I was thinking about a project management system for about 2 years before I was able to actually start working on it. Initially my main goal was to create a system (both a software product and a set of rules) that will allow me to manage contractors effectively. At that time I’ve had big plans of using contractors in the projects of my clients and the issue of proper management was my main concern.
I’ve actually thought about this a lot and even tried to factor in bizarre situations when a contractor, a project manager and a client all speak different languages. Well, not really all. In my scheme, a project manager could communicate both in the contractor’s language and in the client’s language, thus serviing not only as a manager in the project, but also as a translator. I thought that if a project management system will support such scenarios it will make it possible to have truly international teams: a client speaking only Spanish (from Spain), a manager speaking Spanish and English (from the UK) and a contractor speaking English and Russian (from Russia). I thought that a task could have a description in all languages that are requried in the project, a customer writes it initially in Spanish, a manager translates it (the translation is saved in a separate task field) into English and only after it is translated a contractor can work with it.
This all was of course very theoretic. When I’ve got involved in a really complex project (online hotels reservations system) that needed a project management system badly I’ve started the design of the product from scratch. This time I had real experience to base my design on.
Quite soon I’ve identified the main problem with our existing communications — information about projects was scattered around different applications and mediums. With my client we’ve used:
- Good, old email for tasks, files, normal communications.
- Forums, for discussing things related to the project.
- A simple project management system that couldn’t do a lot but was good for some basic operations.
- Bug tracker for bugs and for some tasks too.
- MSN messenger for real time conversations.
It was quite clear that the main thing that we need from a project management system is an ability to post and retrieve information about the project always in the context of this project. We needed tasks, discussions, emails, bugs, knowledge base functionality, but we wanted to work with this functionality inside the project. Basically, we wanted to select a project from a list and be able to see everything that relates to this project.
So this is how Factory Nova’s main concept appeared — Project is the King!
A lot of other PM systems and collaborative environments treat projects as just another module in the system. A link to the projects could be listed along with everything else in the system’s menu: calendar, discussions, wiki, polls. etc. We wanted to change this. In Factory Nova a project is the top functionality, other modules could only be added to the project, they can’t exist separately. This very much sounds like Groove’s concept, but only web based. We’ve tried to use Groove, but thought that it’s tools are too simple for our needs. And of course Groove doesn’t integrate with an email and requires a client to be installed before a person could join a project. Also I believe that there is no such thing as a free Groove client and this is a deal-breaker for us, because no way we could force our clients to pay for something just to be able to communicate with us.
