Projects: Cultivate Successful Projects

Does Project Management really need to be Gantt Charts, earned value analysis, PERT, and resource allocation? Do I have to use enterprise project management software? If you feel comfortable with all of those things and if they help you get your projects done on time and under budget why not...but you don't have to do that.

The PMI, PMBOK track makes a lot of sense for a lot of Project Managers. We started here too, but quickly leanred that for most small companies it's all too overwhelming and makes it harder to get stuff done. You spend more time trying to manage your projects than actually getting tasks done.

For the small company it often comes down to the standard project management cycle:

Predict >> Track >> Learn

Translated into the day-to-day:

Create a contract based on some sort of specification >> Track the actual tasks and effort >> Take what you learned into the next contract/project.

The tools needed for that cycle can be a lot less cumbersome.

Intervals is about getting work down, empowering your workers to have every piece of information they need to work efficiently, tracking that work, communicating openly with clients, having real-time status of what's going on, and get meaningful reporting from the whole cycle.

Intervals hits the sweet spot between so simple it doesn't do enough and so complicated no one will use it.