Projects Possible

Projects Possible has decided to host a Blog Carnival on Email Productivity. 

To set the stage I think it is important to understand what a “blog carnival” is.    If you look at the Wikipedia link you will see that a “blog carnival” is a blog event.  It is described a really nothing more than a collection of permalinks on a particular topic.  It is likened to a “magazine” in that the host, acting as the editor, compiles the stories into a post and lists all of the links to the blog articles that were submitted.  The readers of the post have a plethora of information at their fingertips on a specific topic, and the blog authors have a link back to their blog.

The Email Productivity Carnival is anticipated to be a monthly compilation of blog posts related to email productivity and email tools that increase productivity.  Submissions will be accepted through the last day of the month and then I will edit them and create a posting in the “Carnival” category on the Projects Possible blog approximately 1 week later.

Article or Post Suggestions:

• Reviews of software applications
• Tips and Tricks
• Email Etiquette
• Feature and Functionality of Mail Clients

The Email Productivity Blog Carnival is posted on Blog Carnival if you would like to submit links.   You can also submit links by clicking on the Contact link at the top of all of the blog pages.   Comments on this post might also work but there is no guarantee that I will get them included in every posting…

Check back around March 8th for our first posting…

Do you remember the baseball movie with Kevin Kostner called “Field of Dreams”?  The phrase - “If you build it they will come”  - may work for baseball fields in the middle of nowhere but it does NOT work for a blog.  You have to do some level of marketing. 

Buzzfuse offers a unique marketing opportunity for blog owners as well as those that would like to share pictures, audio and video, or flash content.  The process is relatively simple and involves signing up for an account (which requires email validation), placing some code into the content that you would like to share, and then activating that code by clicking on it.   It is at this point that Buzzfuse becomes a bit unique in that it would then like to send your content to a group of individuals that you designate as your reviewers.   It gives them an opportunity to create a “buzz” about your new content and to share it with others that they indicate as well. 

As a nice added bonus there is a bit of a revenue stream for the top “buzzing” items for the month.   I’ve added a buzz to my Geek Speak post… check it out and click on it… letting me know what you think… share it with your friends.

For those that have been tracking my progress with Xobni I have to say that today is a sad day.  After multiple attempts at trying to figure out if there was a way around my problem - nothing could be found - I really didn’t have much choice but to perform the uninstall. 

In a nutshell, my environment - Outlook 2003 connecting to an Exchange server over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) periodically runs into a situation where when I close Outlook it would technically NOT close.   It disappears from my screen but if I look in the Task Manager the processes are still running.  To make matters worse when I would terminate Outlook (End Task) or do a shutdown, I would end up with a mailstore error that Outlook would want to rebuild the next time I started the program.   Have you ever had to rebuild a mailstore that has about 80,000 messages in it?  Let me just say that it is NOT a quick process.

Xobni tech support (Tyler) was quite helpful and indicated that they were aware of this error and were working to get it resolved.  He suggested that I uninstall until the mid-February time-frame when they expected they may have a fix, and apologized for Xobni’s bad behavior.

It’s a “Sad Day” because I had grown so accustom to the application being available to find people and conversations that I needed.  As I’ve said in previous posts Xobni has become part of my work-a-day world and not having it means that I will need to resurrect my prior searching and contact solution NEO (Nelson Email Organizer).  Neo is a great program in it’s own right, and one that I paid for years ago, it just isn’t integrated into Outlook like Xobni is and is missing some of the functionality that I’ve gotten used to. 

I’ve set an Outlook task for mid February, when I will once again go and download my newest web favorite, productivity enhancing application and hope that they’ve fixed my Outlook 2003 issues.

(Before you comment about upgrading to 2007 - Let me tell you I work for a corporation that has not certified that application for our use.)

I posted about my initial Xobni impressions a number of weeks ago.  Recall that Xobni (zob-nee), inboX spelled backward, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides you with nearly instantaneous access to “the most important information in your email”. This message is a follow-up to that message and provides more insight on my continued use.

I think it is important as I continue this post that I point out that Xobni is still beta software.  As such a problem or two is to be expected… after all you aren’t a “beta tester” for nothing.  You are helping to identify the “bugs” to make a better product when it is finally released.

Overall, great experience with the tool!  The capability offered in the Search engine is absolutely amazing to me.  I am used to the Outlook 2003 searches where you put something into the search dialog tell it to find it and then come back after lunch and hope that it is finished finding what you are looking for.   With Xobni the second you start typing in the search bar results are being found,  and not just results in email, but results in your contacts and even on the web.  I am amazed at how quickly this search operates and it is every bit as good as the search that I have in NEO and I don’t have to load a new program in order to take advantage of it.  

I have been playing around with multi-level searching and so far my results have not been as promising.   An example of this might be that I know I received a message from John Doe.   I search for John… and then from the contact results I click on John Doe.  Xobni is now showing my all of my email conversations with John Doe and the files we exchanged as well as John Doe’s phone number.   What I would like to do is to then use the search box again but ONLY display results from my John Doe match.   I do not see this as an advertised feature anywhere but the way Xobni builds the windows it is just something I would have expected it to be doing.

Xobni has two features directly below the phone number.   One of them is to Email the person the other is to schedule time with the person.  On my version of Outlook both of these do the same thing.  I get a new email window popping up inside of Outlook and the contact information for the person is displayed.   The only difference between the two is the subject line.  I would think that since we are integrated to Outlook that if you wanted to schedule time with someone that it would open up an Appointment window rather than an email window.  I’ve left support an email related to this behavior.

When I first started using Xobni I kept forgetting about the Organize Tab.  Rather than having to shift over to the Task page in Outlook or the Calendar Page in Outlook you can just click on the Organize tab and on one screen you can see both of those pieces of information.  What I don’t particularly care for on this display is that you see all tasks and they are alphabetically sorted.   Most people I know do not manage tasks alphabetically.  I’m a due date kinda guy.  I haven’t been able to figure out how to get them into due date order and I have a few hundred of them.  Great however if you are looking for tasks for a specific person or customer because searching works here too.

I’ve run across a few other small annoyances but none of them are severe enough to make me want to uninstall the application.  I did that over the weekend and found that I missed the phone number, conversation and searching capability so much I had to re-install it.   I’m thinking they truly have a winner here and will probably have to pry it from my dead fingers now that I have grown accustom to using it.   You can check them out at their website…

As many of you are aware or you can see from my scrolling pictures, my wife an I own lakefront property.  When the property was subdivided by the builder he created a Homeowners Association to manage the common elements of the property including the road, the water system, and the sewer system.  As the secretary on the HOA board I’m always looking around for ways to help our small association of 12 members manage not only the invoices and receipts but also to distribute information like emergency contacts and meeting minutes to a geographically diverse group of owners. 

Today I test drove an online real estate software product called Buildium.  These are my findings.

Buildium on their home page indicate they are #1 in online property management.  With our small association I wasn’t too sure that an online solution could provide what we needed without becoming so overwhelming that it was more trouble to use than it was worth.  Pricing was also a consideration because we really are a very small association.

When you first go to the buildium.com website you will notice that they actually have 2 versions of the software.  One suited for property managers and the other for homeowner’s associations.  Reading through the website information they certainly seemed to be quite feature rich and included features like: financial reporting including budges, the ability to send announcements to homeowners, a homeowner interface where they could create tasks, pay their fees and interact, and the ability to share documents like my meeting minutes.  I decided to create a trial account and see just how much work it was going to be. 

When you setup your trial account you basically fill in a form asking for some pertinent details and an email is sent to you immediately.  Within a matter of minutes I had an online “site” ready to play in.

At first I was a little overwhelmed with the amount of information that was presented on the dashboard but I quickly learned that Buildium was trying to give me the information necessary to setup that particular portion.  I could click on a link and all of the help information including links to tutorials were no longer displayed when I clicked on the individual  tabbed sections. 
Read more »

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.

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?

I have been a seller on eBay for a number of years and have dabbled a little bit with books on Amazon.  What I am looking for now is some GOOD auction management software.    I’ve tried quite a few different things in both the online and local environments including: Merlin, Auctionwatch, Auctionworks, Mr.Lister, and Shooting Star among others.   In all cases they each had features that were great but for this casual eBay seller I was finding they were or became too expensive to run, or they just didn’t have what I needed to do the types of auctions I wanted to perform.

So lets get into that… What kinds of auctions do I run?  I think this is critical question to ask when you are determining the software that you want to run.  For example if you have an item or two and you only sell those items do you need to have the full blown package complete with inventory management?  I’d guess not but then each seller likes to run things differently.

My items include:  flea market and estate sale items, collectibles, home decor (50-60 items that can be stocked, ordered and drop-shipped), overstocks and returns, basically a real eclectic mix of things.

For me the critical things are:

1.  An inventory management system.   I have many items that I have in multiples that can be re-ordered, and others that are of the one time purchase variety.  Because I am a “data hound” and I never know when I might be able to get the items again I want to be able to keep track of all of the inventory and then list to the auction sites from my available inventory to sell.  I also want to be able to run a “storefront” for the item that I currently have in stock.

2.  Seamless integration with the auction site’sg checkout including integration with Paypal.  I don’t want my buyers to wonder what is happening in the checkout process.  I don’t want them to be redirected to some OTHER place and wonder if they are being spoofed.  

3.  At a glance status or dashboard would be nice.   I want to know how all of my auction are doing… Not only the ones that are running, but the ones that are complete.  Am I waiting on payment, do I need to ship, am I waiting for checks to clear, do I need to post feedback, has feedback been posted for me, etc??

4.  Scheduled listing.  I don’t want to have to babysit the process of listing items.   If today I want to list 30 items for sale I’d like to be able to schedule which of those items I would like to list and on which auction venues and just forget about it.  

5.  Financial reporting.   I need to know what the items cost (from my vendor) , the listing fees (auction venue) , the selling fees (Paypal, auction venue), the selling price (buyer), shipping charges charged, shipping charges paid, packaging materials, insurance, etc. etc. etc….  I need to be able to know if after all is said and done with an item whether there was any profit made on the item and if so how much.   An export of this P&L information would be helpful to other accounting software like Quickbooks as well.

6.  Image management.   I don’t necessarily care if there is hosting of images but the ability to upload, delete, and include image links in the auction listings would be important.  For any item there could be any number of pictures and being able to tell the items story with pictures is extremely helpful.

7.  Flexible auction templates.  I would like my auctions to look professional and include a lot of “standard information” like return policy, shipping policy, terms and conditions, etc.. but I would also like the flexible information to be fully integrated so that the auction as a whole looks like one complete “flyer” of information.

8.  Storefront.  I’d like to run my own based on what is in my inventory.   Just because it isn’t on auction doesn’t mean I won’t sell it.  I’d like to make all of my in-stock items be available to buyers.  Preferably as part of my auction management solution, not as part of the auction site.  (ie.  Not a fan of eBay Stores)

So what have you all found that can help me out here?   I’d be interested in links to reviews, your own personal choices and observations, any information you have at all..

As a project manager, I am always looking for great tools and utilities that will help me to become more productive and improve customer (internal and external) experience.

I know about the standard stuff that we use like Microsoft Project, Mindmapper, Excel, Outlook and the like.   What I would be interested in is hearing what you’ve found that you believe to be absolutely indispensable.  For example, I have posted reviews on an Outlook addin that I use called ClearContext IMS.  This tool helps me become a much more effective and productive email manager.    I’ve also posted about Excel and some of the things that I try to do with Excel to make me more productive.

 What do you do?  What little tricks have you found that help you out as you work on projects…  Share them with us!

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.