A whole new world was thrown wide open with the advent of the concept of open source. The biggest advantage of open source projects is the easy availability of the source code and also the rights to tweak it or modify the code as we deem fit.

Listed below are some top open source projects that are making waves with their innovative ideas at this moment.

ProjectLibre

Project Libre is the open source replacement of Microsoft Project. It was one among the top 10 open source projects of 2013. With over 6 million downloads; it has most certainly captured the imagination of people around the world. Details of project Libre could be found at http://www.projectlibre.org/ . Project Libre has separate release for mainframes. It also has a web based version which further increases its overall appeal. One of the main advantages is that it has a list of tasks that can be tracked to closure. It can also be used in conjunction with LibreOffice to provide a great set of tools to the team leaders.

Diaspora

Companies have been collecting and analyzing data forever, pretty much.” So what’s really new here? What’s driving the data-analytics revolution and what does it mean for those that choose to postpone or ignore the pivotal role big-data is currently having on productivity and competition globally?

General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt explains it best when stating that “industrial companies are now in the information business—whether they like it or not.”  Likewise, digital data is now everywhere, it’s in every industry, in every economy, in every organization and according to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), this topic might once have concerned only a few data geeks, but big data is now relevant for leaders across every sector as well as consumers of products and services.

In light of the new data-driven global landscape and rapid technological advances, the question for senior leaders in companies now is how to integrate new capabilities into their operations and strategies—and position themselves globally where analytics can influence entire industries. An interesting discussion with six of theses senior leaders is covered in MGI’s article, “How companies are using big data and analytics,” providing us with a glimpse into a real-time decision making processes.

Being treated like a twelve year old at work by a Tasmanian-devil-manager and not sure what to do about it? It is simply a well-known fact that no one likes to be micro managed. Not only do they not like to be micro managed, but tend to quit for this very reason. Unfortunately the percentage of people leaving their jobs for this reason is higher that you would imagine. Recently, an employee retention report conducted by TINYpulse, an employee engagement firm, surveyed 400 full-time U.S. employees concluded that, "supervisors can make or break employee retention."

As companies mature, their ability to manage can be significant to their bottom line as employee morale, high staff turnover and the cost of training new employees can easily reduce productivity and consequently client satisfaction.  In many cases, there is a thin line between effective managing and micro managing practices. Most managers avoid micro managing their employees. However, a decent percentage of them have yet to find effective ways to get the most of their co-workers.  They trap themselves by disempowering people's ability to do their work when they hover over them and create an unpleasant working environment. This behavior may come in the form of incessant emailing, everything having to be done a certain way (their way), desk hovering, and a need to control every part of an enterprise, no matter how small.

Superimpose the micro manager into the popular practice of Agile-SCRUM methodology and you can imagine the creative ways they can monitor everything in a team, situation, or place. Although, not always a bad thing, excessive control, can lead to burnout of managers and teams alike.  As predicted, agile project management has become increasingly popular in the last couple of decades in project planning, particularly in software development.  Agile methodology when put into practice, especially in IT, can mean releasing faster functional software than with the traditional development methods. When done right, it enables users to get some of the business benefits of the new software faster as well as enabling the software team to get rapid feedback on the software's scope and direction.

Despite its advantages, most organizations have not been able to go “all agile” at once. Rather, some experiment with their own interpretation of agile when transitioning.  A purist approach for instance, can lead to an unnecessarily high agile project failure, especially for those that rely on tight controls, rigid structures and cost-benefit analysis.  As an example, a premature and rather rapid replacement of traditional development without fully understating the implications of the changeover process or job roles within the project results in failure for many organizations.