Commitment, that’s what makes teams work, and lets teams work together. Actually, it’s commitments, which is why Milestone Planner is a commitment management system, at its heart. What are my commitments? Who have I made them to? When am I expecting to meet them?

We’re All Connected

People talk a lot about “social graphs” these days, at least we do here in the SocialOptic offices! Who is connected to who. We also talk about the “commitment graph” – how do all of the different commitments in the organisation link together, and how do you keep them together, with the constant juggling that happens in today’s world. That’s what we are here to help with, even when it’s complicated.

In the words of Paul Simon “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” we often “back off” our commitments on to others, just as others are depending on us. You’re producing a report for the boss, and I’m creating a graph for your report. You’ll need my graph before you can submit your report. In planning terms, that’s a dependency, and it’s something that Milestone Planner has always handled.

I Know You’re Depending on Me

We have made juggling commitments even more powerful, and hopefully simpler too. Let’s go back to that report we were working on together. Create a milestone for the report, then set the date. Next, create an action in the milestone for me. You’ll notice that the action picks up the date of the milestone. What is new is that you can see that the action is currently ‘not planned’, but that it is expected by the date you set. When I next come in to Milestone Planner, I’ll see the new action on my dashboard. It starts as ‘provisional’, so the first thing I do is ‘accept’ it. Now, I can leave the date as it is, or I can plan when I will do it.

Simply Done

That’s it. Now you can go back to the action any time and see when I’m planning to have the report to you. You can even add a comment to the action if you want, by clicking on the speech bubble.