Tuesday 20 April 2010

Release Night at Projectplace - BETA of new social Project Overview

Tonight we have a release which includes as the main feature a more social version of the Project Overview. It's being deployed as we speak and I really wish the hard working team all the best luck.

The new version of the Project Overview is released in beta so that we can get feedback and make sure that it's as good as we can get it before releasing it in all projects, Team Edition and Enterprise Edition, later this year. I could rant and rage about it (we have tested it in internal beta for a while and I absolutely love it) but I think I will first show you my colleague Beate's film http://files.projectplace.com/english/demo/projectwall/projectwall.html

I hope that all you people out there who have been on the look out for a more social communicative platform for your project will take the opportunity to test out and influence this part of Projectplace. Of course we will gather your feedback on Projectplace Ideas and you can also check out how other people like it, vote and comment on their ideas and take a short survey about the new Project Overview.

Wednesday 14 April 2010

What happens at a Quality Backlog meeting anyway?

A week or two ago, we had one of our monthly quality backlog meetings. This meeting is where I get to represent you, the users, and try to get some of your ideas included in our quality backlog.

Simply put we take all the ideas with the status "quality backlog" and start going through them according to ranking / score.

We try to understand the need, when it arises, why and for whom. Sometimes an idea can not be processed further because we simply don't quite get what you want. Please make your idea as specific as possible and explain to us why the current solution is failing. It's also useful to understand in which situation you are when your idea would be useful.

We estimate how many existing users would be affected by a change, positively or negatively. Simply put we are more likely to implement ideas that affect a lot of people positively and none, or very few, negatively. Included in this is an underlying wish to make a clear, useful and clean interface that provides the functionality you need when you need it.

We also look at the wow factor: Is this something that people expect to find or something that will cause them to go WOW!!! Either extreme here makes the idea more likely to get implemented.

We also have a manifesto that we hope to develop a bit further, an idea about what key factors make a project successful.

We believe that the key to successful projects is to help people share information and manage their commitments


We believe that projects with the courage to open up communication and share information transparently to create trust will be the ones most likely to succeed


As a consequence the main focus of Projectplace is to promote cross-boundary project collaboration by communication. Projectplace supports decentralization of control that promotes individual initiatives, concurrent work, continuous learning and innovation

Once we have talked about the idea we decide whether to move on with it. If we feel like this is not something that we can pursue at the moment, we try to be transparent about it and let you know.  I will comment and let you know what we concluded for each idea