Archive for the ‘project management’ Category
How do I begin project management?
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 released: a major free upgrade
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.
A critical moment: choosing or changing a project management tool
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’s philosophy: a short story
There were once two brothers and a sister, and they were managers at three companies.
The first brother was called Micro Manager, and he picked the most complex and integrated management tools, which were entrenched in the technical staff IDEs and into all their network activity, so that not a single line of code could be written without it being carefully logged. Not an hour could pass without justifying time spent; not a file could be opened without explaining why. Not a project could be created without designing a 100 leafed Gantt. And after a week everybody hated the system, and then they hated Micro Manager, and everybody was unhappy.
The second brother was called Over Simplify, and he didn’t want any kind of management apart from to-do lists. And everybody just had to-do lists, and for the first week everybody was happy. Then many started having long to-do lists, and some started worshipping them, and instead of working, they were compiling longer and longer personal to-do list. And every list was different from any other, and nobody knew what, when, how, and why, and everything was in a mess. And then they hated Over Simplify, and everybody was unhappy.
Their sister was called Reasonable Modesty, and she had minimal goals, had always clear that what matters is how people work and interact, and that software is always secondary, and should be flexible, not do too much, and not get in the way. She started evaluating Teamwork.
Doing better than the usual project management software?
How can we improve Teamwork, and more in general, how can we help people and teams manage their work better and better?
Teamwork today is a stable, well known and widely used application – its sales getting better every month. We are always improving it and searching for new ways to make it better. The feedback given by users through the feedback service and the answers Q&A gives us a lot of ideas.
But people’s way of work change evolve all the time. With software we should try to foresee changes, and in the case of structuring work, be compatible with new ways of working. Now, project and work management is a field where there is a lot of competing software, and new solutions are created quite often. So in the last weeks I checked competitors for new ideas and evolution that would cover the recent trends in ways of working, like for example having the browser as the “operating system” where more and more applications operate, and so in many organizations a considerable amount of activity is on applications in the browser. Yes, of course Teamwork is web based, but one can do much more than that today. New ways of working need new ideas, sometimes radically new ones. Is anyone proposing different models, or reacting to new working ways?
Well, to my surprise, no. The same mistakes are simply repeated, again and again, like trying to “trap” user communication flows and other user usages in the project / work management software; development is done under wrong beliefs like “using e-mail is wrong, and users should be ‘educated’ to centralized communication systems”. Such tasks are destined to fail: it is simply assumed that users will happily and daily spend a considerable and growing amount of time on your specialized project / work management application because of their stakanovistic dedication to organization, which is the opposite of what is happening: people use more and more different, specialized applications for their tasks, and dislike and refuse single, centralized “monster apps” which attempt to replace all others.
In my review of “solutions” I’ve even seen a specific content manager connected to a popular issue tracking system that offers users a blogging platform. Now, how likely is that? How happy will employees be of being forced to blog in that corner of the bizarre issue tracking software instead of using their preferred blogging platform? This kind of ideas just don’t make sense: you have to improve work management without directly impacting software usage, and without trying to replace high quality specialized solutions with centralized (low quality) ones.
We have learned a minimalistic, relational approach and deposited it in Teamwork years ago. Now what about going beyond that? Well, no concept evolution is happening in direct competitors.
So in my search, I ended looking at personal productivity software, after seeing this nice presentation by Scott Hanselman, and there indeed there are some original ideas; consider for example Evernote ©.
The high level of interactivity, openness to devices and compatibility with user habits of this application is striking. The aim of Evernote seems not as much managing work, as simply collecting notes for personal usage. But there is a lot of stuff to look and learn. And many users will start work management from a personal perspective, and then will try to propose it as a shared approach: I believe this is a path that currently lacks appropriate tool support. There is a divide between project / work management tools and personal productivity ones that should not be there. On one side project / work management tools still pursue the centralized application option, on the other the sharing features of personal productivity tools are weak.
So we decided to open an experimental platform where to try and test different approaches to managing work, in particular starting from the personal / to-do point of view. In the meantime, Teamwork will keep evolving and improving, eventually getting new features and improvements from this experimental platform. We will blog about our experiments here in the coming months. If you any suggestion to make, post it on the feedback service: thanks!
P.S. Teamwork release 4.4 should be out in a couple of weeks (a free upgrade to all users of version 4), and will introduce the notion of “public” project – keep in touch.
Open Lab and Teamwork are not associated with Evernote in any form.
Teamwork release 4.3 available for download
A free upgrade release for all users of version 4.0-4.2, this release includes some major extensions of functionality; while there is no “revolution”, this kind of release makes your “Teamwork life” more comfortable. Several features requests from the feedback service have been fulfilled. Also the user guide has been updated.
Download this release here.
Multi-Gantt support
This was motivated by this request: “Manage graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects”. We then realized that all it needed was the filtering power of projects search together with a Gantt style visualization. So this is what we’ve done: we added an additioanl visualization of the search results. So for example you can see all your root open project closing in 2 weeks in a Gantt style view.
Also all the Gantt scales have been extended to 5 years.
Import from CSV – Bugzilla
Import of issues and resources from CSV files: issues get imported from the Bugzilla CSV export format, but of course in this way you can import from anything.
Collapsible project trees
Projects trees can be collapsed and there are options to keep them open by default etc. . This was this request; thanks to Halil for the first implementation.
More Twitter integrations
Twitter integration with any action and there is a new portlet for filtering tweets on any topic: see the user guide, section 8.3.3.
Little improvements
- All notifications have in the subject the task they refer to, if it exists (this request).
- Display log on descendants (this request).
- Balloons have no more the confusing Roman number.
- Use darker gray on Gantt duration background – better prints.
- Search analysis worklog: make the field “action” larger.
- In resource list there is no more the bothering default filter by company.
- Snapshot of a task can be edited.
- Search analysis worklog: make the column “action” larger.
- Issue multi editor: if there is a task on the issue and you have an assignment on it, let the watch icon appear even if the issue is not assigned to you.
- Experimental: supporting SSL over LDAP (LDAPS)
Bug fixes
- Issues didn’t get indexed any more for full text search.
- Order in company news doesn’t work.
- Portlet news doesn’t show news ordered by order factor.
- Resource hourly cost sometimes gets set to zero.
- Meeting: drag&drop multi editor doesn’t work for the just inserted.
- The link to resource drawn by the smart combo if the resource is from another area on which you have no right you see the link but you get an error.
- Search of a string containing ” in issues looped the application.
- Sometimes the rollover menu opened in the wrong direction.
- If you change the allowed file storage roots, disable links to old locations.
Technical notes for upgrade
This release build is 11250; it contains no database schema changes for all users of 4.2.10080 and following. As it contains an issue full-text indexing fix, you should reindex your data: see 17.4 of the user guide.
| try darker gray on gantt duration background |
New multi Gantt support
Forthcoming Teamwork 4.3 release will support a way of “managing a graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects“, actually, more than this: simply any filter on the project list can be seen in a Gantt-like way, and also printed. The need for this new implementation was suggested on our feedback service and got many votes from our users.
Until now the powerful search filter, which lets you compose complex search criteria, gives as result a simple list of tasks. From 4.3 Teamwork will layout the results also in Gantt graphical style. In the picture below you see an example of it.

Gantt view for Teamwork task's list
In the example above I’ve searched all the active tasks opened after the first of June and with a progress over 50%. Simply picking the “view as Gantt” button I’ve changed the view modality in order to compare the filtered tasks in time.
This cross-project comparison in a unified view is practically impossible (in Microsoft Projects, insert as subprojects etc.) in file-based project management, it is easily accessible in Teamwork instead.
The result of the search will be shown in temporal interval which goes from the minimum start date to the maximum end date, in order to cover all the tasks filtered and to get a global timeline view. Also progress andmilestones are shown. Moreover this page includes the possibility to move in time and to change scale.
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So we keep implementing requests from our feedback service: thanks for the ideas, keep voting there!
What you get with Teamwork and what you don’t
Some project management applications provide minimal functionality: just a Gantt drawer. Some, more groupware oriented, provide a vast spectrum, including e-mail and chatting. While developing Teamwork, we made several choices about what to include and what not. The choice for Teamwork has been guided by this simple princliple: include only what will not sharply conflict with acquired user habits, and will have a rich integration with the rest of the system.
Examples of what we did include:
- “boards”
- sticky notes
- to-dos
- a calendar
All these have a natural integration with project management, bringing together personal and team management. So we put them together in a unique, integrated solution; you don’t have to get three separated products from us to get this functionality.
Examples of what we didn’t include:
- e-mail client
- chat services
- file management
The three integrations above are probably used by most in standard ways, and happily too: you are not going to change those user habits with the new project management software; so the work we have and are doing is to integrate with the existing applications, as smoothly as possible.
Notice also that probably most users already have a calendar application, and others that may overlap with what we provided built-in, and for that we are working so hard in extending seamless integrability (most previous posts talk about this in fact).
Current and future developments
This is for the actual situation; but usage of the web is evolving all the time, and more integrations are now needed: in Teamwork we always assumed that the contents and documents related to projects and work which would not be articulated in tasks, issues and to-dos would be handled by other document management software, and then somehow connected to projects (say for example with file storages). But with wiki and blogs, content is more and more inserted directly online, and we should support this also inside Teamwork. One can currently do this by simply creating custom portlets connected to a Wiki service. But as with most of our solutions, we would like something organically integrated with the rest of Teamwork functionality; for example, content editing would naturally blend with exposure of Teamwork objects to REST and similar services, and in-place customizations of pages. So this is one of the (non trivial) directions we are now exploring.
If there is an organic integration that we are missing, just post it on our feedback service!
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Simplistic cost/benefit evaluations of organizational tools adoption
I’ve recently received yet another request of a cost-benefit analysis given by the adoption of Teamwork, in general, of project and groupware management software. Not always in those exact terms, but we do periodically receive such requests. One may rephrase the question as “what is the exact economical gain given by adopting Teamwork”?
Very superficially, this looks like a clear question, which requires an exact answer. Let’s take a closer look.
What does it mean “adopting Teamwork”? If one takes even a cursory look at Teamwork user guide, one should quickly realize that for a tool that can integrate at so many different levels with IT infrastructure, this may mean all sorts of different things: one may be handling just high level projects, sharing them on the web, or one may have integrated it from intranet authentication and certification forms, following every little action in the company.
One may be using the exchange function with Subversion, Google calendars and Twitter, so even the boundaries between what is done in the company by Teamwork and what is done by other applications is blurred. So “adopting Teamwork” has different meanings for each adoption process.
But there is an even bigger conceptual mistake that is lingering here, given by the first part of the question, “exact economical gain”: i.e. that taking steps in improving quality of work, by implementing software aided organizational procedures, is a purely economical gain that can be accounted for say is a year after the reorganization. Anybody that has experience in reorganization and working on quality of work and communication knows that consequences cannot be evaluated so simplistically, though they can be great, and span an entire work life.
This said, the benefit that one will have basically depends on the plan and determination of the leader that is introducing innovation, by her/his culture, open mindedness and experience in the field and in human relationship, and the respect that she gets from the team; and we believe that in some cases (not all), Teamwork can be of help for such individuals, more structured help than just a to-do list shared online. But don’t ask us to fool you with numbers thrown at random; you should probably be very suspicious of vendors that promise X% “gains in efficiency” by doing this or that. Our customer list is partly public, the best way is to ask them, and everybody will give a different answer. Just my two cents.
Pietro Polsinelli
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