Here’s a little video detailing my methodology, which includes, Evernote, and Preview with annotations to get the job done. Would love some feedback on my approach, and to hear about what works for you.

What’s in a name?

For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.

Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:

1. More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
2. More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
3. Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.

So, with these objectives in mind, I started looking for words, which related to projects, planning, and organization. In the English language, there are few (ok, none), which are short, memorable and fun. So, I started looking at other languages—all of them.

Kito (key-toe) • is a Japanese word, which means “project” or “plan”. I thought, how ideal is it to use a word, which comes from a culture of organization, simplicity, and structure to represent a project management application?

Lab • alludes to the fact that this is a place, not only where work is done, but where it is done in a consistent, measured manner. It’s a place where there’s method to the madness that is project management.

Now that I have the name chosen, I will be writing much more about the development of this app. Please feel free to follow www.twitter.com/kitolab for updates.

Also, I’d love your feedback on the name/logo!

Consequently, the more I’ve thought about this question, the more keep coming back to another question: How long? This seems to be the most prevalent question in project management, and is the basis for nearly every project management decision we make. How long ago did they ask for this? How long will it take to do? How long have you been working on it? How much longer until we’re done? Then, when we’re done, we ask: How long did that take? How much longer is that than we thought it would take?

There are dozens of “how long” questions in project management, and this is simply because managing a project, is managing time. People, budget, service these are all just tangible realizations of time. The distillation of nearly every facet of a project, to its most basic unit, leaves time.

So, it seems clear to me that a tool designed to make project management easier, should place great emphasis on reducing the effort required to answer these “how long” questions. Odd that I’ve yet to see one that does.

What does good project management mean to you?

Unfortunately, many organizations, if they analyze their projects at all, do so in the form of post-project performance reviews. Reviews are fine, but they have some inherent flaws. The most obvious being that as a review, you’re looking at something after it’s happened—it’s a lagging metric.

Reviews are also problematic in that they are almost entirely subjective. We all bring lots of baggage to project reviews. Past experience, our field of expertise and preference for specific tasks all affect reviews. Perhaps the most simple illustration, can be seen in our assessment of time spent on tasks we enjoy versus tasks we dislike. As the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun, which affects our perception of performance. How we feel about performance is generally skewed by a number of external factors, which conspire to make us poor reviewers of our own work.

When it comes time to review we know if the project landed on time and on budget, but other than that, a review is largely a discussion around what we feel went well, or didn’t go well; where we feel we spent too much time and where we feel we could have spent more time; what we feel were the obstacles and what we feel went smoothly. This is important information, but only when coupled with some hard, objective evidence.

Since reviews really only help us gauge project performance once the project is complete, we also need metrics, which provide us with relevant data mid-project. These real-time metrics enable us to alter course before we encounter problems, rather than reacting when we’ve already hit the iceberg.

One of the main issues with getting timely, relevant information as you’re working on something is the shear administrative effort required to generate and process it. Primitive checklist-style project management tools would require too much effort to capture the data needed and when using tools at the other end of the spectrum, reporting can be so complex only project managers with extensive experience with the tool can use it effectively. What seems to be missing is a tool that generates simple, easy to understand, real-time points of reference—where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going.

To do this, the tool would need substantial inputs. It needs to weigh expectations against actual performance and provide analysis. I strongly believe that any tool, which creates more work for workers, is destined to fail, and since processes/tools can not be forced upon workers, they have to make their lives easier, or they simply won’t gain traction (no matter what threats you come up with, or how many signs you put up on the wall). However, a tool, which captures working data autonomously would have the capability observe input, without adding workflow overhead.

Admittedly, that sounds a little science fiction, but in reality it’s fairly straightforward. The same basic actions that we perform during the course of any project management process could provide mountains of data, if it were captured. Adding and checking off tasks, posting comments, resolving bugs, uploading attachments, these are all examples of things we do every day, which could be monitored to generate real-time performance data, all without adding overhead to our process.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be experimenting with collecting this kind data, and using it to generate useful, real-time reporting within my project management tool. Of course, I’ll be keeping you up-to-date by posting more on the subject here.