Teamwork relational structure
Filed under: IT integration, news, technical | Tags: Teamwork relational structure
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Following some user requests, we’ve put together a first documentation of Teamwork’s relational structure, that will be a part of next release of Teamwork user guide. Here is the PDF. Hope it helps!
P.S. Published an update expansion on July 19 (2010).
How do I begin project management?
Filed under: project management, work management | Tags: project management, work management
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In “Making things happen”, the author (Scott Berkun) states that he assumes that the reader is not stupid, is curious and pragmatic, does not like jargon or big theories, and does not take herself, software, or management too seriously. Well, we do the same in Teamwork.
Still, you may have no or little experience in managing team work. Whatever work you will be doing, you may have some requirements, and some dates. if your company has no notion of project / task / issues, you can start this way: list all the things you are doing in your organization. You could separate internal work / external work. In the list obtained, group dependant activities: each group can be called a project, and the people that should work on it are the assignees.
You may notice that when you are listing “thing that we are doing”, you may also include “things we should be doing”. Notice which of these are stated in the form of concrete actions, like “call X”, or “write Y”, and which are still to be transformed in actions. You should try to transform everything into actions, and get rid of the rest. And still among actions there are simple, brief ones, and others that group many others: you could model the simple ones as issues, and the ones comprising others as tasks (that is, projects which are child of other projects). This is a start of management.
Often we get asked by people evaluating Teamwork:
How do companies really use Teamwork?
In the new user guide you will now find several examples. Here are also some good books where to start learning about personal and project management.
Some reference books:
This book by Berkun is our main reference:
Making Things Happen
Mastering Project Management
By Scott Berkun, publisher O’Reilly Media, 2008
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517717
From a personal productivity perspective:
Getting things done
By David Allen
On the Agile/Scrum theme:
Agile Project Management with Scrum
By Ken Schwaber
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X
Teamwork 4.5 patch release (4.5.17900)
As always after a major upgrade, thanks to your detailed feedback we can already do a patch release with a few bug fixes. This is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. Get the installer / upgrader here: http://www.twproject.com/download.page
Bug fixes:
- IMPORTANT BUG FIX FOR ORACLE INSTALLATIONS: Release 4.5.17800 had a schema name bug which made it impossible to install it on Oracle – a problem in our Oracle test due to an existing table made us fail to detect the problem. This release works fine on Oracle.
- issue editor is now compatible also with lower screen resolutions
- issue statuses can now de deleted
- the “worklog day” portlet now saves also descriptions
Teamwork 4.5 released: a major free upgrade
Filed under: issue tracking, news, project management, releases, usability, work management | Tags: kanban tool, teamwork issues, Teamwork 4.5
Comments (1) We are really happy to announce this major release update. As you may guess from the length of this announcement, this update will improve your Teamwork in almost every section, providing more modeling tools and functions. The web browsers’ enhanced capacities (in particular those of Firefox, Safari and Chrome) are used in depth to give users a better experience.
This is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. Get the installer / upgrader here: http://www.twproject.com/download.page
The main features of this release are:
- Issue managing by dragging – “kanban” like.
- History of issue assignee, status and task change (better help desk and issue scaling support).
- Customizable issue statuses.
- Better graph and agile / scrum handling.
- Cross links between tasks / issues / resources / agenda events / meetings / boards.
- In-place popup editors.
- Operator load computation has become much smarter.
- Greatly extended user guide with real case work “mappings” to Teamwork, and a new section on performance optimization.
Layout changes
Several pages that up to now were popup windows are now windows in place, which improves their usability: issue editor, custom forms, workgroup selector.
Several text areas now support internal links (e.g. T#MYCODE#), web links (http://www.twproject.com), smiley’s, absolute URLs to images.
New features
Issues.
Issue statuses – customizable. New issues statuses can be created. There is a page for managing issue statuses (which before version 4.5 were fixed):
And for every status not only its color, but most importantly its business logic behavior is determined from this editor:
Whether it should “behave” when asking user feedback as an open status, as close, whether it should ask for comments and / worklog when entering a status.
So typically if your status is something in which the issue enters at “end of life”, it should be marked “as close” and “ask for worklog” too should be enabled.
Issue change history. When changing a status, task or assignee on an issue, the editor will ask for a reason, and the change will be recorded on the issue. And in fact there is an additional tab on the issue editor, “history”.
Issue organizer “Kanban”. Issues can be now be organized in a completely visual way by dragging and dropping them: filter the issues in which you are interested in, and then select the “organizer” button.
Now you can also enable use of external codes on issues (admin -> default for projects).
Dashboards.
The usability of the “customize this page” function has been improved: all portlets are always visible:
And it’s easier to drag them in the dashboard. Moreover it is easier to access the general page / portlet disposition page: just click “all users”. 
There is a new additional starting page: help desk support.
Operator load and planning. This was the user request:
“refine the operator load showing the effective load taking in consideration worklog done. E.g: 100h estimated on 20 days, done 10h in 10 days the resting 10 day must have a load of 90h not 50h like now”
Also take care of unavailability.
Use the new operator load on plan, load by day, end wherever it is meaningful
Operator load textual: put worklog with totals and pink holydays. Use striped background
Advanced users
- The examples in the distribution and the documentation now cover also “custom wizards”: see section 14.4 Custom wizards of the user guide.
Minor improvements
- More kinds of documents are now full-text indexed; these are the extensions now supported:
“.txt”, “.rtf”, ”.log” “.pdf”. “.htm”, “.html”, “.zip”, “.war”, “.jar”, “.xls”, “.xlsx”, “.xltx”, “.xlsEmb”, “.doc”, “.docx”, “.dotx”, “.docEmb”, “.ppt”, “.pptx”, “mpp”, “mpx”, “.msg”, “.msgEmb”, “.vsd”, “.pub”.
Also custom fields are full-text indexed.
Here are several user requests fulfilled:
- “Add worklog approval monthly screen” -> We will add bulk status change in worklog search / analysis (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/305194-add-worklog-approval-monthly-screen?ref=title).
- Expose issue id in editor and list (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/257395-expose-an-issue-id).
- LDAP authentication cascades to system one (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/265843-login-with-ldap-for-external-users).
- Develop a resource snapshot (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/348397-develop-a-resource-snapshot).
- Sort File Storage Document Listing (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/369822-sort-file-storage-document-listing).
- Make “add document content” in a rich text editor (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/239855-make-add-document-content-in-a-rich-text-editor).
- Please put a link to a task on the agenda event (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/223380-please-put-a-link-to-a-task-on-the-agenda-event): we actually did much more by having full internal links.
- Need to add subscription event for when a new version of a document is uploaded (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/624803-need-to-add-subscription-event-for-when-a-new-vers).
- Display agenda items in planByResource like in worklogWeek (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/142356-display-agenda-items-in-planbyresource-like-in-wor).
- Search for specific custom fields.
- You can have a customized help message in the “help” page, just add in the labels CUSTOMIZED_HELP_CONTACT (http://feedback.twproject.com/forums/6995-suggest-features/suggestions/599247-add-a-customizable-area-on-the-help-page-so-local-)
- Notes on issues are on the main tab and self-resize.
- Issue assignee selector got simplified.
- Now you can create subtasks as sub-fluxes.
- Counters can now be reset and deleted.
- When changing a task on an issue, notify the new assignees.
- Since version 4.5 custom fields support also “typing” of data. E.g. “cost,20,java.lang.Double” will add a custom field of length 20 and type “double” (a floating point number).
- Holiday settings: now you have year-specific settings.
- In issue list you can now filter by task type.
- Resource print includes my assignments.
Bug fixes
- Check why in the assignment notification we add a link to the task even if the resource has not the rights to read task … .
- Meetings are not full-indexed.
- Index custom forms data.
- Create issue from task editor menu does not launch creation nor filters???
- Issue multi edit: bulk change gravity do not close actions clicking “close”.
- Fixed MIME for teamworkMenuPlusCss.jsp,
- Issue cloning did not raise events,
- Fixed various combo positions in bulk update screens in case of scroll.
- Summa is not saved on document link and file storage on tasks and resources.
- A fix for Oracle on Resources with no surname.
- An operator may change his own password even if cookies are enabled.
- Do not notify disabled users.
Technical points
- In order to optimize memory usage,
If you log as administrator and go to the label management section, open the “label rules” container (it is closed by default), and say if you want to have only English as language, type EN in the enabled languages field and select SAVE.
- Teamwork 4.5 is no more on quirks mode – we dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 – and pages are in HTML 5
Important for upgrades. Several JARS have been updated, added and removed. If they are present these JARs should be deleted by hand from WEB-INF/lib:
o commons-collections-2.1.1.jar
o commons-logging-1.0.4.jar
o poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar
o jcaptcha-all-1.0-RC3.jar
- Added -server configuration to the Java JVM distributed.
- If using HsqlDB you can make a dump of the current log by hand from system check instead of having to wait Teamwork restart:
Notes for updating to 4.5:
Any custom filter on issues will need to be redone as the issue statuses are a lookup field.
Unfortunately all document list attached to discussion points of meetings will be reset.
P.S. We’re building the beta of a new online service – called Licorize – a cocktail of Delicious bookmarking and light to-do management. If you’d like to beta-test it, just send an e-mail to info@twproject.com with “Licorize” in the subject or body – we will soon give you access and also a year of free usage to your entire group.
Stories of work management
Filed under: IT integration, project management, usage, use cases, work management | Tags: management stories
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In Open Lab we’ve been developing Teamwork and consulting on project and work management software since 2003.
Every time we got in a company with our software, we had planned to show how the software worked, how to optimize its configuration, how to integrate it with existing software. But we actually did so in the last moment of our visit, if ever.
But when we got in we always ended up in meetings after meetings where the topic was not specifics of Teamwork, but questions of work management, and how to best “map and structure” these, so that project trees, sets of issues, workflows and so on could be used in a coherent matter.
And we’ve learned a lot about which mappings work, and which not.
This need for conceptual mappings is teaching something, that is, where is the real value for the customers, what users need.
We progressively realized that the value of software like Teamwork can be simply in the introduction of more structuring, more quality in work. This can be much more than actually using the software – taking it to the extreme, one could simply read this guide, reform practices in the company and forget about the software 
And more people and companies we met, more we appreciated the way we had structured Teamwork from the very beginning to be very, very flexible. A group of fashion designers, a company doing production, a team of software developers, an IT group, hardware engineers, event organizers, all these have different needs. And these groups may be in the same company, and different models need to co-exist.
Meeting diverse needs made Teamwork evolve so that it is an even more powerful mapping tool. Though it is extended, it still is an organically integrated tool.
Modeling company needs for organizing work always implies going beyond the scope of a single application: Teamwork is always used in an applicative context, and so its openness to external integrations is something that in our concrete experience has made a successful adoption possible.
In the user guide for version 4.5 you find also some of our experiences of “map and structure”, some gained by “boot camps” in companies, some by giving web support. You also find the definitions of some concepts related to work management that are not directly linked to software usage.
Some say that all companies need is a to-do list; this is for us just a symptom of scarce experience in what people do at work, of how complex are the needs of a productive company. We hope that the new guide can be of help in understanding which map best fits your organization.
Some of the stories titles:
How do I begin project management?
Managing with lists vs. managing with trees
Overcoming opposition
A critical moment: change
Migrations
Public projects
A design & production company
To Gantt or not to Gantt
Social tools for work management
iPhones for all
A distributed research group
Agile methods
Working by “pomodoros”
Kanban like management
Simplistic cost/benefit evaluations of organizational tools adoption
Worklog validation
Deep IT integration
Work management and games
How Teamwork is made with Teamwork
Teamwork and multilinguism
Business processes
Help desks
Company structure
Different Teamworks, same data bucket
Teamwork and your company’s worth
Lighter, faster Teamwork (release 4.4.16000)
This release (4.4.16000) includes fixes and refinements on memory usage that make Teamwork lighter and faster – thanks to the great Lambda Probe tool for help (we are not associated with them). Both absolute memory usage and memory usage by logged user has been significantly reduced.
A few features included: custom pages can be disabled, possibility to speed up the “my assignments” web part.
The release includes also some bugfixes:
- fix in task list search when you search for code and name
- better logging for scheduler exceptions
- faster task print list
- fixed a rare key incompatibility with certain versions of MySQL
- custom pages can be disabled
- safer schema update procedure
You can download this release here. It is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. This release does not include database schema changes.
A critical moment: choosing or changing a project management tool
Filed under: project management, work management | Tags: reselling Teamwork
Comments (2) Healthy companies, groups which are self-critical tend to periodically reorganize themselves. It is an opportunity to improve both productivity and quality of work. In these moments, software surveys are done to select new software for project and more in general work management. It is in these phases that sometimes Teamwork is chosen. In the choice what most matters is how the software can “unobtrusively” map to the new organizational practices, and Teamwork in this can be great, because of its flexibility, scope, and the wide fit to the IT infrastructure. All this is explained in detail in the user guide.
Now it frequently happens that some software houses (which are about 8% of the companies that use Teamwork) like Teamwork so much that they consider distributing Teamwork themselves to customers, and contact us for that; we always say “fine”, but none has been very successful, and this is quite easily explained: if you have say 20 companies to which you provide software services, what is the chance that that very company will want to buy Teamwork?
About 2% of the companies that visit Teamwork site get to try it; and about 2% of those that try it get to buy it. And consider that all those companies are already in the critical situation of choosing a PM tool. So calling a company at random, what are the chances that they will be searching right then a PM tool? Slim, very slim. And the chances that Teamwork will fit them? 2% of 2%. So how many companies will you have to contact in order to have a good chance of making one sale? Many. Too many.
All this because in this scenario we are not using the power if internet of being found, instead of contacting known ones. If someone wants to offer software like Teamwork to customers, the best idea is to get a good presence on the web, maybe in a localized / specialized part, so that companies in search of PM solutions can get competent help. Just my two cents.
Teamwork in Chinese – 中文 (release 4.4.15200)
Filed under: news, releases | Tags: iphone agenda, iphone calendar synch, teamwork chinese
Leave a Comment This new Teamwork release includes the Chinese translation of the entire interface, we want to thanks Mr. Chenfan for his great work ( we hope that the blog’s title is correct 
) .
This release includes also an improvement in the public task page. We added a new check box that enables showing also custom fields contextually with the “add proposal” functionality. Thanks to this, your customers could send you not only a simple issue with a description but also some additional data from fields that you defined. On issues you can add up to six custom fields.
A requested feature was to display also event hours in the results of the search events page, and its done.
The release includes also some bugfixes:
- bug fix in the project summary web part.
- bug fix in the generated iCal file from the Teamwork agenda
You can download this release here;
This release does not include schema changes.
Teamwork is made with these books
A blog post on the books in Open Lab: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2010/03/01/some-books-helpful-for-product-development-and-marketing/
Download Teamwork ready and running in a VMware
Not all companies have Java expert IT admins. And even if they have, most companies don’t have time to spend in installing evaluation software. Well, a simple solution is to use online demos. But in the case of Teamwork, this can mean limiting the evaluation, as many IT-integration tasks cannot be carried through using the online demo, and also all the administrative tasks are disabled in the demo case.
In order to simplify evaluation and deployment, we have prepared a complete Vmware image – for both 64bit and 32bit servers – which you can download and use as Teamwork server. It runs a Debian operating system with Apache Tomcat and includes a pre-configured PostgreSQL instance.
In order to use Teamwork, you just have to launch the VM and point the browsers to it – no config needed. The only configuration step we suggest to do as soon as your image is running is inserting the free 30 days demo license.
