell.Column
  LRow = cBox.TopLeftCell.Row
  Set Rng = ActiveSheet.Cells(LRow + 1, LCol + 1)

'Change date in cell to the right of CheckBox, if checkbox is checked
If cBox.Value > 0 Then
  Rng.Value = Date

'Clear date in column B, if checkbox is unchecked
Else
  Rng.ClearContents
End If

End Sub

The key lines here are:

• Set Rng line which determines the row and column to place the date… You may tweak these to be +2, +3, whatever you need based on where and how you place yoru checkboxes in your spreadsheet and where and how you want your dates to appear.
• Rng.Value sets the date if there is a check in the checkbox
• Rng.ClearContents clears the date if the checkbox does not have a date

To use the routine you must open the Visual Basic Editor in Excel - Alt+F11, Click on Insert, Select Module and then Paste the Code above.   In your spreadsheet you would then right click on your checkbox and Assign a Macro to it… the macro is called Process_Checkbox.  Now every time you check the checkbox it will run this macro and it will insert the date.

In looking at the projects that I work on there could literally be thousands of small little tasks in the jigsaw puzzle we call a project.  The tasks could range from simple little 20 or 30 minute things, to tasks that may require days or even weeks to complete.  At one time, I went down the road of creating a Work Breakdown Structure that would allow me to assign and track all of those thousands of tasks.   What I found is that I was spending more time tracking tasks than some of those tasks even took to complete.   I also found that I was creating an atmosphere in my projects that did not allow my team members the flexibility that they needed to exercise their expertise.  

I learned after doing a couple of these extensive WBSs that I needed to trust my team and hold them accountable for their portion of the project but to let them handle the small details that they had control over.  As a result I had a slimmed down WBS that really focused on key components of the project with a few “touch points” within each component that I could effectively monitor and measure.  My team members were empowered to complete their jobs without me hovering on each and every task and instead of me spending hours trying to keep tasks updated I was now able to focus my attention more on the things that really mattered.

In my web surfing today I ran across an interesting website called 4PM.com that deals with a concept in project management called Achievement-driven Project Management.  While I haven’t had full opportunity to review everything they have to offer, there was an article that I wanted to share with you that is similar to my current approach to WBS.   Written by Dick Billows - Work Breakdown Structure: Project Design Issue or Clerical Task - discusses the WBS as a “TO DO” list being the potential launchpad for project failure…check out the blog post and the associated article linked in the text.

I’d be real curious how other project managers deal with their work breakdowns.  Do you poll your team members as to the tasks they believe need to be completed and then compile the final list?  Do you build it yourself and send it out to the team for review and edits?  What tools do you use to assist?   As a “rookie” project manager I’m always looking for ways to streamline the processes.  Anything that I can do to make me and my staff more productive is a positive thing.  What are some of your thoughts?

There are a LOT of theories and ideas floating around to help with time management and productivity.  Classes and seminars are offered, books are published, and websites and blogs are posted all to try to help us better manage our lives.  For this author there has been no one method to help with time and productivity management.   In fact before I knew about these methods I was trying to come up with things on my own that many of these methods suggest.

In today’s posting I am going to give some insight on how I manage my projects using Microsoft Outlook, ClearContext’s IMS, Nelson’s Email Organizer (NEO) and Excel.   My goal has been to try to get everything I do that is work related consolidated into a single location and while Outlook is getting pretty close, my work environment requires some additional reporting structures that keep me away from my single trusted system.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, or Total Workday Control (TWC)by Michael Linenberger it is all about changing the way that we work.  This can be as simple as the little things like grouping like things together and working on them all at the same time to much more complex and time consuming changes like rebuilding your workspace, developing filing systems, etc.   The key for me was to latch on to an idea or two and work with them, integrate them into your life and then add more once I had mastered the ideas I was working on.

When I started managing projects I found rather quickly that the medium that people wanted to use for communication was email.  I quickly went from an email box of 20-30 pieces of significant email every day to 200-300 pieces of email every day.  Combine that with customer face time and limited access to email and I soon found I was not keeping up.  I needed a solution that could help me manage and find things much easier than I had in the past.   The solution I found at the time was Nelson Email Organizer.  This is a great tool and one that I use to this day for email searches and correspondent management right from within Outlook.  NEO It was my first attempt at managing each piece of email in my Inbox, giving it a home, and knowing and being comfortable with the fact that I was going to be able to find it again if needed.   Another KEY feature of NEO for me was the ability to search across multiple mail stores.  Remember that 2GB limit that Outlook used to have?  My solution to that was to create separate Archives and move messages into those archives.   The down side to that is the messages were no longer search-able in Outlook unless I loaded each of the archives one at a time and performed the search.  Because NEO creates its own set of indexes that are super fast, this restriction was removed and I could keep years worth of email and search through 10s of thousands of messages in a matter of seconds.

NEO and Outlook worked well for me for quite awhile but NEO didn’t help me with managing tasks and so I went on the hunt once again for web solutions for project management.  Ultimately I stumbled across GTD (Getting Things Done) and TWC (Total Workday Control).  Take a look at the graphic.  The concept with these systems is that as messages come into your inbox you need to make a decision about them.  Ask yourself if you need to do something with this email… If not you probably just need to file it away as a reference or better yet if it isn’t going to be needed just delete it. (NEO would help me with this so this was nothing new.)  The other side of the equation however is more difficult to deal with.  If I need to do something with it, what is it that needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, etc… all start entering into the picture.   As you can see from the graphic there really are 3 choices… I do it now, I delegate it to someone else, or I hold onto it until a future date.  It was something that hit me as being so simple yet almost unbearable to manage.  That is where ClearContext’s IMS product entered the picture for me.  With IMS not only are the non-actionable items manageable but the actionable items become manageable as well and all linked to the appropriate projects and people.  I downloaded it, installed it and I’ve never looked back.  Keep in mind that I don’t claim to be a GTD or TWC guru and I don’t do all of the things that I’m supposed to do nor will I probably ever do them all.  I don’t even use all of the functionality that exists within ClearContext’s IMS product (yet).  That isn’t the point.  The point is I use what works for me and as I fine tune my process I may also find I use more of their concepts or in the case of the software their tools. 

The last tool that I have started using pretty extensively is Excel.  I find that I can use it to keep track of a lot of information in an organized form and have at my fingertips information about each project that I use on a day to day basis.  With Excel I am able to streamline common project tasks information on the items that are repeated for each project that I work on.  The members at Excelforum  have really helped me in this end goal by helping me to create scripts that help me keep track of tasks that are completed, scripts that help me to create new task spreadsheets with limited numbers of key-presses, and most recently with a script that helps me to create Outlook tasks for each and every item  of a project that I need to be tracking.

While my methods are not perfect… the goal is and has always been to increase my productivity and reducing the amount of work that I have to perform.   I’m always looking for great new ideas so if you have any to share please do so.   In the next few weeks I hope to share with you some of the scripts that I use in my Excel workbook.  I also encourage you to read my reviews on ClearContext or better yet go to their website and download the application and give it a try.

By my own admission I am NOT a Microsoft Excel expert.  I know enough about the application to make me dangerous. 

I use Excel pretty extensively in my day to day work activities, and in my continuing effort to streamline my day I decided that I needed to add some functionality to my project management spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet has really become my single point of information for all of the projects that I work on and I wanted to enhance it even further by integrating it with Outlook.

The integration that I had in mind was to read through the TASKs that I have detailed in my Excel worksheet and IF there was a due date to create a task for me in Outlook using this date as the due date and various other information from the spreadsheet as my subject.   I certainly didn’t have the expertise needed to complete this task on my own so I headed out on the Internet to find a solution.

Google is a great thing! Within a matter of minutes I had any number of resources available to me from my search terms about Creating Outlook Tasks from Excel.   Many of them included quoted scripts that gave me a head-start on what I wanted to do but ultimately none of them quite met my specific criteria.  I decided what I should probably do is simply pose the question to the experts in some of the forums that Google was pointing me to.

Now keep in mind that your mileage may vary at these sites.  I’m simply telling you of my experience.  I’m sure with the thousands and thousands of posts that each of these sites have that either would be a good place to get solutions.

I went to http://www.excelforum.com/to start with.    This particular site had helped me a number of months prior with a question I had about populating a cell with a date when I clicked on a check-box.  Within a matter of hours I was up and running with the script that I needed to perform this task.  My Outlook task on the other hand did not get the same type of response.   I was provided with virtually the same code that I had found doing Google searches and when it came to customizing that code my post sat unanswered.

A few weeks later I decided that I would try to reinvigorate the project and again get on my trek to higher productivity.  I Googled again and this time I found a post at http://www.ozgrid.com/forums-  It actually had a few Google hits that led me to believe there were people there that knew exactly what I was wanting to do.  I can tell you that on this site you need to heed the warnings of reading the RULES. And that the rules are Strictly enforced.  You have plenty of opportunity because they are part of the main page, you hear about it in the registration, and even when you are ready to post.

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