For most of us, work is a series of projects.
We’re always drawing up plans (some more formal than others) and trying to carry them out, usually as part of a team.
That’s why it’s not surprising that so many people use PBworks for project management. After all, if PBworks is a great solution for improving team productivity and work performance, shouldn’t it be great for project management? And when we asked you what you were using PBworks for, “managing projects” was the #1 answer.
But in reality, while PBworks was helping a lot of people manage their projects, it was far from ideal.
Even within the company, where we use PBworks for pretty much everything (including project management), we felt the limitations of the product. When I create a task, I want to be able to assign it to someone with a due date. I don’t want to be forced to try to remember where I wrote down the task. I want notifications to go out when the status of the task changes. I don’t want to forget when things are due. Yet manually managing projects with the old PBworks product had all of these drawbacks.
It’s a testament to the power of the product that despite these issues, so many were getting so much productivity out of it!
So over the past few months, we went back to the drawing board and started talking to our users. We conducted dozens of interviews with consultants, PR firms, designers, marketers, and other project leads, including in-depth follow-ups.
As a result, we were able to design PBworks Project Edition, which represents a major leap in project functionality. In our opinion, it’s the best tool anywhere for managing the vast majority of projects.
What makes Project Edition special? Certainly we’re very proud of how we’ve created task and milestone functionality that is simple, elegant, and flexible. But the real key is in combining project management with collaboration in a neatly integrated package.
Historically, project management separated the “management” from the real work. Picture a Project Manager walking around with a clipboard, collecting status reports, and fiddling with Ganntt charts. Great for putting a man on the moon, but not appropriate for all the informal, fast-moving projects that make up the bulk of our working days.
The first Web 2.0 project management tools broke the monopoly of the project manager, and put the ability to view and manage the project in the hands of the entire team, but they still didn’t help you do the real work. You would log in, pick up your next task, then switch to another application or window to do the actual work.
Project Edition combines “management” with a collaborative platform that lets your team do their work faster and better. Sometimes as much as 10 times better.
That’s the breakthrough we’re calling “organic project management,” since the management is a natural and organic result of doing the real work.
Our goal isn’t to displace the project management tools that people use for the 0.1% of projects that are formally managed (though you can certainly do that with Project Edition). It’s to radically improve performance for the 99.9% of projects where the most sophisticated management tool is the Post-It pad.
You can try out Project Edition for free for 30 days and see what consulting firms and agencies like Deloitte and Ogilvy are raving about. We’re confident that you’ll like it, even if you’ve never used any other project management tools in your work. And if you have used other tools, we’re even more confident that you’ll find our product easier, faster, more flexible, and most importantly, more productive than anything you’ve used before.
Don’t just believe us…here’s what other folks are saying:
“Simple project management functionality, like workflow management, task assignment and milestones, is built right into the tool, so there’s no need to use a separate app like Basecamp to handle simple project management. This makes PBworks an attractive option for teams looking for a tool for collaborative project tasks, like document authoring, requirements gathering or design review. Task management is kept together with the actual task itself, which makes a lot of sense.”
—WebWorkerDaily
“A busy manager could check the new project coordination workspace to get a quick status update, use the discussion feature associated with each task to communicate with a team member, or add a new task and assign it to someone – all without ever sending an email. This feature alone makes the new PBworks Project Edition very attractive.”
—Future Changes
Get the scoop on Project Edition by visiting our Project Edition minisite.
PBworks Official Blog 