We've been busy little bees for the last month - or two.  Where did that time go?

Making a product like Team Effect is only half the job, taking it to market - finding people who will want it and make use of it - is a challenge of equivalent proportions.  The challenge of marketing a product like Team Effect to millions of potential customers through the medium of the Internet has been a steep learning curve.  Admittedly we are much better at making software than we are at telling people about it - something we will improve on once we have a dedicated expert in that role.

Meanwhile we've been flat out responding to the steady increase in our customer base.  A few weeks back we had a mention in the popular blog Web Worker Daily and the response from that was deliriously exciting.

We've doubled our active customer base since that publicity and the Dev team have been working on some new functionality as a result of the requests from those new customers.  More about those changes when they arrive.

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Jason Glover
CTO & Co-Founder

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.

Budget 09 (New Zealand)

Team Effect, for those who weren't aware, is based in the clean green isles of New Zealandand our government yesterday released the national budget for 2009.  For many it will come as quite a shock.

Predictions of up to 220,000 people out of work within the next year.  Two hundred thousand people!!  (For our overseas audience, that's 5% of the population of NZ.) Two hundred thousand frustrated, bored people sitting at home getting despondent about how their CV was rejected by yet another job application.

That sux!  That really sux! 

I have been lucky enough to have very few CV rejections over my career but each one of them cut me deep. It's humiliating and terrifying to be shot down again and again and again.  To anyone out there who has applied for more than a dozen jobs in a row and received that woeful "Dear John, Thanks for your CV, but sorry ...” letter, my hat is off to you.  You are truly brave and courageous for your perseverance regardless.

"We are seeing around New Zealand ...  people showing a great deal of resilience.  No one likes this recession, but they're rolling up their sleeves, they're doing what they need to do, to get through it."

Bill English, 29 May 2009, Interview on Campbell Live

That got me thinking about things.  I definitely consider myself to be one of the sleeve rollers, but what can I do?  I'm just one guy - what sort of impact can one person have in the face of something as big as this "credit crunch"?

....

Meanwhile I am checking my email and coincidentally I'vejust been followed by on Twitter by Claire Sawyers of DonateNZ.  Who is this Claire Sawyers, and what is she doing following me?  Wasn't she the one in Lost with the baby that we haven't seen since Episode 2? 

Nup.  Wrong Claire! 

I do a little reputation searching using Yasni and it turns out that ClaireSawyers is the founder of http://www.donatenz.com, an awesome organisation busy channelling this national sleeve rolling effort that Bill English is yakking on about to John Campbell on the news.  "Donate NZ provides the ultimate simple portal where individuals, organisations and companies can donate goods, time and discounts to schools, early childhood and not-for-profit organisations in New Zealand."

Super simple and super smart.  Wow, cool, I like it!

I tell you, it's the Claires of this world that are going to be the difference between this depression (I prefer to call a spade a spade) being a lot less unpleasant all around than the Great one in 1930 that really seriously bummed everyone out.  So I fully support what she's doing but again I ask, what can I do?

Decision time.

Decision: I'm going to do whatever is in my power. 

..and it is well within my power to provide Team Effect gratis to the kinds of organisations that Claire Sawyers is helping.  After all, apart from the thousands of hours of weekends and evenings, and most of my blonde hair that is now grey; Team Effect doesn't "cost" us anything to give to community supporting charity organisations - it is just electrons in the wire at the end of the day.

Will this help?  To be honest I don't know.  The macro-economist in me believes that it might help streamline fundraising projects at the orphanage, or that maybe it will smooth out the childhood education planning at some Kindergarten in South Auckland, or perhaps it will help the Salvation Army with their amazing and worthy efforts.  I really, really hope so!!  If using Team Effect helps those guys get more done and stretch their resources further then my one little thing could make a whole huge bit of difference and that would be awesome!

So that's what we're doing here at Team Effect - we are rolling up our sleeves and getting on with making our collaborative project management app better so that it will make a real difference where it counts.

Ka kite ano

Jason Glover  (CTO & Co-Founder)

&

Joel Macfarlane (CEO & Other Co-Founder)

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Any non-profit organisation wanting to use Team Effect to better manage their precious time and resources should send an email to ForTheGreaterGood@teameffect.com when they sign-up.  Please include your Team Effect unique URL in your email and also a URL to your organisation’s website so we can vouch for you.  To prevent fraud, your sign-upemail address should match the domain name of your website (e.g.caroline@plunket.org.nz if you are signing up www.plunket.org.nz).  We would appreciate, but do NOT require, some online recognition for our efforts as it will help us reduce our marketing costs.

Stop... Collaborate and listen,

Team Effect is back with a brand new invention...

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned some exciting new collaborative features we were working on. Well we have put the finishing touches on those funky new features  so I thought I would jump online and tell you what's in the upgrade.

Messages and Files

The center piece of our new release is the new notes tab. Despite its humble name this tab gives you and your team the ability to run complex project discussions. You can upload files, comment as you would in a blog and as you would expect it all happens quickly with no page loads getting in your way.

Project-related messages and files on the new Project Notes tab.

A Screenshot doesn't do it justice at all. You really need to jump on in and try this functionality for yourself.  Posting messages and uploading files is snappy, fresh and fast. Uploading files is slick, even when uploading several files at once.  Right from the outset we wanted to enable uploading of multiple files at once because real projects often have dozens of files and this is what we have done.

Dashboard Chatter Feed

All this new dialogue you're going to create has the potential to quickly devolve into information overload so we've put an "update stream" on the Dashboard so you can keep track of the updates to all your projects, tasks and actions all from one central place.

Dashboard showing the new Comments and Messages steam.

No RSS feed yet, but that is coming very soon - along with a vast range of other exciting developments.

So stay tuned! 

Since our Beta trial period began in May this year we've had a very encouraging response from the user community and we've learnt a lot from all your feedback. Throughout that time we've been working hard to make Team Effect easier and more enjoyable to use.

This month sees both the rollout of a new version which is the culmination of a lot of that feedback, and the end of the Beta period itself. It's been quite a journey and we're excited to tell you about what's in store next.

Our recent user survey highlighted that your primary use of Team Effect is to plan and then share your project, so the enhancements introduced now and in the next release are all aimed at improving the usability of Team Effect for these functions.

This update will also see the introduction of our pricing plans. Team Effect starts at a humble €10/month for your first 4 Active* projects and allows you to share your projects with as many people as you like.
(* Hidden, Closed and Deleted projects are not considered to be Active)

Pricing & Plans

** Loyalty money-back offer **

Improvements in Version 1.0

1. Moving a Task

Moving a task with a person scheduled on it is much easier now. Simply drag and drop - no more task locks or SlipTask.

When you release the task bar you will be given the option to move all its sub-tasks by the same time period, or to leave them where they are.

Couldn't be easier, could it?

2. Easier Calendar micro-adjustments

We received feedback that making micro-adjustments to your schedule became difficult when the project was large or the time scale was not in view.

Our solution was to add these nifty little flags to indicate which day you are about to drop the bar on. It makes it easy to move a Task to start on a specific day, even in week mode.

You can also click (and hold) on the bar to see quickly where the bar starts and ends. Useful when the ends of the bar are out of sight.

3. No more annoying Schedule mouseover popups!

We heard from a lot of people how annoying those Schedule mouseover popups were, so we replaced them with a status panel along the bottom of the schedule.

4. Improved: EasyAdd new Person

There is an easy way to schedule a new person onto a task. You don't need to leave the project's Schedule to do it. You can create a new person from the Finder when you go to assign a person to the task.

This feature was already in place, but we've made improvements to it so that it is more accessible for a wider group of users.

5. EasyAdd new Role

Just like adding a new Person it is just as easy to add a new Role when scheduling work.

6. Easier navigation - My Actions, Project Progress

We've redesigned the 'My Schedule' tab. It was cluttered and we noticed that the secondary tabs on it were not frequented by most users, so we split them out. You will now find the My Actions and Project Progress pages on the main menu.

7. Easier to create an Action

Click on the day in the Schedule to create and Action for that day. An annoying bug in the person and project pickers has been fixed.

8. Improvements made to prevent Javascript errors; increase AJAX responsiveness

All the Javascript errors you might have encountered were all logged in our systems and analysed by the development team. We've chased all the bugs down and swatted them.

9. Compatability with more browsers

We've worked hard to improve all the known comaptability problems with the various web browsers. Certain aspects of Team Effect looked horrid in Google's chrome browser (our new recommended browser), and there were also some Javascript issues cropping up in Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

We are not finished by any means. In the new year we will be working harder than ever to improve Team Effect to make your project management run more smoothely.

All of the team here at Team Effect look forward to helping you in whatever way we can.

Congratulations to Ian Wild (Sheffield, Great Britain), you've won a US$150 Amazon voucher for participating in the Team Effect survey!!

Many thanks to the many other people who shared their thoughts by participating in the survey, we appreciate your time and the many considered comments.

We received valuable feedback from everyone who participated and we are now looking at how we can most effectively address the concerns and features that are most important to our users in the new year.

Plug: Analysing all those responses would take up the rest of the year if it weren't for the amazing power of the survey software we used. This was our biggest ever survey and we owe a lot of thanks to our talented marketing intern Virginia Owen who helped up design the questions, and the folks over at Qualtrics for their brilliant survey software. We highly recommend Qualtrics!

"Have you considered surveying all your customers to get to know them better?" asked Virginia, our recently acquired marketing intern.

"Only every single day!" we replied. So we immediately put her in charge of designing a scientific survey to gleen some valuable feedback out of our beta customers.

Commencing today we have invited all our active beta trial customers to give up 5 minutes of their precious time to share their thoughts and answer some questions that will help us understand them better. To sweeten the deal we're putting up a random prize of a US$150 gift certificate for use at either Amazon store or iTunes music store!

How cool is that?!

The winner will be drawn on the 28th November 2008 and notified by email, and also here on the website.

We estimate that probably 1 in 4 emails we send to our customers end up in spam filters. That's right, a quarter! At least.

Spam filters are a nuisance for us because the "semi intelligent" spam filters built into all the popular email clients and ISPs use rules to detect potential spam and those same rules often decide that our legitimate emails to our customers are also spam.
The most annoying is when customers say they never received their Password Reset emails, only to find that it was trapped in their spam filter.

Our technical team are constantly working hard to improve upon that, but in this day and age we're fighting a battle with constantly shifting rules of engagement.

We've made some major improvements in the last 2 weeks by adopting SPF, so it will be interesting to see how much of an improvement that makes.

In the meanwhile the best advice we can give you is to add the domain teameffect.com to your address book and/or junk-filter's white list.

Peace out.