One of the problems Milestone Planner sets out to address is the traditional bottleneck that happens in project management: Someone ‘owns’ the plan, and every-time there is an update, that person has to be contacted, update the plan and push a new version out. Or, as is more often the case, the owner of the plan is left chasing people for updates. The result is people living with a permanently out of date plan, and chasing each over via phone and email. That’s no way to run a business. Time for one of Jim’s cartoons…

hub

The hub model has the appearance of a safe, controlled, well-managed process. The reality is that it leads to people making decisions on in-accurate information, and at the speed of one bottle neck. Of course, there is a different way to do things.

mesh

The mesh model is peer-to-peer. Anyone can interact directly with anyone else. In the case of Milestone Planner, this means that anyone in the project team can go and update their milestone directly, and see the most up to date version of the plan. No trawling through emails or folders trying to find the latest-latest version.

It is a person-to-person form of management and communication (something that Scott Gould of Likeminds is blogging a fair bit about – Becoming P2P), and based on an “adult-adult” communication model, rather than the less productive “adult-child” one that so often accompanies the hub/star model. We’re aiming to make Milestone planner a grown up tool, for grown up people.

Let us know what you think.