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.

So if project management is so core to our professional lives, why is it so difficult to find great project management tools?

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.  I’m sure most of you have used or seen Microsoft Project at some point, and I’m just as sure that 99.9% of you haven’t used Microsoft Project anytime in the past year.

For more, contine reading here on CloudAve.

Admit it, you thought Twitter was nothing but mindless drivel the first time you heard about it. Like me, you reluctantly signed up for an account, searched for your friends, followed them, and Tweeted about your weekend escapades, your deadly hangover, the killer PB&J you just ate…blah, blah, blah.

Then you heard about JetBlue, Zappos, and Woot! using it for business purposes, successfully. Define successfully, you thought to yourself. Well, if you exposed your brand to a new user, saved an upset customer from canceling, made a deal, sold a product, or simply sent someone from Twitter to your site then, you’ve succeeded at something. And you did it with little to no overhead and insane margins. Nice job.

Read more of Kris’ post here.

The conversation prompted many questions, which Geoffrey went on to answer, such as:

Q. If you sell to multiple verticals, should you toggle between solution and provocation?

A. Think of provocation based selling as a pick and solution selling as a shovel. The former is for creating budget, the latter for consuming it. As long as there is budget in play, you do not need to provoke. But wherever the answer is, we don’t have budget for that, then provoking is warranted.

The higher order question may be, how much resource can we devote to provocation-based selling, given that it does not scale the way solution selling does. This is a very real issue, and it could lead you to restrict your focus to a single vertical. In that case, make sure you pick the one that has the biggest upside for your company.

For more on the questions raised and answers shared, continue reading the full Q&A here.

In a 4 minute video, Jean talks about how successful organizations embrace a notion of the ‘knowledge-creating company.’ In Agile, knowledge-creation can use “5 Levels of Planning” to ensure they are engaging in this whole organization practice. In sum, the highest level of planning, the vision, feeds and is fed by all subsequent levels, down to the lowest level of planning, the detailed daily work.

For more on Bottom-Up and Top-Down Decision Making and other management tips, check out this link.

Paul has also held the CFO position at VMWare and Vitria, but he’s not just a finance type… trained as an engineer at Dartmouth, Paul also holds several patents on digital video compression. So, he’s always got a lot of interesting thoughts to share. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Paul Fisher: Gary Steele, Proofpoint CEO, said that one of the reasons why he’s fairly confident is that you’ve got a strong cash position. Would you want to start an information security company right now though?

Paul Auvil: No. I wouldn’t want to be in a small start-up right now. There are some companies that are series A, series B companies with some very good technology, but it is hopeless to try to get anyone to buy your products right now if you don’t have strong reference accounts for prospective customers, if you don’t have someone that they can call and can confirm and corroborate that the technology is good. Combine this with the fact that people are increasingly concerned that these small companies aren’t going to make it and it’s not a good outlook.

It’s tough going but it’s proving to be an opportunity for us, in that there’s a large list of very interesting series A companies with very good technology who are essentially trying to find an outlet, a buyer. So we’re pondering that list at this point and trying to decide which of those really have great technology that would be a good addition to our product portfolio.

Read more on Proofpoint’s progress here:

There is a lot of news all over the web about the Customer Service world and its connection to Twitter. Companies are being exhorted to search Twitter to understand what the “real time web” is saying about their brand. Salesforce has their Service Cloud product, which draws Tweets about a brand into their Customer Service app where Reps can then respond back to Twitter. Of course, there will be the cynical view that it’s because companies are trying to ride the wave of Twitter’s “cool” factor, but let’s put that aside for the moment because, the bigger question is “Why Twitter?”

Let’s put ourselves in our Customer’s shoes and once there, ask what might motivate Customers to  talk about you elsewhere. I have four reasons why your Customers might choose to go to Twitter (or some other third party web property) for Customer Service. If your organization cares about Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction, I would think this list has your full attention.  Read more here.

Consuming internet video is a full-contact sport — the initial viewing experience is just a gateway to the commenting, rating, sharing and even remixing or mashing up the original video content. And what brand doesn’t want to tap into this new class of consumer behavior, making their ads “go viral” (cough) and picking up millions of “free” (cough, cough) impressions?

But our experience shows there’s a world of difference between building a video campaign intended to go viral and actually having the target consumer embrace and extend it. The interest gap between embraced and stalled viral video ad campaigns is massive: as much as 20 times in terms of total campaign reach.

Read more here:

“Not all failures are equal, explains William H. Davidow, a founding partner in the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures. A company might fail because its timing was bad or because the entrepreneur was a poor manager. Mr. Davidow, who says he would have expected ‘a higher follow-on success rate for the failed entrepreneurs,’ says that an entrepreneur who has failed in a previous venture ‘would get in the door to talk to me’ about a new idea. But, he adds, ‘I would want to know why that last deal failed, and what the person learned from it.”

Among others who voiced opinions in the story was  Gordon Moore.

“No less an authority than Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, says that in the Valley, ‘You’re more valuable because of the experiences you’ve been through under failures.’

The basic idea behind the embrace of failure is this:  Entrepreneurs who have built and then tried to save a company have seen what does and doesn’t work. This experience is viewed as excellent preparation for tough situations that might arise in a new venture.”

Read more on the Infusionsoft blog.

What you are likely to find in a downturn is that niche markets will take precedence over mass markets. That is because the most compelling value propositions—the ones that move even a tight-fisted customer to spend in tough times—tend to be local rather than global. Thus the financial services industry will be under enormous pressure to spend on compliance solutions, the health care industry on productivity solutions, and the media and advertising communities on better targeted marketing solutions. General purpose productivity investments, by contrast, are more likely to be put on hold.

The result of these circumstances is that mass markets in a recession become severely commoditized, rewarding only the lowest cost producers. Companies who chase them anyway become unsustainably unprofitable and end up being consolidated. Companies who focus on niche markets, by contrast, find their customers are more loyal and their offers more valuable. As a result they can charge higher margins over what is admittedly a smaller landscape, finding profitability in a downsized form. Niche market winners, in other words, live to fight another day.

For companies under $500 M, a single niche market can offer immediate returns at a sufficient scale to warrant a major strategic bet. For large established corporations, on the other hand, no single niche market moves the needle sufficiently by itself. These companies must instead attack large numbers of niche markets simultaneously in order to create meaningful total returns. How is this possible?

The answer is to focus individual business units (or their moral equivalents in your form of organization) on finding the growth niches within their existing installed bases. Merhdad Baghai and his colleagues outline this idea effectively in their book The Granularity of Growth (see also an article of the same title in the May, 2007, McKinsey Quarterly). Their research shows that even in the lowest growth markets there are pockets of high growth, either in terms of geographical regions or specialized populations. To capitalize on these opportunities corporations need to modify their offerings and their go-to-market programs, but not radically. More than anything else, they simply need to focus, to overspend within the niches, and under-spend elsewhere. This is not radical, but it is disruptive and does require a change in management methods, key metrics, compensation incentives, and reporting systems.

Big or small, niche market strategy is the order of the day for all companies except the lowest cost consolidator. For that company alone commoditization is an ally, and its goal is to drive prices so low as to clear the field. Such scorching the earth will not penetrate deeply into niche markets, however, for the value gained from customized offerings exceeds the cost saved from a commodity purchase.