Last year’s FranklinkCovey survey of the top 10 New Year’s resolutions is little changed from the previous year, with most of us still circling around the same things. Specially, the top 5 last year was:

1. Become more physically fit
2. Improve financial condition
3. Improve health
4. Lose weight
5. Read more

So, what’s the plan? We’ve got an app for that… Milestone Planner is free for a single plan, which is all you need for tracking your personal goals (although if you want to treat yourself to the Professional Edition that would make our day, and it won’t break the bank!).

Create a ‘workstream‘ for each of your goals (or New Year’s resolutions), then set milestones in each stream that track your progress towards that goal. Breaking it down into specific steps, with a deadline for each step (which is what a milestone really is) is a great way to chunk your goal down into manageable bit. Later, you can come back to the plan and on the dashboard, milestone or ‘do‘ pages, break things down even further by adding actions (specific tasks) against each milestone. If you don’t check in our your plan for a while, and a milestone is due, we’ll send you a gentle nudge. If your plans change, just click and drag the milestone to a new date.

If you are familiar with GTD, you are essentially asking yourself “What’s the next action?” towards achieving each milestone. You’ll end up with what seems like lots of milestones and actions, but you’ll have spread them over time to make them achievable. The review feature graphs your progress, and you can export your plan, or share it with other people if you want.

I might be biased, but I think it’s great for tracking goals and making sure you follow up on those new year’s resolutions.

You might also want to read Simon Jordan’s post on making a plan. Which encourages you to think of the big picture:

• VISION
• MISSION
• OBJECTIVES
• STRATEGY
• PLANS

Where do you want to get to? That’s your vision. How are you going to get there, what’s the journey, why are you taking it? That’s your mission. The objectives are the markers you set, so that you know you are on your way. Please do vote for Milestone Planner, and let us know how you get on!

A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal.

John Rusk describes how they work in his post – Agile Charts - which is over 6 years old, but still up to date today. Now, not everyone likes burn down graphs - they do have some very definite limitations. In Milestone Planner, Milestones have a status beyond just completed or open, and as we are tracking an entire project, so we have to deal with things like changes in scope (adding and removing milestones), and down the line, we also want to show the earned-value in the project (see “Earned-value and Burn Charts” by Alistair Cockburn).

Burn-up charts are the mirror image of burn-down charts, and are much better suited for charting the progress of an entire project. As the name implies, they are line an upside down version of a burn-down graph. Being the other way up let’s them display different types of status, and any changes in scope show up as changes on the top line. If you are interested, you can get more of an idea about how they compare by reading David Anderson’s “Managing with Cumulative Flow Diagrams“, or see how burn-up charts can be used to show bottlenecks in  Juurgen Appelo’s take. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an example of a burn-up graph from Milestone Planner (we call it a progress graph – didn’t wan’t to get the health and safety folk all hot under the collar with talk of fires):

But the image is only part of the picture, as it were (not doing so well with metaphors today). From left to right, we can see how the project suddenly grows in scope (number of milestones) half way through, and we can see a steady difference between work completed, in blue, and the target completion, shown as ‘missed’ in light blue. But because we track the full history of the plan, we can also show how these estimates have changed over the course of the project. Watch this video from Jim to see what we mean:

Slightly mind bending stuff, but we hope, after a little explanation, that it makes sense. As ever, the best way is to dive in and try it for yourself. You’ll need to run your project for a few weeks to really see how the progress graph works. We hope that it gives you a better view of how your project is going, and helps you stay on track!

We’ve found that much of the trick of successful project management is helping people to make clear commitments, which are visible to the entire team, and then doing everything you can to help them achieve that.

One of the simplest ways to make commitments and progress visible is schedule regular time to review these with the team.

Assuming that you’ll be meeting weekly, there are three questions you need to address at that weekly review…

• What did we plan to do this week?
• What actually happened this week?
• What re-planning is required to take account of this weeks events?

So to prepare for the weekly meeting, list each of the key milestones and actions that the team agreed to deliver in the last seven days, and get updates from each of the team members on the status of each of these (you can do this in the meeting, but its a much better use of time to begin the meeting with all of the facts already documented). Use the time in the meeting to address the “why’s” of any issues, then move onto re-planning where you need to and setting out the key milestones and action for the next seven days.

Of course. if you are using milestone planner with your team then we’ve already done all of the meeting preparation for you. If you make sure you and your team update actions and milestones as they happen, then you’ll find an up-to-date weekly report under the ‘review’ tab for your plan. It contains all of the facts you’ll need to run a really effective weekly team get together…. if you want to send the info out in advance then theres an option to automatically generate a pdf document which you can send out to your team.

So if you want to help your team get more done and be super organised get those weekly sessions in the diary today.

Switching Plans is now easier. You’ll see an ‘Active Plans’ Tab at the top of the page. Clicking on this will pull down a list of all of your active plans which you can then choose from.

We’ve added a ‘Review Page’ which contains two useful reports which look back at the history of your project over the last week.

New Report Page

The Status report is designed to be helpful input to team meetings. It will show you all of the milestones which are overdue; all of the milestones that were supposed to be completed in the last seven days and all of the milestones your team has committed to completing over the next seven days. You can download it as a pdf to send around to your team and form the agenda for your weekly team progress updates.

The Activity report does what it says on the tin. It shows you all of the activity that has happened on your project over the last week, which actions have been assigned, started or completed and which milestones have changed.

Improved Search

Our professional users will notice we’ve moved the search box to the top right hand corner of the screen, but as well as this we have improved it. It now shows plans, workstreams, milestones, and actions as you type, making it super-easy to find the thing you are looking for.

In addition we’ve made lots of small tweaks to the look and feel – see if you can spot them. As always we’re really happy to hear your feedback on the changes – just click the feedback button at the bottom of the screen

There are a few different ways to add a Milestone Planner calendar, but here is one example… Sign in to your Google Calendar. On the left hand side you’ll see that you can add other calendars. Click add, then click add by URL (yes, it is a little bit tucked away in there!).

Next, sign in to Milestone Planner and head to the projects / plans page. You will see a feed icon and a calendar icon by each project. Click on the calendar icon and copy the url that comes up (or depending on your browser, right click and select ‘copy this link’). Pop back over to Google Calendar and paste than link in and confirm adding the new calendar. That’s it, you’re done. Now, whenever the plan is updated (and a milestone moves), the milestone will change automatically in your calendar.

By the way, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of project updates in Google Reader as well. The updates feed gives a step by step account of changes to the plan, as they happen.

Happy planning!

Milestones, sorted

Firstly, the milestones page now has a lot more functionality: you can sort milestones by date (as you always could), by status (blue, green, etc…), by owner, by workstream, or by the date that they were last updated. And, of course, you can still filter by the owner and milestone status. Its pretty nippy, and very, very mobile web browser friendly. You can now slice and dice your project in all sorts of ways – sometimes a different perspective helps you see the way to move things along.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Sometimes you love to have the activity stream, and other times you don’t need it. The activity stream gives you another way to navigate around your project plan, and also allows you to see the history of each item, but sometimes you don’t need that. Now you have a choice of having it hidden or showing, by using the little tag at the top to hide it or make it re-appear. When you click to the next page, it will stay hidden or showing. You should find this useful if you are doing your planning on a smaller screen or on a tablet device.

A bit of a tidy

We’ve tidied up the layout of milestones and actions, to make them a bit easier to read, as well as fixing which actions get displayed under a milestone, according to who you are focussed on. We’ve tidied other aspects of the layout to allow it to work on smaller screens in the desktop world too.

Kanban can do

The action kanban is now also much more dynamic and shows the full set of actions, in the Professional Editon. You can view actions by person, and focus the view of actions down to a certain number of days.

Over to you…

We very much hope you enjoy the changes, and welcome your feedback and suggestions as always! Milestone Planner is now in the Google Chrome store, so if you are a Chrome user, please do leave us a review! Don’t forget to explore Milestone Planner’s other features – have you checked out the activity and status reports in the plans view, or tried the RSS and Calendar feeds?

There was a flow and a pace to her work. She was lost in concentration, unaware of the onlookers and clearly enjoying what she was doing. The white paper was rapidly transforming into an intriguing backdrop. Had I arrived a few days later, I probably would have walked right past and not given it a second thought. Being there during the construction gave me the opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the process, the beauty of the work, not just the outcome.

A different perspective, a different outcome.

Using different perspectives to change things obviously isn’t a new idea. Much of my study time at the moment is spent in the depths of Social Psychology. It is an academic field with all the challenges of working between two disciplines (Sociology and Psychology) and bears the scars of long fought battles about the nature and position of ‘the person’. These differences have lead to distinctly different perspectives, and different methods associated with them. The way that we see reality, and the tools that we use to access it, actually change our reality, as they shift our attitudes and our behaviours.

The same applies to work, and the way that we perceive and frame it. Management science comes from a tradition that centered on ‘piece work’ in the manufacturing world. Frederick Winslow Taylor and the other founding fathers focused on how work could be optimised – increasing flow rates and output. Inherent in that thinking were the assumptions that:

• Work is well defined and repeatable
  • The exact specifications of the work are known at the outset.
  • Production can be simplified.
  • There is a mass market.
• People are ‘standard resources’
  • All resources (people) are nominally equal and substitutable.
  • There is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ equate to fast and slow.
  • Resources ‘soldier‘ – workers are lazy, not autonomous, and do not self actualise.
• Workers act as individuals, not as groups
  • Individual pay is the primary motivation.
  • Workers must co-ordinated, work must be individualised.

Now, I don’t know about your work and your teams, but mine aren’t like that. However, I do recognise that style of management (although not around these parts!). Just like the window dresser in the picture, knowledge-based businesses, and the workers in them, operate in a world where the exact specifications of the work are often not known at the outset. People are often passionate about their work and do not ‘soldier’ – they find flow, they push boundaries, they want to learn and discover. They also don’t work alone – even when it looks as if they do.

I am sure that if that person in the shop window had been given numbered instructions that said ‘pick up brush’, ‘dip in paint’, ‘draw circle 300mm’, ‘draw another circle  of 57mm next to the circle’, ‘repeat 400 times’ the result wouldn’t have been the lovely backdrop that emerged. When I was working in Asia, and in Africa, I saw art produced that way – cheaply and at volume. Sadly, a huge amount of physical work went in to creating artefacts that had little commercial value. The majority of the products our businesses produce are not mass market, their value rests in their uniqueness. Just as significantly, the process of the work, once mechanised, was far less enjoyable, both for the artist and for the observer. That leads me on to the third assumption… That work is done as individuals in groups, rather than groups containing individuals.

Social Psychology, whichever of its perspectives you choose to follow, asserts and demonstrates that no person is an island (to un paraphrase that song). We are impacted by those that work around us. Most obviously by their work (ie their output), but also by their attitudes and demeanor. I can’t remember meeting someone who had autonomy in their role for many, many years. In a world of matrix management, virtual teams, and cross-disciplinary working, we constantly rely on the input and actions of other people to ‘get the job done’. In the knowledge-based world it is all about the group, not the individual.

Kurt Lewin and others recognised the importance and effect of the interactions between people. The friction between workers and managers is friction in the process of work itself. Even more so in knowledge-based business, where much of what happens is dependent on the discretionary effort of individuals. Those touch points are typically commitments – “you need this from me” or “I need this from you”. Work can be defined as a series of commitments, the final one representing an end goal. In the case of the window dresser, that might have been articulated as the delivery of a captivating window display, that was sympathetic to the ‘brand values’ of the shop.

However, even the most beautiful of work can be made ugly by reducing it to a list of inflexible work items to be done by anyone, with a minimum of discretionary effort and no personal interaction… Rather than minimising interactions, maximise them, and rather than over specifying the way to do something, under specify it, but set expectations about the value and purpose of the results.

Milestone Planner was built as a way for teams to work together in outcome-based, commitment lead environments. Having a place to track commitments (large ones as Milestones and smaller ones as Actions) leaves our minds free to get on with quality work (rather than fretting about who needs what by when). And having work defined in terms of outcomes enables us to use our skill and creativity to get the very best results.

Work can be beautiful. More than that it should be beautiful. It needs to be, in order to get the best from any team. Google makes the work place beautiful, by providing amazing facilities to its employees, other businesses focus on amazing problems that satisfy people’s personal need to make a difference. The challenge for every business leader is to make work more beautiful.

This week we’ve introduced a couple of new things…

For brand-new users we have built some simple ‘getting started’ templates that can be chosen when you sign up. We’re hoping that being able to choose a pre-built project to ‘play’ with will give people a real head-start in building their own plans.

We’ve also made some changes to how how you can interact with workstreams. I’ve explained what we’ve done in this super-short video.

While we’re on the subject of workstreams, I’ll also mention something we introduced a while back – each workstream now shows you how complete it is. As you complete milestones, you’ll notice two things happening… firstly, the little circle to the left of the workstream title starts being filled in… secondly, a blue line is drawn across the top of the workstream to show you how far through you are. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted that theres a little yellow line that moves along the timeline to show you where the next milestone you are responsible for is.

Hope you find this week’s tweaks useful!

The first approach is where someone locks themselves in a darkened room with some ‘gantt chart software’… they think about the sequence of tasks; they phone people up and say “how long will it take to make a “; they work out all of the intricate dependencies. Some time later they emerge with a massive file of paperwork which contains ‘the plan’.

The second approach is where a team get together in a room and work out what needs to be delivered, roughly when things are required and who is going to get on and do them. Usually there is lots of scribbling on whiteboards – the plan may not be nicely wrapped up in a document, but is more likely a collection of phone-snapped pictures of flipcharts and whiteboards.

So which one is best?

Of course, the answer is… it depends.

Next time you need to make a plan answer these two questions…

* Can I precisely describe the ‘thing’ this project is meant to deliver?
* Have the people I’ll be working with delivered one of these ‘things’ before?

If the answer is a resounding YES to both of these then you can stop reading now – go and find a darkened room and start making gantt charts.

If you’re not so sure you can answer yes to both of these questions, then its time to book a meeting room…

Here are four questions to tackle with your team. Don’t worry about getting them exactly right first time – it may take a few iterations before things become completely clear.

Why is this thing so important that we going to spend lots of time, energy and money on delivering it?

Sometimes grown-up organisations call this ‘The Business Case’ and make you jump through all sorts of hoops to have it ‘approved’. However, the real reason for answering this question is that it starts to shape the approach you are going to take to the project. Are you going to go out of business if you don’t deliver? Will doing this increase the number of customers you have? Will it reduce costs? Will it be fun and exciting? etc

How will we know when the ‘thing’ is finished?

This one needs some imagination, but its important. By working out – if you like – the ‘test criteria’ for your project you are moving toward defining the outcome (which is a handy thing to know). So it could be… “at the end of the project we’ll count the number of widgets we make per day and that number will be twice as big as it is now” or “we’ll have released a new version of our software to all our customers with no additional calls to our support centre”… and/or “our boss will be so delighted that we’ll all be taken out for a massive celebratory dinner”

What are the smaller ‘things’ that we know we need to finish the bigger ‘thing’ AND Who is going to get/buy/make each of the ‘things’ by when?

OK its a big long question, but this is the one that’s going to make stuff happen. Break the project down into chunks. If you don’t know what all the chunks are right now, then at least you’ll identify some things that you can get on with while you are working out what the rest of the chunks are. For each chunk have an initial stab at who is going to be delivering it and when it’s going to be needed by. Don’t worry too much about getting dates right first time – as your plan starts to take shape you’ll want to shuffle dates around anyway.

Write this up somewhere – a flipchart or whiteboard with post-its that you can move around will work. Even better (and here’s a plug) use Milestone Planner with a projector and start putting each of the chunks on the timeline as Milestones. With everyone looking at the same screen its then easy to assign people to milestones and move things around on the timeline as you work out what needs to happen. (As a bonus, at at the end of the meeting, Milestone Planner can send you a pic of your plan which you can then circulate to everyone so that everyone stays on the same page !!)

What are we going to do when stuff goes wrong?

Anyone who thinks that reality will pan out exactly like the plan is kidding themselves. Use some of your workshop time to ask ‘What if…?’ type questions. Try and get a feel for where the risky areas of the project might be and start to work out what your response might be.

Wrapping Up

Its important to document the answers you got to… and agree what the next steps are.

If you’re lucky and you’ve got to the point where all the answers are clear you might want to ‘write it up’ into some impressive document. If things are still fluid then it might be better just to take lots of photo’s of the flipcharts and whiteboards and send them around to everyone. Of course if you’ve used Milestone Planner you could just invite everyone to the plan and ask them to update their milestones as they work on them!

There’s a simple answer to the problem, of course, and it’s a simple answer with 2 parts:

1) Set Milestones.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? Creating a check list of the items required, then creating milestones for each of them, according to when the items become available, is a simple way to break the process into manageable little chunks. UK  self assessment tax returns are due, online, by midnight on Monday 31 January. The deadline is only later if you received the letter telling you to complete it after 31 October. There are only a few cases where HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) accepts filing other than online, so for most people this is the deadline. If you are due a refund, you’ll probably want to submit it as soon as you can – the old October deadline is a good one! The documents you need for a tax return become gradually available throughout the year.

2) An (orderly) File.

Collect each item, for example your P60 and P11D, or bank interest statements, as they arrive and drop them into a single file. If you are a bit of a paper-free fanatic, you might want to scan them into your computer and save the files into a single folder there. Then, when you come to file on-line, or using your software of choice, you’ll have all of the information to hand in one place.

We’ve created a simple template plan for UK tax filings:

If you have any feedback or suggestions on it, do let us know. If you are a Milestone Planner user, drop us a note via the feedback form, and we’ll send you a link to add a copy of the template to your plans. If you aren’t yet a Milestone Planner user, just create an account via this link and we’ll send you details once your account is created.

The template is free, gratis – we hope it helps people have a less stressful tax return for this year!

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This is a 101 on how to make those promises last. It was prompted by a tweet from the man behind Thinking Digital, Herb Kim, and from reading a piece in The Times of India, of all places.

“A study has found that most people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them within one week of starting.”

Well, we’ve got to do something about that before it’s too late haven’t we?!? John Norcross, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, says that the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions probably began with the ancient Romans, who would “make promises of good conduct to Janus, the two-faced deity who looked both backward and forward” and presided over beginnings and endings. I’ll come back to professor Norcross in a bit, but first, a quick think about those resolutions…

You Resolved to Do What?

New Year’s resolutions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Every year, the FranklinCovey group conducts a survey of its customers’ resolutions. This year is the 5th, and although the 1,007 respondents are in the US, the patterns in the top 10 are globally recognisable:

1. Improve financial situation.
2. Lose weight.
3. Develop a healthy habit (e.g. healthy eating, exercise).
4. Change employment.
5. Develop a regular savings plan.
6. Break an unhealthy habit (e.g. smoking, alcohol, overeating).
7. Spend more time with family and friends.
8. Other.
9. Get organized.
10. Develop a new skill or talent.

It has shuffled around a little since last year (when “get organized” was at number 4), but the pattern is the same. The goals are about achieving something, doing something, changing a behaviour, making a habit or breaking a habit. Those are distinctly different types of challenge, with different ways of reaching them.

How Are You Going to Do That?

eHow has a rather nice article on making resolutions stick, which boils down to this:

• Revisit your goals regularly.
• Think about the process as well as the goal itself.
• String goals along a timeline.
• Set yourself a reward.

You knew I couldn’t go too far into this post without mentioning Milestone Planner didn’t you? Having a place to write down your goals and a way of charting progress towards them on a timeline is a basic essential – that’s why you can do that even with a free guest account (but as it’s the New Year you should treat yourself to at least a trial of the professional edition ;) ). This time last year, we wrote a post about building a plan for the year. It’s still one of the most popular ones on the blog.

If your resolution is an outcome, which is not a bad starting point, then think about the process and specific actions that will make it happen. In Milestone Planner, goals live at the end of a workstream, milestones plot the key events on the way to achieving them, and milestones can be broken down into actions.

Why do people abandon resolutions? Often we’re discouraged when results aren’t immediate, or  satisfying. Change requires a sustained effort and commitment, and it is all too easy to procrastinate and put things off until ‘tomorrow’, so MAKE A START NOW! Sorry about the caps lock there, but now really is the best time – login, fire up the timeline, click and add your goals, then add the first action for each of the milestones you create.

Keep on Going

There’s a little bit of controversy on this next bit. I said that I would come back to professor Norcross, and I haven’t mentioned Herb’s tweet yet. The tweet was to a TED talk by Derek Sivers, where he advocates keeping your goals to yourself. I have to completely disagree with him. He cites a study by Gollwitzer in 2009 (this one in fact – pdf) that suggests that making goals public causes people to be less motivated to achieve them.

Gollwitzer’s study actually relates to identity-related behavioural intentions – an academic way of saying goals that relate to how you want to be seen. If you tell people that you want to be a doctor, then obviously you are going to feel a little bit like you have become a doctor, as you have taken a first step. The study is situation, and doesn’t look at the long-term effects of sharing

A long-term study by Richard Wiseman – who is also mentioned in that piece in The Times of India – suggests the opposite :- In his research telling others increased women’s chance of keeping resolutions by 10%. His participants benefited from family and friends encouraging them to stick to their goals, something that the 43things site majors on. In a piece in the tips section, author Lia Steakley Dicker suggests the following six tips:

• Be deliberate – rather than impulsive, goals made up on the spot aren’t often keepers.
• Leave the past behind - something Wiseman suggests too. Don’t be defined by past failures.
• Stay positive – It is easier to do something (new), than to stop doing something!
• Shorten the deadline – many sources suggest breaking the year down. How about 90 days, or a month at a time?
• Define the obstacles – preparing for challenges ahead of time will make them easier to overcome.
• Go public with your plans.

Back to Norcross; He says that those who “made a public commitment instead of a private decision to change” before New Year’s and were “genuinely confident that they could keep their resolution despite a few [inevitable] slips” were much more likely to succeed in the long run (you can hear him speaking about it on NPR in Radio 2008). Which leads me on to an important fact…

You Will Fail

A long-term study by the University of Washington found that only 40 percent of people who stick to their No. 1 resolution did it on the first try. The rest had to try multiple times; 17 percent finally reached their goal after more than 6 attempts.

Failure is just a small step on the journey to success. In the end your persistence will pay off – giving up is one of the biggest causes of failure! Plans are an aim, not an absolute. They can be amended, corrected and adjusted. If things go off track, accept the fact and adjust accordingly.

Changing behaviours – breaking old habits or creating new ones – is a long journey. One of the most well known approaches to change is the “Stages of Change” model, developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente in the late 70′s, as they studied ways to help people quit smoking. The model accepts that relapses are an inevitable part of the process of making a lifelong change.

Relapse is just a phase. You can read the full transtheoretical model on wikipedia – knock yourself out ;). The shortened version: Pick yourself up; Get back to your plan; Keep calm, and carry on.

“Not Just a Better Me, a Better Us”

The biggest goals are achieved when we work together. That’s why Milestone Planner is social software. It’s much more fun when we do things together with other people, they provide the support and resource that’s required to make big changes. Working in a team also means that you get to see how what you are doing fits into a bigger picture – something that all of the researchers mentioned here would probably agree is a good motivator.

Have a Successful Year!

What do you want? When do you want it? What are the steps towards making it happen? Start now!

If you are interested in reading more, I highly recommend Professor Wiseman’s  ”59 Seconds: Think A Little, Change A Lot” (Amazon UK, Amazon US) – and you are signed up to Milestone Planner, and about to build that plan aren’t you?

Jim and myself have been on the road for a couple of weeks, talking with new, existing and future users of Milestone Planner. We’ve learnt lots, and back at the office the coffee bill has gone down!

A lot of the new learning has gone into our latest release wave, now live, with more to come. I feel like we should call it the “shiny jazzy” release, even though it is mostly been about removing distractions, increasing the functionality and speeding the workflow of Milestone Planner – kind of a tall latte – all the coffee without the froth. Can you tell I haven’t had my morning coffee or put my headphones on yet? Anyway, here are the key changes:

Crisper Milestones and Actions

On the dashboard and milestone pages we have resigned the way milestones and actions are displayed. The new design is (hopefully!) much cleaner, clearer and more compact. That means you can see more at once, especially on netbooks and tablets with smaller screens that seem to be becoming more and more popular with road warriors.

The way dates are displayed has been enhanced too. The due date for milestones and actions is now highlighted when they are past due. It’s just a gentle reminder that the commitment needs to be renegotiated and adjusted – just click on the date.

Clearer Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great little bit of information that let you know where you are. At the top of each action and milestone we have a new “breadcrumb” design. The breadcrumb is designed so you can easily see which project, workstream and milestones each item belongs to – a little trail of context. Clicking on the breadcrumb will focus the activity stream on that it, so you can see what has been happening. On a milestone you can also click on the workstream name to move the milestone into another workstream.

Jazzier People Bar and Sleeper Activity Stream

The pictures in the people bar now have a name on them, to help identify those people who haven’t uploaded a profile picture yet – there’s always one! At least now you’ll have a name to identify them by. To upload a picture, simply click the ‘my account’ button at the bottom of the page, then click on the profile picture.

We have added a ‘view all users’ button on the people bar for milestones and dashboard views, in the professional edition. Clicking the icon will show the milestones and actions for all of the users in the project at once.

The clearer design extends to the Activity Stream, which now allows you to see more clearly who made what changes, and when. There is more space between items, and each change gets its own line.

Activity Reports – Phase I

If you’ve sign up to the tracking features (go to your account settings page), you’ll be able to preview our new activity reports, which show what has changed on a project between now any any given date that you choose.

Faster Dashboard

The dashboard now defaults to listing the first few most relevant items in each stack (this saves a few mouse clicks every day). Milestones and users that have had activity since you last logged in have a star by them, so you can check out changes at a glance.

Auto Extending Project Timeline

The concept of project length (in weeks) is now separated from the length of the timeline view. That’s a very technical way of saying “if you move a milestone beyond the end of the project, we’ll make room for it. Automatically.” The same happens if you click on the scroll right button, past the end of a project.

And more…

The appearance of the menu has been tweaked a little, there are some bandwidth optimisations to help with mobile and slow connections, and a more touch friendly display for ipads, ipods, iphones and touch screen phones.

Keep sending us feedback, inviting folks and requesting new features – talking to people about how they use Milestone Planner has really energised us. Lots more things coming very soon!

Last week we started to talk about the benefits of visualising your workload. Visual representations, because they are non-linear in nature, and because we can direct our eyes and focus, enable us to take in a huge amount of information quickly. It was interesting listening to Dan Boyd talking about his films this morning, and the challenges of big screen, versus small screen, versus a stage. Seeing, rather than just hearing things, or seeing a linear presentation of data, it much more under control of the control of the viewer. You choose where your eyes go, although the producer is guiding your gaze in many subtle ways.

What catches your eye in the word cloud above? Everyone will pick out something different, but a single visualisation gives a focal point for discussion and exploration that helps us come to a shared understanding. When you walk away from a (great!) conference like Likeminds, or from watching a film (as many did last night), it is ok for everyone to walk away with a different perspective and understanding. When you walk out from a management meeting or a planning session, you want everyone to walk out with the same understanding, even if they have different perspectives. That’s why you should create and share visualisations of your plans (the export feature in Milestone Planner is there for good reason!), and provoke discussions around them. Conversations surface differences, which can then be explored and resolved. That’s how people come to a shared understanding, and the right things get done.

There were some great discussions at this week’s TVSMC meet up about observing and visualising work, particularly in talking with Simon Bostock. The challenge is that “knowledge work” isn’t as visible as “traditional work.” If I am ploughing a field, it is pretty obvious when I am half way through, and it is also obvious to my boss that I’ve ploughed half a field – or not ploughed half, if you are a glass half-empty type! Knowledge work doesn’t play that way. There are some great insights via a post from Jim McGee, although I’d beg to differ on a few points. Specifically, I believe that social technology can help to restore the organisational learning that has been lost in the transition to knowledge working, and that we can actually visualise our workload.

Will You Get  it Done?

Since we added the new dashboard into Milestone Planner, I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way that I work, and view work. There’s a couple of powerful, but not immediately obvious, things about the three stacks: completed, in progress and not-started/upcoming. At the Milestones Level, I can tell if I am in trouble or not. In my dashboard here, it’s pretty obvious I am in trouble!

I’ve completed 5 milestones in the last week (the default range of the dashboard), I have 39 due now, and 33 due soon. So, my historical work rate is 5 milestones per week – If there are more than that upcoming in the next week, then I am clearly in a spot of bother! That’s assuming that the Milestones require the same level of effort of course, and here is where the second set of stacks comes it - actions. At the actions level I am doing pretty well. I’ve burnt my way through 34 actions in the last seven days, I am working on 18 in progress, and I have 48 not started. The ratio between completed and In Progress does suggest I’ve probably got a few too many on the go at once, and the ratio between the number of upcoming Milestones and actions not started suggests I might want to look at those upcoming Milestones and see if some of them need breaking down into actions.

There’s much more to do of course – and I don’t just mean my work! – but it is interesting how useful visualising our workload can be. Balancing what we have coming up, relative to what we have achieved, is a great way of compensating for the overconfidence bias that all of us have. We can offset how we overestimate our ability to predict future events, but looking at our past performance. Just because you believe that you can do it, doesn’t mean that you can. You really don’t want to end up like the guy in this video!

[Backstory on the video here, with kind thanks to tvsmc regular Alec Muffett, and to Jamillah Knowles]

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Milestone commitments to renegotiate!

Do Things Differently

Milestone Planner is about working more effectively, and has a very different approach (and philosophy) to ’1.0′ productivity software. Outcomes outperform activities. Purpose outperforms process. Deadlines outperform durations. Leadership and co-operation outperform command and control. Networked people outperform constraints and controls. So, what have we done? Here’s a quick video overview from Jim:

Actions over To Do’s

To Do’s are usually items without context, although good to do lists do have context, which helps to help prioritise and make sense of what’s in them. The real purpose of context is to ensure that our actions map to our goals (either personal or business). So, how are Actions in Milestone Planner different from what you might have seen with a To Do list before? Firstly, actions represent a commitment, either to yourself or someone else. Other things are fine, but they belong in a notepad or some form of idea store. Secondly, actions are created in a context –  they exist against a Milestone, inheriting it’s due date, and following it around.

Just like Milestones, Actions have an owner, but they also have a ‘supporter‘. The owner is the person who created the action. The supporter is the person it was assigned to, who is ‘supporting’ making it happen. The two may be one and the same of course. There’s nothing wrong with making and keeping commitments to yourself! Just like milestones, actions can be reassigned and edited in two clicks. If you are on a call or in a meeting, you can capture the meeting actions by clicking add action on a milestone, then simply type each action and kit enter – you don’t need to take your fingers off of the keyboard unless you want to assign them to someone else. It is super fast, enabling you to keep the flow of the meeting, and have a comprehensive action list at the end of it.

Actions have a status of  completed/done, started/in progress or not-started/backlog . This forms a basic personal kanban system, which you will see when you sign into the Milestone Planner dashboard. Kanban is something I’ve been big a fan of for a long time. If you want to know more about personal kanban, start with this presentation from Jim Benson (@ourfounder on Twitter), and check out the personal kanban site:

There have been hundreds of conversations that shaped the latest release of Milestone Planner. A huge thank you to everyone who’s taken time to speak with the SocialOptic team, dropped us emails, sent feedback or tweeted us. One conversation that stuck in my head is this one with Richard Maybury during a tvsmc meet up. I had my Zi-8 to had, so was able to catch it on camera:

Be productive, very productive! Keep the feedback coming, and thank you for inviting your friends and teams, and for keeping us healthy and growing! As we’ve been saying in the office all week: “ACTIONTASTIC!“

Spurred on by discussions and sessions at Over The Air, we have released a number of new features for Milestone Planner Mobile. You can now more easily log on from your mobile, and view Milestones. For phones with Javascript capable browsers and touch screens, you can also update Milestone status and dates, as well as adding notes and updates. You can now even invite people to a plan right from your mobile.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s talk at over the air was also a good reminder to us of the importance of openness for the success of the web, so we have started to formulate plans for an API to Milestone Planner. If you are interested in integrating what you are doing with Milestone Planner, then do please get in touch. And on a similar note, feel free to send us screen shots of Milestone Planner running on your device – it helps us work to create a better experience. We keep an eye on the #milestoneplanner tag on Twitter and Flickr – it’s always nice to see the great comments there. I rather like the look of Milestone Planner on the new Nokia E7 (thank you @ilicco!)

Milestone Planner running on the Nokia N900

The power of mobiles for productivity is the way they allow you to use the interstitial time in the day – A few spare moments waiting for the train, stuck in a lift or running between meetings – It’s all time that can be used to check in with your team, shoot off updates and re-plan on the fly. I found running Milestone Planner on the N900 a handy complement to planning sessions with a big screen and the laptop. The high resolution screen (for a mobile) and touch interface turns out to be a nifty combination for jabbing at Milestones and dragging things around. We’re building a list of things to do to improved the mobile experience. Not all handsets are able to fully run Milestone Planner, which takes me on to the sticky world of mobile application development…

On the web or on the handset?

For a long while I’ve strongly believed the future of mobiles is web-based applications (long before it was fashionable). In the past the glue of the web (HTML) was extremely limiting when it came to developing rich internet applications (RIAs) like Milestone Planner. However, this isn’t really the case anymore. With the advent of HTML5, and phones that run Javascript applications with decent performance, things are starting to change. There is something even bigger happening too: Flash is coming to the mobile screen. Nokia high-end handsets have had Flash for a while, and Andriod is joining in too. We might have a bit of a bias (the main timeline view in Milestone Planner is built in Flash), but it is a powerful way to build apps with rich user intefaces. Don’t think of those silly splash screens landing screens you get on marketing web sites, or the flash games that proliferate across the web, think serious business applications – Things like Milestone Planner, where there are hundreds of objects on the screen you can interact with. Apple might hate it, but flash is big news.

There is still a case for on handset development. If you use specific features of the handset, it’s the best way to get to them. I was at Nokia’s Ovi Developer event yesterday, and it was a good reminder of just what can be done on a handset. It’s something we’re still thinking about – e.g. integrating with the address book and calendar, and using sensors, location or messaging features in the phone. It’s a little less binary than just ‘on the handset’ versus ‘on the web’.Nokia positioned three sorts of mobile apps: Web Apps, Java Apps (on the phone, cross platform) and Native Apps (designed for the handset).

It’s a confusing world, but at the end of the day, what you want is something that works, where you are, when you need it. The mobile phone has a great opportunity to eat into the traditional domain of desktop computing. Many of us are ‘mobile in the office’ – meaning we aren’t desk bound – so even within the four walls of the office, mobile apps are important. So, rest assured, you’ll see more mobile features for Milestone Planner. The web interface already works with most mobile web browsers, and phones like Nokia’s can run the full app as it is today.

More or Less Milestone Detail

The button at the bottom right of the screen now lets you switch between three different levels of display:

• Milestones with all details (name, owner, status and date).
• Milestones with less detail (titles and status only).
• Milestones with no detail (status only).

Simply click the button to step through the different modes. Clicking to the lowest level of detail, and zooming right out (using the ‘max’ zoom button) now means that you can see most plans on a single page:

Which brings me on to another new addition: The time sweep now works backwards, and per workstream. You’ll notice that each workstream is slightly greyed out before the first and after the last milestones on each workstream, and that the area between the first milestone and the next milestone due is highlighted in blue. This makes it much easier to see how each workstream is progressing. You can still see the overall time sweep up in the date bar (just under the dates).

Focusing the Activity Stream

The Professional Edition’s Activity Stream could always be focused, by clicking on a milestone or workstream name, or on the image of anyone in the plan. Now this process also happens automatically. When you click on a milestone to edit it, or drag it to a new date, the activity stream will focus down on the history of that milestone. When you complete your change, it reverts back to showing all the recent changes in the plan. Similarly, when you edit a workstream, it will focus on the changes within that work stream.

As ever, feedback and suggestions welcome either here, via twitter, or via the usual feedback link!

“The first thing is: There is a presumption that entrepreneurship is about science and technology, whereas entrepreneurship, in large part, as far as I can tell, is about friction. It’s about collision. It’s about things running into each other. It’s about two people sparking off of one another, and not solely in the areas of science. In fact, I would say it is more so in the creative arts. One of the things that I really find quite astonishing, coming from California in particular, is the prediliction we have for assuming that the great new innovative entrepreneurs are in large part flowing out of universities, direct from the science labs, when in fact they are sneaking out of most of our art colleges, without any due regard for the any of the provenance that they might have…”

“…but I do know that entrepreneurship is largely successful when people collide. That is – and you guys are choosing to use the word collaboration, I would use other words that are slightly more violent, because I like to see people forced into an incubation, into collision with each other – because it is out of those creative tensions that interesting ideas come, and quite frankly functional projects; things that you can do something with.“

“Whether they are for a social entrepreneurial outcome, an artistic outcome, or an entrepreneurial outcome, it makes no difference. The goal is to take people who are wrapped up in their passion and to find ways to express that passion, whether it is through a social route, or through an economic route. And, interestingly enough, I believe that’s all entrepreneurship, because at the end of the day you cannot solely depend on others to bring things to the world, you have to bring things to the world yourselves.“

The bold text is my emphasis. Doug went on to talk about the newly launched C4CC, which you can read more about here. The big take away from the evening for me is that it is far too easy for us to forget how creative the process of business is. Businesses create – make if you must! – things; products and services. We often view that as a mechanical process, which it perhaps is for the mass manufacture of products, but the process of generating a new product or a knowledge-based service is essentially a ‘creative’ one, in the traditional sense of the word. That creativity is stimulated by collaboration. As Doug puts it, the sparks that come when people collide. The knack is to capture that creative spark, and harness it into a plan – a set of aims, objectives, commitments – that can be easily flexed and adapted.

Integrating creativity and process, that’s the entrepreneurial business, and what we are aiming for in Milestone Planner. Perhaps art and business aren’t so far apart after all.

I’m in Amsterdam, at Orange Business Live 2010 – An event Orange Business Services runs each year, looking at the challenges and changes in the communications space. At the pre-event evening event one thing that really struck me was the value in networking and networks. Not just the global data networks that have been built (and many of which Orange Business Services run), but the human networks that drive business, and the value of person-to-person communication.

The activity of meeting industry peers, exchanging ideas, and sharing experiences and challenges, is an intensely valuable one. It’s an interesting time for the CIOs here. While there is conversation about the place of machine-to-machine communication, the bigger buzz was about building the “human network” within the business, enabling people across the globe to work as if they were standing side-by-side.

Business agility is a key theme here. The speed of change today is phenomenal, to borrow an example from Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services: ”Days to a million” is shrinking. Apple took 724 days to sell a million devices with the first iPod, 74 days for the first iPhone, and just 3 days for the iPhone 2. Business has to move faster, react faster, make decisions faster. That means getting information around the organisation more quickly, but meaningfully.

“Gen Y” is becoming an increasing percentage of the work force, brining with them new expectations about connectivity and communication. A new generation of IT users is coming into the work place, and for them their first experience of IT was their mobile phone. It’s something that’s true from India to Europe.

From a SocialOptic perspective, this is not news. Milestone Planner has always been about building human networks with plans and people as nodes in that network. We’ve seen how rapidly human networks build, and how effectively information travels when it traverses across social graphs (human networks again!) rather than org charts. What is news it quite how quickly the shift is happening. You can see it in people’s faces as they interact with the blogging team. There’s curiosity, and less caution, about understanding social computing and what it can do for business.

Data networks’ value is in supporting the human network, and the most valuable software is that which joins the human network to the global network. Now, I might be a bit biased in that, but I challenge you to tell me that that isn’t so!

A Better Sense of History

Plans, as we call them in the app now – a nice, friendly short hand for projects – have always had a history. The basic version of Milestone Planner keeps a limited history, while the Professional Edition gives a full history. The activity stream makes this history easier to see, by displaying it across all milestones in the project. It is now quick and easy to see what has been happening since you last accessed the project.

Zoom in on an Aspect of the Plan

If you click on one of the gravatars (hovering over the image will show the person’s name) in the activity stream, it will zoom into just the updates made by that person or to Milestones they own. You will see a “show all” button at the top of the stream. Clicking on this zooms back out to the full view.

By Milestone or by Work Stream

The same idea works for milestones and work streams as well. If you click on a work stream name in the text boxes on the right hand side, the stream will zoom in to show just updates in that work stream. Clicking on a milestone title filters out all activity except changes to that one milestone. Again, clicking on “show all” at the stop of the stream zooms back out, removing all of the filters.

Simpler Hovers

The change has also allowed us to reduce the size of the hovers on milestones. When you rest the mouse pointer over a milestone in the time line, you will still see the most recent change. By clicking on the “show history” text, the activity stream will focus on that milestone, so you can see all of its changes clearly, or zoom back out to the full plan.

And it’s Real-Time Too

The activity stream is real-time. Each entry shows how long ago (in minutes, hours or days) the update was made, and if someone else is also updating the plan, the activity stream will notify you of those changes and can load them into the timeline. The Professional Edition receives changes more frequently than the basic version, but you still get the idea.

Happy planning – and let us know how you get on, either here, via twitter, or via the usual feedback link!

Today I am up at Thinking Digital, in Gateshead. The evidence that the digirati are here in force is that the conference tag – #TDC10 – was trending topic on Twitter. Jonathan Drori has just given a provocative talk on the on classic pitfalls of business relationships, and how to make them, or : “23 ways to mess up the relationship with your commissioner”.

For “commissioner” in his talk, you could substitute “customer”, “boss”, “investory” or many other business parties! The ‘not’ view is a great what of pointing out what you SHOULD do, starting with NOT doing these things:

• As a small organisation:
• 23. Go all the way on the first date – ask for money on the first meeting.
• 22. Only call at the top levels of the organisation.
• 21. Cloak your pitches in buzzwords, jargon and boss-speak.
• 20. Don’t support the commissioner’s aims (the buyer). And don’t supply evidence.
• 19. Don’t ask for anything specific…
• 18. Be sure to include minute detail.
• 17. Confuse useful challenge with being lippy – ideally via the press.
• 16. Never give contacts tools to persuade others.
• As a large organisation:
• 15. Design pilots to test the easy things.
• 14. Develop a handy one-size-fits-all procurement process.
• 13. Stubbornly misinterpret European procurement law.
• 12. A tender should come as a nice surprise.
• 11. Frequently introduce surprising new rules – and make them tricky to understand.
• 10. Keep ‘em keen – make people jump through as many hoops to make it hard to do business with you. Make sure that preconditions are hard to find, that dresscode is changed on presentation day.
• 9. Call distant meetings at short notice.
• 8. Government lawyers always know best.
• And both ways:
• 7. Specify first, then get technologists in.
• 6. Choose bad measures.
• 5a. Confuse project-management with editorial vision.
• 5b. Never do a storyboard together.
• 4. Confuse a neat idea with strategy.
• In communication:
• 3.Reinforce prejudices – it’s reassuring.
• 2. Misjudge the knowledge of your audience.
• 1.Avoid understanding who your audience is and how they work.

And, of course, I’d add another, never use a tool like Milestone Planner to co-ordinate and track your commitments ;).

The ‘negative’ frame is a great way to surface the mistakes that we so easily make. Clearly, having a well communicated, common plan is essential to success, but beyond that, is it also important to avoid building in too much process and too little communication. It’s striking how many of Jonathan’s points come down to communication.

There Must Be a Better Plan?

Enter Milestone Planner. Here it is easy to set up a project space that all of the different collaborators can be involved in, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of your organisation. When one person needs to know where folks are at with a particular aspect of the project, they simply check the history of that milestone to be brought up to date – no need to trawl through emails or arrange an unnecessary meeting.

Working Independently Together

Each person can update the individual aspects of the project autonomously, without needing to worry about whether they have informed the right people – anyone who needs to know will be able to see at a glance.  Effective communication is key to the smooth running of a project, but as Craig Buckler warns:

“Be careful not to bombard them with multiple calls and never make assumptions about their decisions.”

Milestone Planner can provide the forum to strike the balance between effective communication and overdoing the phone calls and meetings.

The general consensus was that we do communicate differently. Comms are more direct and real-time, and more public and discoverable too. It is also, arguably, more cautious because of that.

Milestone Planner gives us an unusual perspective, sitting both within businesses and across them. Early on we saw a pattern that the best external users of Web 2.0 and social media were also the best internet uses – or visa versa. It’s something that Lee Bryant of Headshift talked about at Being-Social, and has blogged about as well: Social on the outside needs social on the inside. Effective communication is as much a cultural thing as a technological one. Of course the right tools help, and can accelerate the cultural change – I guess we would say that wouldn’t we! Here’s what Lee has to say: