Next-Gen Project Management?

After my last blog on Projity's OpenProj and Project-ON-Demand, I surfed around for recent articles covering the latest in Project Management software.

There was eWeek's "Next-Gen Project Management" which covered offerings from LiquidPlanner and Lunarr. I read this article a couple of times in order to figure out what exactly makes these two particular offerings "Next-Gen". To be honest, I was completely underwhelmed.

Project Management software has been around for a while...so when I see an article touting "Next-Gen", I want to see something that offers more than subsets of the standard "table stakes". I want to see something designed to change the game!

This is why I wrote about Projity. They appear to have all of the important "table stakes" project management features, and they have mixed in both open source and SaaS as game changers. This is a great start, but in an industry that has arguably rehashed a lot of the same-old, same-old stuff for the past 20 years....I'd like to see Projity kick it up a notch further.

What do I consider "Next-Gen" project management? An open source offering, available in standalone or SaaS models, that kicks it up a notch with social features that really add value and help projects come in on time, under budget, and with the minimal resources required.

So, that means, I'd like to see Projity leverage its strong open source and SaaS foundation and mix in social networking features that enable people to capture their thoughts, comments, ratings, pictures, videos, whatever for a given task (or set of tasks)...and gain leverage from the power of social interactions and socially-generated information.

Providing an easy way for people involved in the project to discuss and annotate the tasks with timely, context-appropriate information (text, audio/visual, etc.) that can help the collective group make better decisions...well that's valuable....and that would truly start moving the project management market to the "Next-Gen".