PMO Tools

Using “Free” Tools for Multi-Project Management \ PMO Hackathon

I went to the recent PMO Flashmob Hackathon. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept of a Hackathon, it’s an event where programmers get together to write (or “hack”) some computer code over an extended period (hence “-athon”, from the ending of “marathon”) to solve problems posed by the attendees. PMO Flashmob decided to hold one of these, with a PMO focus. I was initially somewhat wary. I have done a bit of programming in my time (Fortran, Java and VBA if you’re interested) but most of that is quite a while ago now (I did say some of it was Fortran), and I was concerned at the little I would be able to “bring to the table” for a hackathon. A week or so before the event, a post came out from host John Mcintyre saying the PMO hackathon would have a less technical focus than typical for traditional hackathons, so I took the plunge and signed up. But we had been asked to come up with a suggestion for something to work on. So what to suggest? I have seen much discussion heated debate on the web on the merits of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools vs. Spreadsheets, including this comment from PMO Flashmobber Nicole Reilly “Part of my initial discussions with a potential client will be to assess their openness to using [...] the ever-increasing number low-cost or even free tools now out there”. This prompted me to wonder: What useful PPM functionality can be implemented using just free (or nearly free) tools?
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Five Cool Tools for PMO

Every so often there's a time when I think, that's a really useful cool tool. Then I talk to some of the people at PMO Flashmob - or online in social media groups and they also recommend their stuff too. So I thought, let's share them on here - and hopefully you'll add something that you use in the comments section below. Here's my recent finds: Dropbox Paper Thanks to Donnie M for this one - we've been working on a collaboration and needed to write a document together. He suggested Dropbox Paper - and it really is cool. So you're working on a document together - it's web-based and you can do all the usual word processing stuff - adding links, formatting, just plain good old typing. So far so good. The cool stuff happens when you can see each other writing at the same time - or just watching what the other person is putting on there. It just works - there's no chance of overwriting each others stuff and it's just easy to get going and use it. Plus you can export whenever you're ready. Why I think it's a good tool for PMO? It's definitely something your project teams can use if you don't already have any kind of collaboration software in place - in fact the whole team can use it at once.
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