About ProjectPipe

By Mike Coyle, Co-Founder Botonomy LLC

Note: The following is a candid explanation of why we created ProjectPipe, and why we think you'll like using it.

We created ProjectPipe because there were not any great project management tools for the middle-of-the-road projects that most people spend most of their time managing. To us, "middle-of-the-road" means:

• 3-12 people, most working remotely
• 2-6 month duration
• Under 500 tasks in the "project plan"
• A dozen or so supporting documents

Of course, we engineered ProjectPipe to easily handle over 100X those volumes per project, but that's the type of project and team that we had in mind. We aim to serve the teams whose projects cannot justify the learning curve and financial investment of the complicated high-end solutions, but need more than just basic task management.

There are a number of inexpensive project management tools that provide basic task management and issue tracking. These can be a great way to organize simple, straightforward projects. Unfortunately, when complications arise, you can easily hit the ceiling of what assistance the tool can offer.

At the other end of the spectrum, the "Enterprisey" tools painfully capture tons of low-level resource management details, and then try to give executive sponsors a Red Light / Green Light view of your project health. As a result, they provide metrics that are "inspired by the true story" of your project's real-life details, but aren't necessarily either up-to-date or particularly useful.

ProjectPipe helps you manage delivery risk by showing how the real details of your project fit together. We sidestep the intellectual quicksand of detailed baselining and fine-grained resource allocation. Instead, ProjectPipe enables you to deliver projects on-time and on-budget by helping your team:

• Understand the Context of any item by arranging your data in an outline-based hierarchy. The world isn't flat, and neither is your data.
• Understand the Dependencies among items by graphically illustrating their relationships. Because a picture's worth a thousand words, and if you discover those dependencies after it's too late those thousand words can be quite colorful.
• Understand the Opinions of your team members, by allowing them to annotate and self-organize project data as they see fit. Tagging lets your team create ad-hoc classifications that crosscut the various types of data that ProjectPipe manages.
• Understand the Change that occurs across your project through a variety of RSS feeds. Find out what issues have been fixed by looking at your Blackberry, not by interrupting Bob and bugging him for an update.

I'm pretty sure that if you really understand the Context, Dependencies, Opinions, and Change related to your project, you'll probably do OK building out a Gantt chart.

When you understand the Risks faced by your project, the right Tasks become obvious. But when you don't understand the Risks, you may find yourself Tasked with a rough couple of months.