Cadence ProjectMaster 4.0 Online

Full Disclosure Here: I’m a former employee of Cadence Management Corporation, and I’m also a contractor. Plus, I genuinely like the folks who work there, and I think they do good things. That said…I’m working on a voice over for the Cadence ProjectMaster 4.0 Online software demo. It’s about 10 minutes of me talking over a screencast of the tool, demonstrating how it works, walking through the features and so on. As such, they’ve given me access to the real deal online to test features so that I can create the script. This. Thing. Is. Fantastic.

When I started with Cadence over a decade ago, they were still on ProjectMaster 2. It was a tool that allowed you to create a graphical responsibility matrix assigning responsibilities to project team members, then print it in a slew of formats to hang it on a wall, drop it in a project binder, and so on. But that was it — just the responsibility matrix. Of course, it’s arguably the most important tool in the project planning process, but it’s followed at a close second by the Work Breakdown Structure.ProjectMaster 3 attempted to rectify this. It was essentially a series of scripts for Visio 2000 allowing you to create most of the other components of the project plan: Introduction, Objective, Scope, Deliverables, Issues and Risks, WBS, Responsibility Matrix… the works. So, great, right? Great in concept, anyway. The reality was that building an entire software package with a great big honking dependency like Visio makes this tool very expensive, not to mention notoriously fragile. I was around for this one — I was on the team. Once we got it actually functioning, it was a bear to keep it up. It was like a skinny kid on a Ducati: looks cool when he’s moving, but if you stop him, he’s gonna dump the bike.The intent all along was to move this product online. Of course, back then, it was really expensive to even think about a project like this in the online space, and since Cadence is on the other end of the spectrum from “dot.com”, there was no “boom” money to seed this sort of thing.CUT TO: 10 years laterThey did it. They finally did it. I’m only bummed they did it without me. It’s a subscription based product that allows you to create your project plan in minutes. I mean it… minutes. I used to work on building these things for clients and after a heated consulting session, we’d be looking at a days-long session of data entry and organization, not to mention Word scripting and formatting to make all the components stick together manually. ProjectMaster 4.0 works as it should work. Enter your data, your deliverables, your tasks, your resources and responsibilities, and PM4 formats it and allows you to export it graphically, or to Word in no time. And that’s a key point: at no time did I ever get the feeling that the system was working, choking, chugging along. It’s fluid and efficient.I cannot stress this enough: try this thing out. If you work on projects of any size and need a way to build out a project plan that clearly documents the work you have to do, subscribe.ProjectMaster 4.0 does not do scheduling. I’d be surprised if they didn’t add it to the system later on, but at this point they work around it by allowing what seems to be a pretty good export to MS Project tool. I’m on a Mac so I haven’t tested that out — I’ll have to see what the resulting document looks like in OmniPlan (another awesome program, by the way). Still, let that ring a bit — I’m on a Mac, and this thing works perfectly. Knowing what I know about Cadence, that they inadvertantly built in support for Macs has to sting a bit.