Transcendental Generalization

I’ve been looking for project management software to help run my consulting business. I have a small number of customers and a larger number of prospects. Some of the work is paid and some is unpaid (like moving prospects through the pipeline and developing prototypes and proposals) but in either case, I needed to prevent work from slipping into the cracks. Functionally, I needed, at minimum, the following capabilities:

• Create a list of tasks
• Establish durations for tasks
• Create dependencies between tasks so that when one task is delayed (and they often are), dependents are automatically shifted. I had used Basecamp before, but it does not allow creation of such dependencies between tasks.
• Group tasks into projects
• Display a Gantt chart of  projects

This seemed like a reasonable set of requirements, considering Microsoft Project had these functions in its first version.

I also wanted it to be

• web-based, so that other employees could use it when I eventually hire them.
• free or cheap because the business is relatively poor in cash

There were a couple of good reasons why it could or should be open source.

• The business is relatively wealthy in technical expertise (mine).
• I envisioned customizing it and linking it into other systems.

My network query (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter) yielded almost nothing. Google searches yielded a wiki page with a long list but a dearth of reviews or recommendations. Which to choose?

Since so many open source projects use SourceForge, I hit on the idea of looking for the top downloads in the project management category. OpenBravo seemed most promising because it has been downloaded a million times, over five times more than the second-place software. It claims to be a full-blown ERP system with accounting as well as project management. It runs on Tomcat. Unfortunately, my hosting relationships do not make running Tomcat software easy, so I decided to look further down the list. (In a weak moment, the engineer in me succumbed to not-invented-here angst, and briefly considered the benefits of converting the code to Ruby on Rails.)

OpenGoo was fairly easy to install, but lacks the task-dependency feature. GroupOffice seemed slightly harder to install, but also lacks this feature. I tried eGroupWare, which has an even more complex install, but I couldn’t get the project management function to work as required. The documentation wasn’t very helpful, having apparently been translated from German.

Finally, I settled on OpenProj, from Serena Software.  It is desktop-based, but at least it has the familiar interface and functions of Microsoft Project.

A friend recently asked me what books I had found useful in learning about product management.

I mentioned this article by Regis McKenna, which first appeared in Harvard Business Review in 1991. It opened my eyes to the idea that  “marketing” is more than just lead generation, advertising, PR, or trade shows. As McKenna says,

Marketing is not a new ad campaign or this month’s promotion…It’s job is neither to fool the customer nor to falsify the company’s image. It is to integrate the customer into the design of the product and to design a systematic process for interaction that will create substance in the relationship.