Check out the new calendar just released. It has a new menu system giving you access to all the funcitons you need on one screen. You can now create tasks from the context popup or right there from the menu. 

But thats not the only good news. You can now drag and drop tasks to reorder, right from the calendar. 

Basically there is nothing you can't do from the one screen.

Enjoy!

P.S Task notes have finally turned up in the task popup as well.

2010 a fresh new year begins with exciting times ahead. TheTeam Effect team has been working on a new side project. We have been workingto develop a data center management software application called CenterOS.

This application is part of the new and exciting area ofdata center management tools. Data centers traditionally manage their massive infrastructureusing Excel spreadsheets. This never works perfects and a data center ends upbeing like a library full of books with no indexing system. CenterOS keepstrack of all physical hardware and connections. It also manages power and heat.

The project has given us the opportunity to work closely withdata center managers and within some large data center environments which hasbeen a real eye opener. We are looking forward to seeing how the software isreceived. 

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! 

With a change in the weather comes a change in the beer my palette prefers.  With the autumn leaves falling and the first frosts I'm looking forward to my first brew inspired by Theakston's Old Peculiar.  It's already got a whif that could put hair on your chest.

Awe inspiring!

Another awe inspiring change in the air is the next release of Team Effect.  We have responded to persistent customer requests for collaboration features in this next release by adding the ability to leave messages for your project team and attach files to your projects.  

Did I just hear some of you gasp "at last!"?  ;)

We are currently in the last phases of testing this new functionality and we're pretty excited about it.  Also pretty darn exciting are the changes to the application navigation.  

Although possibly not as sexy as the collaborative features, we've responded to customer complaints about the navigation by grouping all the functionality that works for a specific project and made it into tabs.

This is the fifth post in our series on Successfully Implementing Project Management Software

We have all seen how people get very feature greedy when implementing software systems. Most new systems will perform many different functions, some of these new to staff members. The stats tell us, if you try to implement all of these features at once you will increase the scope of the project and therefore the likelihood of failure. This really applies to project management software which can be very multifaceted.

Simply put the reason you will fail with this 'all at once' approach is you will spook your staff. Most people don't like change, particularly if it comes with a perceived increase in work load. If you want people to use the system to do things they don't already do plan to release the system in steps. For example getting everyone to create project plans in your new application is a project in itself. If you do succeed at just this one thing I would consider that a massive success. 

Once you have everyone using the project management software for the simple things it's not going to be difficult to slowly broaden the scope of its functionality. If you then want them to forecast, work request, time sheet..etc make those into subsequent projects and leave them well alone till people have fully adopted the first release.

I would suggest ordering the different phases of the project by how beneficial to staff they are and how easy they will be to roll out. Create a long term plan for the whole roll out and move towards that goal in incremental releases. 

Just remember, if you have something complex to roll out.. do it once step at a time