Usecase of Joining ProjectPipe - Jim Logs In
Jim summizes the lousy in-house tool situation with his boss, and his boss agrees that it’s a shame.
When Jim asks if the company could pay for a hosted provider, his boss just
chuckles. Jim’s boss tells him that the project’s budget has already been set for the next three months, and
the time to get a purchase through accounting takes ages, but
if Jim personally pays for it that he could be reimbursed later from another budget area.
Having been burned in the past at other companies with unreimbursed expesnses, Jim sends a follow-up email to his boss
summarizing their conversation and cc’ing the business sponsor. The business sponsor sends Jim a private follow-up
email thanking him for taking initiative and saying he’s really looking forward to having a shared system so that
he and his direct reports can see how development is going.
Stated that way, it gives Jim the shivers, but he’s happy he got some brownie points.
So Jim ponies up for 1 month with ProjectPipe on his personal credit card.
He likes the fact that his user id is his email address - one less thing he has to remember.
He gets the login email in less than a minute, and immediately logs in.
The first thing he does is go to the team tab and invite his QA and developer guy. All he has to do is enter
their name, email address and role, and they’re automatically sent emails telling them how to login.
As soon as the team receives the invitation emails, they jump to work.
The developer imports the current cut of source code into the project’s Subversion repository, he wants
to play with it for a little while before moving the offshore guys to it.
Meanwhile, the QA guy imports the bugs from the most recent spreadsheet into the web app.
Since there are only a handful of bugs at the moment, he’ll just manually copy + paste them into the app,
but if there were a lot he could have used the small ProjectPipe client program to upload the data from
a spreadsheet (editor’s note: assuming Christian finishes that functionality).
While his team is busy adding data to their project, Jim installs the client program because he wants to upload
his MS Project plan into the web app. He probably would not have shared the project plan with the team
(he gets tired of developers nitpicking task timeline details), but since the business sponsor had talked
about it, he figures it’s better to be open and critized than quiet and fired later. Actually, Jim gets a little
happy (not too happy, he *is* a PM after all) thinking how he can CYA by saying that the entire project
plan and its status was always available to everyone on the team.
Jim reads up on how ProjectPipe integrates with MS Project, and is happy.
He wants to keep his .MPP file safe and local
and doesn’t want any program messing with it. He remembers the time when a BA took his 5,000 task project,
and ran Resource Leveling on it but didn’t tell Jim until he asked why the project had moved out several months
past deadline. Anyway, the ProjectPipe client is totally unobtrusive, after it asks for his email address,
password and project name, it just sits quietly in his taskbar. Its interface is through the web
(Jim wonders how they did that, but doesn’t much care that under the hood it’s using the XMPP/Jabber protocol,
as long as it works), so to import his project all
he does is go to the project tab in the website, click “Upload project to server”, select his file and click Upload.
To be continued…