project management

Basecamp Is Off-Base On Internal Communications

One of the more interesting things to land in my feed this week was Basecamp‘s new Guide To Internal Communications. As early proponents of agile project management, I have a lot of respect for the company, but I’m was not a happy camper when I read this. In short, the 30 principles of internal communication listed seem somewhat antagonistic toward interpersonal communication. Take principle 3: “Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.” and principle 5: ” Meetings… Read More »Basecamp Is Off-Base On Internal Communications

How I Spent My 2015 Technology Initiative Grants Conference

I’m back from our (Legal Services Corporation) 15th annual technology conference, which ran from January 14th through the 16th  in San Antonio, Texas.  It was a good one this year, with a great location, good food, great people – nearly 300 of them, which is quite a record for us. There were plenty of amazing sessions, kicked off by a fascinating keynote on international access to justice web app partnerships. Slides and videos will be up soon on LSC’s website. But I did want to share the slides from my sessions, which all seemed to go very well.  I did three: Are You Agile I… Read More »How I Spent My 2015 Technology Initiative Grants Conference

13 Lessons On Building Your Nonprofit Technology Culture

This article originally appeared on the Exponent Partners blog on December 19th, 2014. It was written by Kerry Vineburg, based on a phone interview with me. EXPONENT PARTNERS SERIES: SMART PRACTICES Is your nonprofit thinking about implementing a large database project like Salesforce? Nonprofit and technology veteran Peter Campbell, CIO at Legal Services Corporation, recently shared his valuable insights on how to prepare your team and culture for long-term success. His organization, the top funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans in the country, is developing Salesforce as a data warehouse for their grantee information and document management.  We asked Peter to tell us… Read More »13 Lessons On Building Your Nonprofit Technology Culture

Trello: A Swiss Army Knife For Tasks, Prioritizing And Project Planning

This post was originally published on the LSC Technology Blog in May of 2013. Note that “LSC” is Legal services Corporation, my current employer. One of the great services available to the legal aid tech community (lstech) is LSNTAP’s series of webinars on tech tools.  I’ve somehow managed to miss every one of these webinars, but I’m a big fan of sharing the tools and strategies that allow us to more effectively get things done. In that spirit, I wanted to talk about my new favorite free online tool, Trello. Trello is an online Kanban board.  If you’re unfamiliar with that term, you are still likely familiar with the… Read More »Trello: A Swiss Army Knife For Tasks, Prioritizing And Project Planning

Evaluating Wikis

I’m following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.

There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:

From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?

Here’s another recent Idealware entry (from 9/25/2008). Note that the Idealware post has a healthy comment stream. It seems like every month or two, I happen across a forum thread about project management tools. What works? Can you do it with a wiki? Are they necessary at all? Often, there are a slew of recommendations (Basecamp, Central Desktop, MS Project) accompanied by some heartfelt recommendations to stay away from all of them. All of these recommendations are correct, and incorrect. Project software naysayers make a very apt point: Tools won’t plan a project for you. If you think that buying and setting up the tool… Read More »From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?

Lessons Learned: Effective Practices In IT Management

This article was first published on the NTEN Blog in May of 2007. Peter Campbell, TechCafeteria.com I’ve spent more than 20 years in the sometimes maddening, sometimes wonderful, world of IT management. Along the way I’ve worked under a variety of CEOs with very diverse styles, and I’ve developed, deployed and maintained ambitious technology platforms. In order to survive, I put together three basic tenets to live by. 1. Management is 360 degrees: managing your superiors and peers is a bigger challenge than managing your staff. 2. To say anything effectively in an organization, you have to say it at least three times in three… Read More »Lessons Learned: Effective Practices In IT Management