April 1st, Reading, UK. Milestone Planner has lead the way in collaborative, real-time project management and outcome-based planning since it’s launch last year. However, the SocialOptic team hasn’t stopped there. Inspiration has come from the run away success of the consumer-based real-time social-collaboration tool, chatroulette, which has gained coverage on the BBC, leading blogs, and is a frequent topic of discussion on SMS-based chat site ‘Twittr’ (recently renamed ‘Twitter‘). The SocialOptic team have been hard at work to bring the same levels of excitement and addictive game play to Milestone Planner.

With immediate effect we are pleased to announce our latest release, which incorporates social gaming functionality right into the heart of Milestone Planner: Projectroulette. In keeping with our core philosophy, it is based on a simple, but amazingly powerful concept: When a new user signs in, after a few seconds they are randomly assigned to a new project. This instantly creates a new and diverse global project team, delivering on-demand-motivated-team-creation(tm). This directly meshes with current resource allocation methods often found in use by the world’s largest professional services organisations, and removes the traditional project challenges of matching both skills and personalities when building a project team. The built-in “nexting” functionality enables the immediate replacement of troublesome team members at the click of a button. A feature that has proven especially popular during beta testing.

Based on user feedback, and customer-CIO concerns over bandwidth usage, we have removed both the video and audio conferencing features from the initial release, leaving users free to provide their own sound track, and keep their hands and eyes on the project plan. We recommend fellow UK-based start up, Spotify, to share music playlists between team members, and visualisation techniques based on user Gravatars to augment the project experience. Unlike traditional telepresence applications, users no longer have to change out of their pyjamas before starting a planning session, recreating a key element of the chatroulette experience that seems popular with its main users.

If you would like more information, or to schedule an interview. Calls must be placed by 1st April 2010.