Another online project management system?! Another project management blog?!

The answer to both of your questions is no.

At Onit, we recognize that the discipline of project management could play a valuable role in the average lawyer’s practice. None of the tools currently out there are a good fit so we spent the last year studying lawyers and trying to determine what was missing in the market for them. What we created is not the ‘building a freeway,’ heavy, top-down project management that most people think of when they think of project management. Rather, we think what they need is more akin to lean project management, which is collaborative and is focused on eliminating waste as it’s primary function.

We have applied what we learned into a flexible, online project management tool based on lawyer’s specific needs. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal industry: we discovered that lawyer’s project management needs are no different than most people. Perhaps the scale is a little different, but when we stepped back from what we had built, we realized that we created a tool that anybody could get value from. The reality is we are all project managers, whether we have that in our title or not.

We will continue to post on topics that are important to us and that are the foundation of how we think about project management. Next will be a post about our borrowing of concepts from software developers about iterating and frequent status updates.

On Monday, February 1st, we’ll be debuting Onit at the LegalTech 2010 conference in New York City so stop by and visit us! Onit will also be available for beta testing and we encourage you to sign up and try it now. Your feedback is important to us, so please leave comments and interact with our community forum!