Online Project Management Tools (in China)

First things first. Before I get into talking about issues with Project Management in China, and issues with getting Chinese workers to adopted productivity tools, I would first like to share my nifty comparison chart. I just completed an analysis of various mid-range online Project Management “group-ware” tools. I’m going to recommend the usage of one of these tools in my client’s China-based small start-up animation and game creation company. The company is based in Suzhou, but has contract employees all over the world. Anyone interested in shopping for one of these tools can read the comparison chart directly below without having to be exposed to my anecdotal ruminations about business in China.

The above chart is based on the needs of a small company, currently with 10 employees, who is looking for a free or cheap solution to use until the company grows up a bit. The employees can all read English, so language is not an issue. None of the employees have any project management skills whatsoever.

Much of the above analysis is based on my subjective feeling of course (ie. UI, Speed). I’m not looking for software which has MS-Project level detail, such as organizing project elements into WBS, heavy resource management ability, etc. Of course I’m not looking for high-level enterprise solutions. The focus of the online tool is to provide the management a Performance Management tool for his company. None of the above online tools (with except maybe the Zoho tool) would be good for huge complex projects which require detailed GNAT charts.

I will recommend the Wizehive tool to my client for free usage, and Zoho if he wants to spend $99 today. All the above are good tools though. The market leader seems to be Basecamp, which is a very good, clean solution, but does not have some task management options as the other solutions. In China, MS Project – without server / groupware support – is the most popular tool.

Now… about using this in China…

First of all, I have been told that Chinese companies tend to not use ASP / Cloud Computing tools. This may have changed, or is in the process of changing. In general, they like to have local control over the software and therefore like to self-host software.

Large companies usually have their own project management “toolboxes” and preferred software. But sometimes its good to have a more “informal” tool that a smaller group can use. For instance, project sales people, sourcing specialists, designers, merchandisers, and other small-group projects could benefit from using these tools. That being said, most sales people, designers, merchandisers, etc in China do not have very basic Project Management skills.

There has been a big push to advance Project Management skills in China.¹ For more background on this, see this Google “knol”. However, in most sectors, Chinese lack not only formal project management knowledge, but also lack the softskills needed to do basic project management. Therefore, its difficult to get people to use Project Management tools (and CMS tools for this matter) because most office workers don’t understand fundamental project management concepts.

Many…probably most…companies in China use MS Excel as their primary project management tool. Excel is a good tool for this. But it is not “groupware”. It is not good for sharing information. Its not good for managing people who are geographically dispersed. It does not have a calendar, which I think is very important. Hence, I recommended using online tools, which can actually be simpler in many ways to complicated Excel sheets.

To promote proper project management in China, management must invest time and resources to train project managers in both technical and soft-skills. Its usually too expensive (and does not have reliable payoff) to send non-professional project managers (like sales managers and merchandisers) to full PM technical skills training. So I recommend adopting relatively simple online project management tools. Once everyone in a small group is trained on using the tools, people will be used to using calendars to share appointments. Use “twitter”-like micro-blogging for recording daily activity. And set goals, which appear in the calendar, so everyone can visually see the deadlines. In offices where everyone use gmail (we standardized on this service at my previous company, and its a good thing), using tools which allow calendar sync will allow people to syncronize daily work tasks to their phone calendars. Also, Google calendar RSS feeds can be parsed, so one can download a calendar back into Excel in order to create all types of project reports. Of course, none of this will happen unless a manager constantly pushes and monitors tool usage. I guess the same can be said about any other policy, process, or IT solution.

Anyone have other ideas for project management software to use in China?