Christian Simms’s Weblog

One niche that we’re targetting for our ProjectPipe product is
geographically distributed software development teams. Before the rise of the Internet (in the 1980’s and early 1990’s),
only the largest companies (i.e., Fortune 100) could afford to setup development in multiple geographic locations.
I think the original purpose was to have multiple teams working around the clock in different timezones
to increase the speed of development on projects. Products like
Rational’s ClearCase MultiSite
were used which supports multi-master replication — really cool technology, but you need a six figure budget
just for the initial setup, and at least one full-time admin for support and maintenance.

Nowadays, things have changed with the worldwide Internet leveling the cost of global communications.
Many products have been designed to work over the Internet, and they don’t crap out if your connection is slow.
For instance, you can use CVS and its descendant Subversion over a fast LAN or slow Internet connection.
As a counterpoint, ClearCase was designed to work
over LANs, and if you try to have its standard client talk to a server over the Internet on a VPN, you’ll see terrible performance and frequent
failures because ClearCase has very chatty client-server communcation — to be fair, they have a more recently introduced web-based client
which is missing some features but at least works over the Internet.

I could analyze all the tools you need to run geographically distributed development (GDD), but they all have the same need:
to be available anytime from anywhere in the world. Most client-server and even some web apps don’t fit this criteria.
IBM has a nice article about using IBM’s products
to do GDD. But I’m not worried about IBM as a competitor. It’s true, they have googol (not google
more software than we do, but their products are consultingware
– where it looks like shrink-wrap software, but really you need to hire experienced consultants to install and customize
it to do anything, let alone what you want.

While writing marketing literature, I was trying to figure out what ProjectPipe’s product category is. So far I’ve been
saying that we do “project management thru-the-web”. But it’s a little confusing to me because we integrate with
MS Project, which claims to be a “project management program”. If you have MS Project, why would you need us?
Both do project management. Is ProjectPipe just MS Project on the web?

The simple answer is no, we are not MS Project on the web. We are not interested in rendering
Gantt charts on the web. Some companies are doing that
– good luck to ‘em! (Though if SVG ever takes off then maybe I’d do it.
ProjectPipe has a very different focus than MS Project — both products have mutually exclusive and complementary
features. ProjectPipe tries to cover all the major areas of project management defined
in PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge).
However, MS Project just covers task and resource scheduling. Admittedly, that covers a lot of ground — budget
over time, resource levelling, etc. But it doesn’t cover: issue tracking, source control/asset management,
risk management, requirement tracking, etc.

It would be nice if there was another phrase besides “project management”, something like “project lifecycle management”
but I think we’re stuck with this ambiguous phrase.