Business | Joshua Jacobs

SugarCrm Community vs SugarCrm Commercial

By Josh On August 7, 2009 · 2 Comments

SugarCrm is one of the most recent software apps to catch my attention. I’ve heard a lot about it in the past, but until recently have not played with it. Recently, we installed on our server garden and I’ve been very impressed. While it starts as a contact management system, it has some design features that allow you to extend the data model, creating modules that include full CRUD capabilities (from what I’ve seen so far at least). I’ll write more on that later. Right now I want to focus on what I found about the different features.

Evaluating commercial open source software lately has been a bit disappointing because at least in one case, Alfresco, the sales team explicitly state that they would never consider a production installation of the OS version. That shocked me. What was equally shocking was the number of end-user bugs we discovered in the OS GA release. To add insult, the community was essentially non-responsive to wiki posts. Evaluating SugarCrm, I wanted to make sure that I know what I’m getting into.

After listening to this podcast from SugarCrm, I’m encouraged by what I heard. Commercial adds the following value to the community edition:

Commercial Only Support
Standard: E-mail, portal, forums; extended, or premium support includes phone support.

Commercial Only Functions
Quotes, contacts, sales forecasting, contracts, partition data among teams, sales reporting, workflow development for processes, word and wireless updating

Professional Services
SugarCrm professional services only work with commercial customers.

I think the core of SugarCrm should be enough for 110% of what I’m looking for, which makes me happy because the commercial version is not cheap. Perhaps that’s the way to do it: make the community version very high quality, but limited in certain ways; make the commercial version expensive enough to support the entire project and make a profit. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Do you use SugarCrm? What do you like about it? Dislike? What version did you chose and why?

Getting a Status Report / aka The Project Plan, a Template

By Josh On May 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In my quest for increased sanity and simplicity, I’m always thinking about how to be a better project manager. My latest innovation was inspired by Sione Aeschliman of Marylhurst University. Each week she sends email to the stakeholders of a project for which I am the developer. The email is a succinct summary of the [...]

Inspired by the immediate value of having insight into these key issues I’ve been reorganizing my processes to be able to do that same thing for my projects. (As an aside, I have a hunch that success in business, and possibly happiness in life, is more a function of organizational effectiveness that of intellect. More on that another time.)

Over the years I’ve used a variety of software applications in order to meet this goal. Each seemed great at first, only to spiral down into a roiling sea of confusion and failed expectations. I now believe that project management has very little to do with the tools, and much more to do with paying attention to the right things. Right now, I understand those key factors to be the ability to answer the following questions:

When is the project scheduled for completion (how this date was derived is a topic for another time)?
What am I currently waiting for from the client?
What is the client waiting for from me?
What are the open issues? In other words, why is the project not down now? Open issues are all the issues that need to be addressed in order for the project to be considered “done.”
What is the schedule for completing major milestones?
What other notes are essential for keeping track of this project?

I’m sure that are other key factors to track, but this is what I’ve got so far.

To my mind, any tool that allows me to answer the above questions on a moments notice should work fine. Since I’m tired of paying for web-based systems that claim to manage this, I’ve decided to use a bare-bones document-based approach. Essentially, I have one google doc that lists all my open projects, with links to each project’s project plan. The project plan is a simple document with placeholders for the above information. If you are interested in seeing and even using my template, just follow the link below.

I’m really a frustrated project manager. None of this comes naturally to me, so if you see something I’m doing that’s inappropriate, or if I’m missing some essential steps, I would love to hear about it. But remember, right now I’m not trying to explain the full scope of my project management philosophy, rather just the steps required to provide meaningful status reports.

Project Plan Google Doc.

Project Management Thoughts, Part I

By Josh On April 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Project management is hard. But it’s also so common. It reminds me of how having kids is so amazing, the most amazing experience I’ve ever had; and at the same time having kids and being born is the most common experience anyone can have. We all have gone through it one way or another, and yet it’s also magical, mystical, challenging, important and awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word. We also all have tasks, and most of us have projects too. And to complicate matters we usually are working on projects in teams, so collaboration is important. Given the germane nature of projects why is project management so hard?

I’m going to go out on a limb and make a guess that at least part of the problem lies in the fact that we often try to cram too many needs into any chosen project management system. As a case example, I read David Allen’s wonderful book, Getting Things Done, and thought I had it all figured out. Turn everything into next actions and voi-la! Problem solved.

To be fair, this is not what Allen recommends, and for good reason. It doesn’t work. Allen doesn’t provide much of a solution though stating, more or less, that if you have more complex projects you already have a system for managing them.

Because I have real work to do, I’m going to jump right into my current working solution. Please add comments, and perhaps one day I will be able to return here and augment and revise it.

I’ve determined that my projects have four distinct aspects. Any solution needs to deal with all four or it will be incomplete:

The Vision: What you are trying to achieve? Why? By When? For Whom? How?
Open Issues : What questions need answering? What is obstacles prevent the project from being done now?
Tasks: Who is doing what to complete the project?
Documentation: What text will be necessary to explain the results of the project, what it does, how to run it, how to maintain it, and how to get support when it doesn’t work?

I propose that if I address these issues, I will go far towards getting a better handle on my projects. I also think a lot of my past frustration was from expecting traditional task and project management tools to answer these questions for me. I don’t know that it matters so much how they are answered, but they must be addressed.