Online Project Managers: A Great Idea (If We Could Only Remember)

I love the idea of an online project manager… More than that, I love the idea of successfully using them. Unfortunately, I have been thwarted time and time again from a successful run with one. And, due to the fact that I’ve used OPM’s in a group setting, and those people in my group settings stopped using the project manager too, I know that this must be a common problem.

Before the explosion of web 2.0, people kept track of projects in the (relatively) old fashioned way: email, phone calls and office meetings. Then, when the internet became an environment of sharing, distributed content and collaboration, the online project manager found mainstream success. Obviously, because there are thousands of them. But if they’re so useful, how come they’re so hard to stick with?

I ran into a similar problem with digital calenders: I can’t use them. At first, I tried keeping a calender and schedule on my PDA cell phone, but slowly stopped checking it. Then, I figured I could just do it on my Outlook program at work, but again, I stopped checking it. I finally settled on two large pieces of paper taped to my wall. A single row of post-it notes across the top lists each active client’s name, and then I stick a new post-it under each one when a new task comes in. The great thing about a post-it wall: it is absolutely impossible to forget to login. You see it every time you walk in the room.

How can we make online project managers useful? Well, obviously most of them have some amazing and useful bells and whistles.. so the better question is, how can we get people to remember to login? The only solution that can work is to attach the OPM to something that the user already uses daily (and never forgets). The best candidate for this is probably email, however, it can’t be as simple as emailing each person in the project when an update is created. That will only annoy. There would have to be some form of true integration with email (maybe the next Google Labs project?). In other words, you would have a project manager widget in your webware email app. However, even that sounds forgetable. One day, OPMs, one day you will be remembered!