It’s seldom that we associate Law with technology, you often see these smart suited, slick Lawyers walk in and walk out of courtrooms but we never know what goes on behind the scenes. And though these Law firm guys are quite meticulous in maintaining their file work and client details, they are laggards when it comes to work which is non-billable i.e. not associated to the client directly, reports Erick Mazzone in Here, There and Everywhere: Web-Based Tools for Managing Non-billable Projects”, published in Law Practice

Erik Mazzone is Director of the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association. A member of the ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board, he also runs the blog LawPracticeMatters.com.

He manages to capture the essence of project management software for Law firms through his article and goes about explaining different project management features and how it can be leveraged by the Law firms.

The great thing about the article is, he recommends DeskAway as one of the project management tools. This time it feels good that law has an eye on us.

Read more

The Global Climate Adaptation Partnership is a new company seeking to provide client-oriented solutions on climate change. We celebrated our first year in business, already with $1 million in project contracts, a flagship project with the African Development Bank and our first three-week training course in Cape Town. We have clients, partners and consultants across the world.

Tom Downing President of the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership shared his views about how his team uses DeskAway…

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
All of our projects involve a consortium of one sort or another. So it is essential to have a shared operating space that is flexible, attentive to team building and communications. We began using DeskAway a couple of years ago (when I was director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford) and added a GCAP site to the two other DeskAway sites we licence (one for SEI Oxford and one for a major EC consortium). DeskAway facilitates all members of the team to collaborate, at the right level and on time.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We looked around to see what was available. The SEI Foundation adopted its own intranet, but that was difficult to use for external projects. Internal file sharing is easy but requires off-site access and user restrictions are difficult. We looked at Basecamp, Zoho and others. We still keep our eyes open but haven’t found any solution that is a broad-based as DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
I found that the real learning curve was simply getting people enthusiastic about using a sophisticated project management tool, rather than dumping emails on a group mailing list. We come from mostly academic roots, so this has not been easy! However, once people start using it regularly, they don’t stop!

What features does your team use the most?
I find the task lists help structure a project in the ‘big picture’ sense, and then files can be uploaded accordingly. My role is usually to review someone else’s work, so I look at the file and either comment or upload an edited version, sending an email alert around if it is critical. This is fantastic, so much easier than track-changes emailed versions. I often send an issue out, in the nature of brainstorming something that is coming up that we’ve not yet got organized in the project.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway?
I find people still email! More and more though I rely on the email from within DeskAway.

How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
I’d say it increases quality more than anything. New members of a team (and there always are people coming in late in a project) can get up to speed quickly and not try to reinvent material that has been produced already. For us, quality and reputation precede profitability. Our clients know that we have adopted effective project management tools and this assures them that we will deliver according to the agreed work plans. Because it is easy to use, we don’t need as much in-house clerical staff and can work with project managers who are off-site. This improves the pool of people we can draw upon enormously, as well as enhanced life-work balance (as they say).

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
I endorse DeskAway to everyone who has tried to get to grips with tasks lists. It started a couple of years ago with just about everything we needed. And the team keeps improving the service. I’m impressed by their vision of team-work and the innovations in making this a service that grows with you. We’re still only tapping a fraction of the toolkit!

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

We didn’t plan this revamp. It just happened within the last 2 days and I think we have come up with a pretty cool layout. We noticed that the dashboard page had gotten too heavy (we were ambitiously trying to show too much data) and was loading slowing when there were a lot of data - +100 projects, +10,000 tasks and +200 users. If you don’t have a lot of data you probably never realized this. So, on Tuesday evening we decided to do a quick revamp of this page keeping in mind: Simplicity Faster loading Clutter-free UI Today, we took it live. The new Dashboard shows you recent activity within all your projects (categorized by projects), your overdue projects/ milestones, a large stat summary of your projects/users in the system, your top 5 projects that you often access and ways to contact us if you require any help. Check it out and let us know what you think. If you have any suggestions then do put it up on our GetSatisfaction page for others to see and vote. Enjoy!

That nasty bug on a new integration project refused to be found and we were fried at the end of the day. We felt lost and defeated. Leaving the office seemed hard to do but coming back the next day with a fresh perspective was equally important. I think I was in my own world that night. I sent a text message to our team: “I believe nothing is impossible. I hope you think the same”.

We assembled early on Tuesday morning. I think we spent the night thinking about what could have gone wrong. Starting fresh we decided to take a step back and work the basics. This would help us incrementally build our confidence again and find the error(s).

Step 1 - Downloaded new code libraries from the vendor site and went through the tutorials and how-tos. Were we missing something?

Step 2 -  Made sure our server had the correct requirements. It was important to double-check just in-case there was an incompatibility.

Step 3 - Kept the terminal window open and used the ‘tail -f’ command on the error log file. This would help us squash bugs incrementally as we progressed.

Step 4 - Setup the code and made sure that the most basic example ran. It gave us a few fatal errors that we couldn’t make sense of. After searching the vendor’s site, there were others who had the same problem. We applied these patches. At last, the basic example ran properly.

Step 5 - This gave us confidence to add our code and made sure it ran too. After some minor modifications, this ran too and we were well on our way to complete the integration.

Looking back, we figured it was some old libraries and something buggy in our code that returned empty session values and broke the processing. We could have probably commented our code in the first place, but we opted to start from scratch.

This process is something that all developers go through. Though, what we learnt was very powerful and will stay with us for a long time:

a. Take up a challenge positively cause it ain’t going away. If you are going to face it, you might as well give your best.
b. Going back to the basics helps. Building on stuff that works always helps.
c. Control your mind when faced with a challenge. It will wander and get excited. Calm down.
d. Keeping everyone motivated and encouraged as you will be working with people with different stress levels.

That same morning, I came across a quote from one my twitter followers:

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”–Robert Louis Stevenson

Deep inside, I knew it would be our day.