Another recent enhancement to Team Effect that shipped out quietly a couple of weeks ago was the expansion of the Notes system (Messages and Files).

Until this change all conversations (Messages) and file sharing was conducted at the Project level.  But on a big project this isn’t necessarily useful.  In fact on a big project is down right annoying because your Task-oriented team’s chatter gets lost in the full project noise.

Now that we have extended this functionality to Tasks it means you can shield other teams from the noise of your task’s chattering.

To do so expand the “Other chatter Steams” panel…

and then select the Task.

Too easy!

Now, wouldn’t it be great if we sent you an email notification periodically when there was new Chatter activity on your  project or task?

Aren’t spreadsheets handy?!

Try as you much as you like to live without them but it is pretty hard to do without them.  We have very few customers who haven’t asked us for the ability to export some of their Team Effect to Excel so we put it in.

We don’t want to make a big song and dance about it but we thought you might not have noticed the button silently appear on the Actions tab.

Next thing you know there will be Export buttons popping up all over the place!

From a few articles we’ve read lately it is quite apparent that prominent theory in and amongst Agile project managers is that there is no place for Gantt charts in an Agile workspace.  We think that conclusion is nuts!

Why does the Agile community vehemently dislike Gantt charts?

Reason #1 - Gantt charts are typically seen to be inflexible. 

Agile premise number one is that nothing will go according to plan, plan all you like but the only thing that matters is the customer’s priorities on the day.  Traditionally the Gantt chart is used to show how everything will go according to plan, so in the Agile world the inflexible Gantt chart is obsolete as soon as the ink dries.

Keeping them up to date is pointless because Agile says “plan precisely at the iteration level and don’t plan more than a few iterations in advance”.  Any more planning that that is a waste of time because things will change.

They are right in some of these regards, MS Project does not suit Agile.  As an Extreme Programmer I would only ever use MS Project as though it were a special case of Visio.  The Gantt chart went into the TOC document and then after the contract was signed the Gantt chart was filed in the rubbish bin under U for Useless (sometimes under S for Surreal).

Planning Is Good

But planning is good, there is no denying that.  Many people seem to think that Agile means you don’t plan anything but I know that to be wrong.  It just means that you accept your plan will change.

This is why Team Effect is so compatible with Agile project management.

In Team Effect we have a thing called the Project Plan which on face value looks like a Gantt chart except that it is a living breathing facet of the project.  Rather than being a dictatorial master plan that is forever wrong it is a pliable chart which supports change as it occurs.  There are few constraints because constraints prevent agility.  But it does allow certainly and tracking which are very important, no matter what your style of project management.

How does it do this?  By letting you do your own thing.

Team Effect’s strengths are that it allows you to conduct several important project and resource management activities all through one interface.

• Scheduling resources onto tasks.
• Forecasting future capacity and resourcing needs.
• Planning to whatever degree of granularity suits you best.
• Allocating work and assigning tasks.
• Tracking progress.
• Discussing work and tracking project communications.

All of these activities are drawn together in Team Effect and the result is the ability to visualise where your project is at.