Software gives planners forum to share feedback

BOULDER – One Boulder company is convinced that people work better together.

SharedPlan Software Inc. is betting on the attraction of its new online software for project managers who want to share and solicit feedback on their project plans.

The self-funded company has created a series of software applications and associated tools to allow professional project managers to create straightforward but elegant project plans that can be shared with and modified by team members across the online world.

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Founded in 2003 by Chief Executive Roger Denton, a longtime software development manager, the company seeks to fill a shortcoming in the project management arena.

“Working on projects is an inherently collaborative and community-based activity, but the tools developed to help people manage projects are not inherently communal,” explained Tracy Earles, SharedPlan’s head of sales and marketing.

“Roger saw a need to develop a new set of tools to help people exchange information on projects, exchange expertise and basically improve project performance by getting more eyes and brains on the problem.”

The project management industry is two decades old, and the dominant player in the market is Microsoft’s behemoth, Project. But the five contributors to the SharedPlan concept believe there’s a significant market beyond traditional planning software.

“It’s a very mature space, and Microsoft has been around a long time,” Earles admitted. “But it’s a broader problem. Part of the problem is in project management, but it’s also in collaboration and sharing knowledge and the new tools that are being grouped together as social software. We’re not trying to compete with Microsoft. We’re establishing a new category that lies at the intersection of project management, collaboration and social software to create planning communities.”

In other words, SharedPlan wants to do for the project management industry what Web sites like YouTube and Flickr have done for the consumer market: allow users to share content and receive bona fide feedback from other users.

“People want to share their knowledge,” Earles said. “If you look at blogs or these other applications, people are sharing things that nobody in the past thought they would be sharing or that other people would value. That’s proving not to be the case. We’re taking that same need and desire to share experiences into this inherently collaborative activity called project management.”

The firm’s primary product is SharedPlan Professional Edition, an augmented project planning suite that retails for $199.95. The company also is providing a basic version called SharedPlan Personal Edition for free to users who are trying it out in droves. The personal edition’s value will soon be boosted with next month’s integration of a user forum for sharing comments as well as Web-based repository called SharedPlan Central where users will be able to share their project plans with others.

The repository’s beta test houses nearly 1,000 projects already, providing a robust foundation for the company’s plan to create online planning communities.

“Nobody that we’re aware of has ever thought about putting plans out in the public eye,” Earles observed. “If you’re starting a new project, you can look at what other planners have done in similar areas and identify how these projects flow or where the risk areas are. It gives you a starting point from which to start your own plan. Alternatively, other peers in your industry or experts in project management can point out aspects you might not have considered.”

The integrated suite, called OpenPlanning, soon will be released in a private version that will allow companies to share project plans within their own networks, behind the protection of their own firewalls. But Earles believes that the mindset of project managers is expanding beyond their own boundaries.

“Our private version will address security in a direct way but more broadly, our users are starting to realize that the intellectual property associated with a specific project is almost never in the project plan,” he said. “The fact that you post a plan online doesn’t mean it’s an advanced look at your future as a firm. It might be an older plan that you put up because it has value for other people doing these kinds of projects.”

SharedPlan is targeting the professional services industry – architects, engineers, consultants and other project management professionals – but the software has proved to have a draw well beyond that market. The company has sold more than 1,000 paid licenses already and publishes a newsletter about online project management that reaches more than 20,000 readers each month. It’s not a bad start for a virtual company that has no brick-and-mortar offices.

“We’re obviously a small startup, but we’re trying to get to a point where OpenPlanning and its complement in the private space is our primary direction,” Earles said. “What we did with SharedPlan Personal and Pro was to build foundational products that would be building blocks for what we really wanted to do, which was to create these online communities. Now that we’ve launched OpenPlanning and will soon launch a private version, we anticipate growing significantly.”