Posts Tagged ‘Milestone Planner’

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A Little bit of Dependency and a Big Sense of Time

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

The latest version of Milestone Planner just went live. The latest release brings a frequently requested feature, and a little something that we built to keep things moving along.

Milestone Dependencies in Projects

We often get asked if Milestone Planner supports dependencies. In traditional project tools you build tasks, then link them together: Task A and B have to finish before Task C can start. For projects where you know the exact sequence of tasks from the outset, then this is a really good way of planning. However, for emergent projects and projects subject to lots of change, this method can trip you up.

We’ve all been part of projects where the dependencies between tasks keep changing, as we find out more about the tasks or requirements. I suspect we’ve all also seen Project Managers spending more time trying to keep the changing dependencies in the plan up to date than actually leading the project! That said, we know that it is a real pain to have to move 20 individual milestones when the entire project has slipped by a week. So we have introduced “soft dependencies” into Milestone Planner.

In each workstream you can switch soft dependencies on or off, by clicking the icon by the workstream title. With dependencies off, you can move individual milestones by clicking and dragging, just as you always have. With dependencies in a work stream turned on, when you drag a milestone, all of the incomplete milestones after that date will move as well.

This is a super-quick way of rescheduling complete workstreams. We hope it makes Milestone Planner even easier to use, without creating any additional work.

Introducing the Hoover: Time Sweeping

Knowing where you have got to in a project, both as a team, and personally, is obviously a key piece of feedback. It is now easy to see this at a glance with Milestone Planner. There are three pieces of time information that are now visible in the timeline view:
Project Plan

  1. Today – the vertical red bar indicates today’s date, which shows how far through the project you are in elapsed time.
  2. Project Today – You’ll notice that the time line to the left is greyed out. Where this ends indicates the ‘project today’ – that is where you have got to, in terms of achieved milestones. In an ideal world this should be level with, or slightly past, today. To explain it another way, the project today is the date of the first uncomplete milestone. It represents the project progress in terms of progressed time.
  3. Your Today - The yellow vertical bar indicates what we call ‘your today’, which represents the next milestone you are working towards. Just like the project today, in an ideal world this should be level with today, or slightly into the future.

Get More Done

If it all sounds a little complicated, don’t worry. It isn’t. Just create a project and try marking some milestones done, and clicking on the link-milestones buttons and moving milestones around. It is very intuitive. As you start marking milestones complete you’ll enjoy watching the project today sweeping forwards!

The eagle eyed amongst you might have picked up on our latest time related project. More on that in the next post. As a hint, if you have any time-tracking related requests, now is a good time to drop us a message via the feedback form!

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Doing the Right Thing – It’s Not Easy – on RSS, iCal and Gravatars

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Last week I had the pleasure of being over at South by South West in Austin, Texas. Although its roots are in the music industry, it is also one of the largest digital interactive events on the planet. Web folks, designers, programmers, agencies and big brands gather to talk technology, business and betterment.

The session that most stuck in my mind was ”Do The Right Thing: Building Respectful Software”, hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Gavin Bell. I caught up with Gavin at the Digital Mission stand later, which was a great chance to chat about his new book, “Building Social Web Applications” – available on Amazon UK,Amazon US, or O’Reilly. – and to talk social software.

Building web-based applications in a responsible fashion is much harder than it seems at first glance. From privacy issues, to sensible default settings, “doing the right thing” isn’t always that easy. The session was a useful chance to reflect on many of the recent changes to Milestone Planner, and where we go next, from the names used in projects, to how the RSS and calendar features work.

When we added RSS and Calendar support to Milestone Planner, we went for the most secure option available. Secure RSS feeds aren’t that common or well understood. We use them because we want to keep people’s project data as secure as we can. When you login to Milestone Planner, via the web, and choose a project and you will see an RSS Feed icon in the window. If your browser supports it, you will also see it in the menu bar. The first time you select the RSS feed, depending on your RSS reader, you will need to sign in again. From an application point of view, this is ‘the right thing to do’ as each one application uses a seperate copy of your user ID and password, so that you can control access by application. From a user perspective, it seem a little bit of a hassle, but from a security perspective, it is the right thing. The alternative is to leave RSS feeds open, or protect them via a ‘feed key’ which is publicly visible.

Once you add a project feed to your RSS reader (or email client – both OS X’s mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook can read Milestone Planner’s RSS feeds), you are good to go. You can choose to authenticate the RSS feed once or every time. The settings are controlled by your RSS reader, not Milestone Planner. Whenever someone updates a project, you will get an update via the RSS feed – very handy!

Calendars have their own interesting twist. When you click on the calendar icon in a project, it will fire the a calendar feed. This is a dynamically updated calendar, which you can sync to OS X iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird’s calendar or any app that supports the web calendar standard. Whenever a milestone moves, the calendar feed is automatically updated. Just like RSS feeds, you will need to login to the calendar feed separately. If you allow your calendar program to store the login details, you only need to do this once. Remember to set the calendar to auto-update – not all calendar clients do this by default. Even though the standard allows us to specify the default refresh time in the feed, sadly many of the Calendar applications tend to ignore this. That’s definitely not doing the right thing!

We have also added Gravatar support. If you have one, you already know what it is. Very simply, a gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar – a nice picture of you that can be used (in a project) to identify you. It is more recognisable than the email address on which it is based, and better represents the social nature of Milestone Planner. If you don’t have a gravatar Milestone Planner generates an icon for you, which you will see in the people bar at the top of the page. Setting up your own Gravatar is very straight forward.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Milestone Planner. Here is a request from us: If you see a place where you think we might have set the defaults wrong, or things could be better, let us know. Milestone Planner isn’t just a team-based tool, it’s a team effort, and we’d be very glad to have you on the team!

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Social Graphs – The Power of Connections

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Interest in “social graphs” has increased exponentially in the last year or two, with the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. At its most basic level, a social graph is a digital record of the relationships (or ‘connections’) around an individual. In the business context they are an interesting way of mapping the informal relationships that really power the business. It might not be obvious, but Milestone Planner operates off of social graphs. In our case, the social objects that bind people together are the individual projects. Each collection of projects that a person is on, and the people that share some or all of the same projects, forms a social graph:

I’ll talk more about that in a future post. At the individual, consumer level social graphs are a map of the relationships people have, and have had. It isn’t unusual for a student entering the workplace to have thousands of contacts on Facebook. Social Graphs are big news, so when I heard that Social Media Week‘s London Partner, Chinwag, were running an event titled “Understanding Social Graph Optimization” I headed up to town.

While we aren’t about “monetizing” social graphs at SocialOptic - we’re about helping people to be more productive – for big media companies Social Graphs spell h-u-g-e o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y. The event was at the IAB‘s offices, and sponsored by instant messaging provider Meebo, and with an interesting line up for the panel:

There was lots of talk about how BT is (and isn’t) using Twitter. Interestingly I’m currently having a Twitter exchange with @BTcare about an issue accessing Milestone Planner from a BT OpenZone hotspot, which they have been most helpful about. The focus was more about “leveraging the social graph” than optimising it, something that made me feel a little uneasy.

The general feeling from the panel was that users are happy to share their social graphs for providers to use, as long as it is done with their permission, and they get something back from it. However, Facebook’s Trevor Johnson said ”it’s not about monetization, it is about users.” Facebook isn’t a stranger to concerns over how data is used, and Chinwag’s Sam Michel pitched in a question about user privacy, and more specifically users’ understanding of privacy issues. It’s definitely an emerging challenge, worthy of consideration. The convestion spread to Twitter, a few quotable highlights:

@juliusduncan: Social Graph Optimisation SGO has taken over from SMO in the past 6-9 months Carter Brokaw – CRO, Meebo #smwldn

@benjaminellis: LOL, @mazi on content: “sharing is caring, but love is not free.” #smwLDN

@zoe9: #smwLDN Maz Nadjm, BSKYB says social media is a collective effort in an organisation not just for marketing.

@yay_tar: RT @juliusduncan: #smwldn ‘if you can’t get the buy in of the CEO up front, you are in trouble’ Vincent Sider, BT Strategist

The panel’s closing comments on social media contained some gems:

  • BT :- It’s all about education. Create an eco system where customers can be rewarded.
  • Sky :- It’s all about iteration. Test out something small and take it forward.
  • Facebook :- Don’t put yourself under pressure to do something big and immediate. Iterate.
  • Meeba :- Enable people to interact with content. Watch and learn, and listen, and itterate against your content.
  • Future Text :- Think of what the customer wants.

So, the theme seems to be start small, learn, and grow. That’s advice that’ll go down very well here! By the way, for anyone involved in Social Media week that would like to, sign up for Milestone Planner Standard Edition and @ or DM us on twitter (@SocialOptic) for three months free Milestone Planner Professional Edition – this week only!

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Milestones to Talk About

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The week started with a major update to Milestone Planner that gives a taste of where we are heading. There are lots of new features, and it’s been fun to hear how people are using them already. I’m not going to list them all, but  I will pick out a few of the big ones:

  • Edit milestones – no more pop up box! Just click the title to change it. Click the Milestone ‘triangle’ to pop up the status chooser and select red, yellow, green or blue (completed) – or delete the milestone. It’s whizzy, you’ve got to try it!
  • See the owner – click on the person icon and choose an owner for the milestone. Type a name, and click ‘invite’ to bring them into the project. If you hover over the milestone owners’s name, any milestones belonging to  that person will glow. You might want to zoom right out on the timeline for the best effect!
  • Scroll Wheel Support – for those of you with mouse wheels and track pads, you can scroll up and down using them.

A Greater Sense of History

The biggest change has been to how “history” is handled. When you hover a mouse over a milestone, it will reveal the when the milestone was last updated, and what the most recent change to the milestone was – with little icons for date, owner, text update, etc – and who may the update. If you click on the “Show history” pull down, you can see more of the change history:

In the Standard Edition of Milestone Planner, you have the last few changes, in the Professional Edition you have access to the full history since the milestone was created. You’ll notice the history isn’t just what happened to the milestone (created, slipped, status change, …), it can include an explanation or comment as well.

Whenever you update a milestone, the history box will pop up and ask you for a comment. It is optional, but sometimes it is helpful to add an explanation. For example, if I slip a milestone back 5 days I might want to add a note to explain that it will be late because Dave has been stuck at home in the snow. You can also add a URL into a note, for example linking to a relevant document or an image. The link will be hyperlinked in the history view.

Conversations Around Milestones

As you see, your team can now have conversations around any milestone, interwoven with the changes to it. The conversation is kept in one place, so everyone working on the milestone can see who and what is being affected by what they are working towards. This makes it much easier to distribute the management of the project, but ensure that things still remain on track. Even users with standard access to a project (who can’t add or move milestones) can add comments.

Conversations Face to Face

That’s probably enough of a brain dump for one post! Starting next week is Social Media Week, with events all around the world  - It is going to be great (I might have a slight bias). I’ll be at Social Media Week London (event schedule here – the tickets are almost all gone) and speaking at “Social Media in Enterprises”  on at Cass Business School on Tuesday (more detail on the Business Two Zero blog) and “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday. Do come and say hello – I’m always very happy to chat about Milestone Planner!

Keep your browser warm, there’s more coming very soon!

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Milestone Planner Getting Serious

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Take-OffAre you going all serious on me? Well, the answer is yes. We’ve always been very serious about Milestone Planner and now things are moving up a level.

When you next logon you’ll notice that the “Beta” button has gone. For  many services, being in perpetual beta is a fine fashion statement, but  we have a large number of users managing big projects within Milestone Planner, and we’d love more, so it’s officially time to come out of beta.

Being out of beta doesn’t mean we are perfect though – if you do see a hickup, then give us your feedback. There are so many permutations of browsers, operating systems and plugins, there there is always the occasional surprise. You’ll find we get things fixed very quickly if there is an issue, and that we are definitely still adding new functionality.

A number of users have asked us for premium features, so we’re opening that option up more broadly to users of Milestone Planner. The free service will remain as is. Create as many projects as you want and invite as many people as you need to manage the projects . The ”Professional” option adds full SSL support and full Milestone history for  users that have upgraded.

We’ll be adding in more features in the coming months, so  as an incentive to get in early, we have set up an 80% discount code, which gets you a whole year of Milestone Planner Professional for £19.80. Simply head over to the store – click “upgrade to Professional” and enter launch2009 as your discount code. If you are new to Milestone Planner, you’ll want to sign up and give it a try first. If you are upgrading an existing account, just use the same email address you normally login with and you are away.

The offer is only open to the first 200 people [a few left but only a few days left] who register after this post and before the end of december, and if you want to share the code via Twitter or via your blog, then that’s great with us [drop us an email and we'll send you a code].

If you’re a bigger business with lots of users, we have two other offers that might be of interest to you – drop us a line and we’ll tell you about them.

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