Friday, August 29, 2008

Social Networking within Project Management

I'll be the first to admit that trying to find a reason for implementing new technology is not as prudent as finding a business reason for the technology. That includes trying to find various usages for social-networking functionality not necessarily on social networking web sites.

Some people in the office have been kicking around the idea of integrating social-networking features within project management and/or requirements management. Many of us are on linked-in and facebook, and we like the idea of sharing with people
-- what they are doing right now??
-- sharing any new thoughts??

If you have a mini-social network within your project team, it's definitely doable to share features or ideas within the project team. If someone adds a new features and you select to share it, when people log in to the project tool you would see:
-- Fred Gates just added a new ecommerce feature
-- Sean Smith is posing the question about xyz

Yes it could work, but is it a stretch? The short answer is that we're not sure and until we start seeing a gravity towards this kind of functionality in other tools and having customers consistently request this functionality, this won't be a part of the project management platform for some time to come.

But we'll keep an eye on it.... Happy Labor Day Weekend!!

Monday, August 04, 2008

Benefits of Copying Features (and objects)

For a few years now, one of the most common items on our wishlist has been the ability for customers to "copy" objects from one project to another. (objects referring to features, requirements, and use cases). If you think about a project as a big folder with features and requirements being physical files, you should be able to copy these features from one project (folder to another).

As of now, GatherSpace has provided the ability to map features from one project to another. The problem with this ability is that it's been totally confusing for customers. We see scenarios where one customer changes it on a project and it no longer makes sense in the context of the originating project.

For this reason, we will be removing the ability to map features from one project to another and just allow customers to copy information from one project to another.

In working with the project managers and engineers of GatherSpace, we expect to roll this functionality out by late August. We always welcome ideas and comments regarding this newly anticipated functionality.

~Kyle, Senior Account Manager