Last year I talked to Massimo Sgrelli from GotThingsDone about the future of Project management software. His company had just released version 1.0 of their product WhoDoes back then. Almost a year later, they present WhoDoes 2.0.

In the previous conversation Massimo explained that his company strongly feels that project success depends on two factors:

• Every person in your team must know what to do every morning
• Information must be shared in real time

Their project management product, WhoDoes, has been primarily designed to fulfil these needs.
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CSOdessa will release their project management tool ConceptDraw Office in a couple of weeks (latest word is mid June). No, this is not just another piece of PM software. And that is a good thing. If you provide the Project Management world with new tools, you better bring something cool to the table.

ConceptDraw innovates in two areas: 1) supporting the process from idea to schedule and 2) visual representation.

Idea To Schedule

The application lets you draw mindmaps around certain themes. If you need to build some piece of software you can just think of all the steps you need to perform and mindmap it on the screen. This mindmap can be enhanced by entering dates, resources and slowly turned into a Gantt chart, a real genuine schedule. With this approach it truly reflects the real world planning process. We all hate to send a half-baked draft MS Project file. Well, ConceptDraw will have none of that. Just communicate the mindmap and there will be no false expectations.
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A short while ago I got an email that stated "Organizations reinvent the same knowledge over and over again because of poor cataloging, traceability and redundancy in the knowledge that is created." Now that is someone who has been around the block!

Within projects, from requirements to design to code, it is always the same problem… a problem we all know from Kindergarten. As a kid I played this little game at school we called 'telephone line'. Twenty kids were hurdled up into a circle.

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A couple of months ago I got an email from Sean Stewart pitching me Zephyr "a revolutionary test management system with top features". Well, "revolutionary" is always good for getting my attention… So, I had a small email interview with him about testing processes and his companies test suite.

If you could decide, how would you organize the test process within an agile software project (iterative, on site)?
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With large groups and a lot of time pressure you don't always spend enough effort in communicating the overall perspective of the project. Too bad, because emphasizing the "bigger picture" helps stakeholders to keep in line and, if done properly, enhance motivation among the team (they wanna be part of something cool). Here are two tips to save you time and help you out in this department.
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