Eight project management problems in search of solutions

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Project management problems and solutions

Handling teamwork by project management requires expertise, skills, experience and flexibility in time. In our fifteen years of development and support of Twproject, we have found some problem patterns that are repeatedly found in teamwork management, and we have hence created corresponding solution support in Twproject. Some of the problematic patterns found are:

  1. Too much information at once
  2. Communication slip-ups
  3. Compatible with a single methodology
  4. Productivity slumps
  5. Not enough resources to run bigger projects
  6. Different apps for different things
  7. Risk of unauthorized access
  8. Task changes difficult to track

Finding solutions with Twproject

 

  • Too much information at once

    Twproject solves this by using  powerful filters and role based structures which allow users to focus only on what they are really involved in – filtering by topic and time.

  • Communication slip-ups

    E-mail notifications constantly interrupt you? Minimize the risk of productivity slumps keeping track of all your activity with Twproject. Communications is easy and collected in your tasks, reducing need for one-to-one communication by email and chats.

  • Compatible with a single methodology

    Designed to adapt to your organization’s processes, Twproject supports different methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, XP or classic waterfall. Twproject is so flexible that it lets you map projects, tasks, issues to people and customers, in the way that better fits your needs.

  • Productivity slumps

    Twproject time tracking tool lets you insert (quickly!) and monitor time spent on tasks, so that managers can check tasks progress and users can assess their own productivity.

  • Not enough resources to run bigger projects

    Use Twproject interactive Gantt to split the work into sub-tasks with achievable aims, use Twproject to assess what is most time consuming (and react when necessary), use quick messages for ad hoc communication, and last but not least – let everybody work the way they want.

    But what makes Twproject unique is that you can change project structures and assignments while production runs, without losing anything of the information introduced so far.

  • Different apps for different things

    Finally Twproject offers one login for one platform with tasks, issue tracking, time tracking, integrated agenda, shared documents and much more.

  • Risk of unauthorized access

    Twproject fully customizable roles/permissions allow users to maintain control over sensitive areas. Role based on assignments let users have different rights for different tasks.

  • Task changes difficult to track

    Twproject task progress is easy to track, statistics are always available, giving you an immediate perception of task health.

Still in doubt? Well you can try yourself with a free demo.

Give Us a Try!

Enterprise Project Management – Twproject

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Twproject is a high-end project and work management tool. You have great teams, we will help you making them happier.

 

Twproject is built to adapt to your working methods and operative environment; it give you a full set of instruments to stay informed on project progress, budget, and scope creeps. Twproject facilitate work offering you the right place to “collect” information, store documents, take notes and whatever else run around a project without effort.

Be free

Twproject do not push you to use a methodology. You will be free to use a classic waterfall as well as a Agile or a Prince2 approach. No additional effort is required to use Twproject; you drive, we follow.

Above all, control

Complex projects, several teams, issues, budgets, milestones; how to keep everything under control? There is one answer only: collecting feedback, any kind of feedback (status changes, date changes, work done, issues opened, notes, discussions etc. ), from where things are done. This point is the crucial factor; only if you get actual information from the “base”, managers will have significant data to get the right decisions. This requires that your software need to be widely adopted. We spent several months to make Twproject UI nice and friendly, making it useful to every users profile. This is why Twproject has a very low “rejection” rate.

Security, not jails

Enterprises are complex; organizational charts, permissions, grants, delegations, bosses and customers. The refined security role based model covers any kind of requirements of access/visibility on projects; just assign resources on tasks and Twproject will do the rest. No effort is required to setup a security structure that fits your company needs. More than ten years of adoption success stories tell us that this it’s true!

You will be able to set access from a single sub-task to the complete project in few clicks. High security standard are used for data encryption, control access, enforce password policy, but do not duplicate you efforts if you have already setup your network security: Twproject uses your LDAP, Active directory, file servers, or DMS with one click. Read more about Twproject security here: https://twproject.com/support/security-faq/

 

Add, adapt and stretch

Every company has its own “mandatory oddities”: Twproject is built to extend the basic set of features by adding custom properties on task, issues, resources, costs and every main entity.

Users can make its dashboard “a la carte” adding its preferred widgets. Custom forms, wizards and reports will complete the set of feature Twproject  offers to fit enterprise’s needs.

More on Twproject flexibility here: https://twproject.com/support/customizations-faq/

Make your IT happy

Twproject runs everywhere. It is built on Java and run on all the most used servlet containers. “Compatibility” and “connectivity” are our keywords.

Twproject installs in minutes on every operating system. You can use your company’s preferred database. Twproject is the IT world’ preferred  product.

An easy data structure, API, schedulers, and connectors will allow you to let Twproject talk with your existing ERP, CRM and accounting systems.

Don’t have an IT or you want to spare upgrade and maintenance costs? Use our per-customer dedicated servers on Amazon cloud.

Ready to give Twproject a try?

Start you trial now
One try is worth a million words.

Twproject 5.5 release: project reporting, collapsible Gantt and more

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Reporting, statistics, Gantt, security and much more

After less than one month from last release, here is a brand new Twproject version with exciting new features.

Reporting

Your project data are carefully collected and maintained by Twproject and this represents on of the most valuable aspect of Twproject adoption.
How can you extract your data and present it to your users? Actually Twproject has several pages with dynamic filtering capabilities that extract meaningful data, but a customizable reporting systems was missing…. until now!
On version 5.5 we have integrated Jasper Reports, one of most powerful reporting engine. Jasper reports add the capability to create your reports in minutes using an intuitive graphical editor.
Reports are integrated with the flexible Twproject security structure in an easy and practical way, without forcing users to write complex query and rules.

Here a screenshot from the report writer Jaspersoft Studio

Jasper Reports Editor

 

and a couple of reports

Jasper Custom Report: worklog by resourceJasper Custom Report: worklog by resource

Gantt

Thanks  to a contribution of “BestKen” to our open source jQuery Gantt editor (see jQuery Gantt editor – collapsible branches) this version includes a nice new feature, collapsible branches:

Collapsible Gantt

Collapsible Gantt

Statistics

On task data, there are more statistical information available: ideal trend, worklog aggregated, and worklog done

image

the visual comparison between trend and aggregation makes you get at a glance the project’s “health”.

This is the first step in introducing earned value management, that will be completed in one of the forthcoming releases.

 

Repository

In this version we introduced some new features related to security.

In Twproject you can upload files on tasks, issues, resources and so on. Uploaded files are indexed, for full-text searching, and then saved to a repository.  Now you can choose between three different kinds of storage: folder, encrypted folder or database.

image

In the first case uploaded files are copied as-is on a folder or network disk.

In the second case, files are encrypted using a AES key, and then saved on the same folder. File decryption is automatic when you need to access the file from Twproject, but the file itself remain encrypted on the repository. There are tools for generating AES keys and for encrypting existing files.

In the third case, files are stored on a database table as BLOB data.

Note: existing files will use its original type and will not be touched.

 

Security

  • We have introduced a seal for every document that allows you to send a link to a friend (even without having a Twproject user defined). This link will be valid for 24 hours only, so that the risk of “leaks” will be reduced. Moreover the seal keep your repository safer, making harder an url guessing attack.
  • Another minor security improvement has been introduced for the LDAP mixed authentication. This authentication modality is useful in companies where Twproject is used by internal and external users at the same time. Sometimes a large company uses the LDAP authentication to make the user’s life better, allowing a single login name and password for multiple systems (and also to have a single point for password policy management). Actually Twproject can be used not exclusively by internal users, but also by consultants or third party suppliers that are involved in projects but are not present in the LDAP server (for several good reason 🙂 ). In this case Twproject can use a fallback to its internal authentication using its internal database. Now we can force LDAP users to do not fallback; internal user MUST authenticate on LDAP, external ones will fallback.

Bugs fixed and little features:

  • full search on plan comments
  • search on agenda events using “a:…”
  • IE fix on large auto-sizing notes fields
  • fix for jdk 1.7 in some comparators
  • a stylish background, and smoother colors

 

Teamwork 5.1: Project trees and more

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We just released Teamwork 5.1 (build 57001) here:

http://www.twproject.com/download.page

Contains a new view, task trees, and a subtle but important extension in functionality for “staff” selection.

This is a free upgrade for all users of version 5. There are no changes in the database structure with respect to version 5.

Task trees

Teamwork tree

Teamwork project actions Thanks to user feedback and direct experience in bootcamps, we added a tree view of tasks which is simpler to read and allows basic data editing. It has limited functionality with respect to the Gantt editor but it can be practical in many cases.

Staff & department management

We revised both the inner logic and the user interface of the resource department / group / staff theme. The modeling problem that we’ve frequently met recently for Teamwork used in large organizations is complex cases of delegation handling.

Now if you are manager of a department you can assign all those in the department (inclusive of sub departments) as now they are on your staff – without setting area-global permissions.

This makes it easier to model delegation in structures where a certain kind of project managers create work for other departments, without overriding that department resources assignments.

It can be useful in cases where you have a planning department distinct from the set of project managers that handle resource’s assignments. So the planning manager can assign tasks to a project manager that has no global company rights, but manages her own staff, i.e. the entire department she’s heading.

We also improved the use interface by removing the “staff” checkbox which made you filter resources by staff, having your staff members always as first rows in bold in combos.

Little improvements

– Gantt editor is now in full screen (relative to the browser).

– Date change and status changed request for feedbacks are active only on tasks not just created.

– See in the resource assignment part all assignments on open tasks, also those out of date scope.

Bug fixes

– Mobile module: got “undefined” when saving agenda events.

– When creating a new document file / folder selection from file storage did not work.

– Made “my open issues” and “my open severe issues” predefined filters behave similarly in task selection.

– Gantt editor: task descriptions inserted from that page were not saved.

– Fixed default language pick at startup and on options.

Teamwork 5: Gantt, planning, new design & more

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Teamwork 5A major Teamwork release, Teamwork 5, is now available for download here:

http://www.twproject.com/download.page

In the same page you can generate a 15 day evaluation license. (inclusive of the mobile version)

Teamwork’s costs have not changed, all details:

http://www.twproject.com/licensing.page

The base cost is 90 Euro per non-expiring license, and the upgrade cost is 35 Euro (44$) per user.

See the introductory video and download the user guide here:

http://www.twproject.com/documentation.page

Teamwork hosting is now built entirely on Amazon dedicated servers E3 service – more information here.

Upgrading from Teamwork 4

The multi-platform installer includes an upgrader from version 4 which updates the web app and your data, but it cannot update Java’s JDK (see FAQ), you must do that by hand or do a new installation; Teamwork 5 needs Java JDK version 6 (or 7). In order to try version 5, the best way is to do a fresh installation.

If you own version 4, you’ll need to purchase an upgrade license for version 5, unless you bought Teamwork 4 after 1st of June 2012 (our invoice date is the purchase date) – in the latter case it is a free upgrade.

What’s new

Teamwork version 5 has a new user interface and several new functionalities. The work model is mostly unchanged from version 4.
Main new features:

– Introduced Gantt-like editor
Also supports dependencies between any two tasks, not just between brother tasks.
Teamwork Gantt

– Introduced issue planner /organizer:
Issue Planner

– Assignment enriched with assignment specific costs (expenses)

Cost on assignements

– Statistics graphs improved and extended

Teamwork Stats
A line graph on the task editor which shows total worklogs / issues done.

More

– Heuristics on project progress / state
– Date and number formats relative to user profile (on top of user interface language, which was always customizable)
– Denormalization to achieve speed
– Speed improved in general
– Conceptual simplification of planning and estimation and more fine grained tools
– Shorter click paths with layers
– Amazon S3 file storages
– Custom reports on all Teamwork sections
– Agenda and meeting completely redesigned
– Workgroups visibility / association with images
– Technical: libraries updated to Hibernate 4.
– Flow management has been extended:
o for example worklog estimated in the time assignment can be set. Also added attributes to workflow descriptions that allow setting duration of tasks and estimations of assignments.
o clone tasks can clone also the assignment for the business process
o when writing flows you can automate assignments by “instantiator” and project manager:
The classes to check are
com.twproject.task.process.InstantiatorSwimlaneAssignmentHandler
com.twproject.task.process.ScaleToBossAssignmentHandler

We also released Teamwork Gantt, a free online tool for creating Gantts, you find it here:
http://gantt.twproject.com/

Of course Gantts created online can be imported in Teamwork 5 – just go to projects and select “import from Teamwork Gantt”.

N.B. Complete Teamwork sources (under NDA) are available for free to all customers as always.

Teamwork 4.5 released: a major free upgrade

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We are really happy to announce this major release update. As you may guess from the length of this announcement, this update will improve your Teamwork in almost every section, providing more modeling tools and functions. The web browsers’ enhanced capacities (in particular those of Firefox, Safari and Chrome) are used in depth to give users a better experience.

This is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. Get the installer / upgrader here: http://www.twproject.com/download.page

The main features of this release are:

– Issue managing by dragging – “kanban” like.

– History of issue assignee, status and task change (better help desk and issue scaling support).

– Customizable issue statuses.

– Better graph and agile / scrum handling.

– Cross links between tasks / issues / resources / agenda events / meetings / boards.

– In-place popup editors.

– Operator load computation has become much smarter.

– Greatly extended user guide with real case work “mappings” to Teamwork, and a new section on performance optimization.

Layout changes

Several pages that up to now were popup windows are now windows in place, which improves their usability: issue editor, custom forms, workgroup selector.

Several text areas now support internal links (e.g. T#MYCODE#), web links (http://www.twproject.com), smiley’s, absolute URLs to images.

New features

Issues.

Issue statuses – customizable. New issues statuses can be created. There is a page for managing issue statuses (which before version 4.5 were fixed):

clip_image002

And for every status not only its color, but most importantly its business logic behavior is determined from this editor:

clip_image004

Whether it should “behave” when asking user feedback as an open status, as close, whether it should ask for comments and / worklog when entering a status.

So typically if your status is something in which the issue enters at “end of life”, it should be marked “as close” and “ask for worklog” too should be enabled.

clip_image006

Issue change history. When changing a status, task or assignee on an issue, the editor will ask for a reason, and the change will be recorded on the issue. And in fact there is an additional tab on the issue editor, “history”.

Issue organizer “Kanban”. Issues can be now be organized in a completely visual way by dragging and dropping them: filter the issues in which you are interested in, and then select the “organizer” button.

clip_image008

clip_image010 Now you can also enable use of external codes on issues (admin -> default for projects).

Dashboards.

The usability of the “customize this page” function has been improved: all portlets are always visible:

clip_image012

And it’s easier to drag them in the dashboard. Moreover it is easier to access the general page / portlet disposition page: just click “all users”. clip_image014

There is a new additional starting page: help desk support.

Operator load and planning. This was the user request:

“refine the operator load showing the effective load taking in consideration worklog done. E.g: 100h estimated on 20 days, done 10h in 10 days the resting 10 day must have a load of 90h not 50h like now”

Also take care of unavailability.

Use the new operator load on plan, load by day, end wherever it is meaningful

Operator load textual: put worklog with totals and pink holydays. Use striped background

Advanced users

– The examples in the distribution and the documentation now cover also “custom wizards”: see section 14.4 Custom wizards of the user guide.

Minor improvements

– More kinds of documents are now full-text indexed; these are the extensions now supported:

“.txt”, “.rtf”, ”.log” “.pdf”. “.htm”, “.html”, “.zip”, “.war”, “.jar”, “.xls”, “.xlsx”, “.xltx”, “.xlsEmb”, “.doc”, “.docx”, “.dotx”, “.docEmb”, “.ppt”, “.pptx”, “mpp”, “mpx”, “.msg”, “.msgEmb”, “.vsd”, “.pub”.

Also custom fields are full-text indexed.

Here are several user requests fulfilled:

– “Add worklog approval monthly screen” -> We will add bulk status change in worklog search / analysis

– Expose issue id in editor and list.

– LDAP authentication cascades to system one.

– Develop a resource snapshot.

– Sort File Storage Document Listing.

– Make “add document content” in a rich text editor.

– Please put a link to a task on the agenda event : we actually did much more by having full internal links.

– Need to add subscription event for when a new version of a document is uploaded.

– Display agenda items in planByResource like in worklogWeek.

– Search for specific custom fields.

– You can have a customized help message in the “help” page, just add in the labels CUSTOMIZED_HELP_CONTACT.

clip_image016

– Notes on issues are on the main tab and self-resize.

– Issue assignee selector got simplified.

– Now you can create subtasks as sub-fluxes.

– Counters can now be reset and deleted.

– When changing a task on an issue, notify the new assignees.

– Since version 4.5 custom fields support also “typing” of data. E.g. “cost,20,java.lang.Double” will add a custom field of length 20 and type “double” (a floating point number).

– Holiday settings: now you have year-specific settings.

– In issue list you can now filter by task type.

– Resource print includes my assignments.

Bug fixes

– Check why in the assignment notification we add a link to the task even if the resource has not the rights to read task … .

– Meetings are not full-indexed.

– Index custom forms data.

– Create issue from task editor menu does not launch creation nor filters???

– Issue multi edit: bulk change gravity do not close actions clicking “close”.

– Fixed MIME for teamworkMenuPlusCss.jsp,

– Issue cloning did not raise events,

– Fixed various combo positions in bulk update screens in case of scroll.

– Summa is not saved on document link and file storage on tasks and resources.

– A fix for Oracle on Resources with no surname.

– An operator may change his own password even if cookies are enabled.

– Do not notify disabled users.

 

Technical points

– In order to optimize memory usage,

clip_image020

If you log as administrator and go to the label management section, open the “label rules” container (it is closed by default), and say if you want to have only English as language, type EN in the enabled languages field and select SAVE.

clip_image022

– Teamwork 4.5 is no more on quirks mode – we dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 – and pages are in HTML 5

Important for upgrades. Several JARS have been updated, added and removed. If they are present these JARs should be deleted by hand from WEB-INF/lib:

o commons-collections-2.1.1.jar

o commons-logging-1.0.4.jar

o poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar

o jcaptcha-all-1.0-RC3.jar

– Added -server configuration to the Java JVM distributed.

– If using HsqlDB you can make a dump of the current log by hand from system check instead of having to wait Teamwork restart:

clip_image024

Notes for updating to 4.5:

Any custom filter on issues will need to be redone as the issue statuses are a lookup field.

Unfortunately all document list attached to discussion points of meetings will be reset.

P.S. We’re building the beta of a new online service – called Licorize – a cocktail of Delicious bookmarking and light to-do management. If you’d like to beta-test it,  just send an e-mail to info@twproject.com with “Licorize” in the subject or body – we will soon give you access and also a year of free usage to your entire group.

Teamwork release 4.3 available for download

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Teamwork 4.3 multi-Gantt view.

Teamwork 4.3 multi-Gantt view.

A free upgrade release for all users of version 4.0-4.2, this release includes some major extensions of functionality; while there is no “revolution”, this kind of release makes your “Teamwork life” more comfortable. Several features requests from the feedback service have been fulfilled. Also the user guide has been updated.

Download this release here.

Multi-Gantt support

This was motivated by this request: “Manage graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects”. We then realized that all it needed was the filtering power of projects search together with a Gantt style visualization. So this is what we’ve done: we added an additioanl visualization of the search results. So for example you can see all your root open project closing in 2 weeks in a Gantt style view.

Also all the Gantt scales have been extended to 5 years.

Import from CSV – Bugzilla

Import of issues and resources from CSV files: issues get imported from the Bugzilla CSV export format, but of course in this way you can import from anything.

Collapsible project trees

Projects trees can be collapsed and there are options to keep them open by default etc. . This was this request; thanks to Halil for the first implementation.

More Twitter integrations

Twitter integration with any action and there is a new portlet for filtering tweets on any topic: see the user guide, section 8.3.3.

Little improvements

– All notifications have in the subject the task they refer to, if it exists (this request).
– Display log on descendants (this request).
– Balloons have no more the confusing Roman number.
– Use  darker gray on Gantt duration background – better prints.
– Search analysis worklog: make the field “action” larger.
– In resource list there is no more the bothering default filter by company.
– Snapshot of a task can be edited.
– Search analysis worklog: make the column “action” larger.
– Issue multi editor: if there is a task on the issue and you have an assignment on it, let the watch icon appear even if the issue is not assigned to you.
– Experimental: supporting SSL over LDAP (LDAPS)

Bug fixes

– Issues didn’t get indexed any more for full text search.
– Order in company news doesn’t work.
– Portlet news doesn’t show news ordered by order factor.
– Resource hourly cost sometimes gets set to zero.
– Meeting: drag&drop multi editor doesn’t work for the just inserted.
– The link to resource drawn by the smart combo if the resource is from another area on which you have no right you see the link but you get an error.
– Search of a string containing ” in issues looped the application.
– Sometimes the rollover menu opened in the wrong direction.
– If you change the allowed file storage roots, disable links to old locations.

Technical notes for upgrade

This release build is 11250; it contains no database schema changes for all users of 4.2.10080 and following. As it contains an issue full-text indexing fix, you should reindex your data: see 17.4 of the user guide.

try darker gray on gantt duration background

What you get with Teamwork and what you don’t

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featuresSome project management applications provide minimal functionality: just a Gantt drawer. Some, more groupware oriented, provide a vast spectrum, including e-mail and chatting. While developing Teamwork, we made several choices about what to include and what not. The choice for Teamwork has been guided by this simple princliple: include only what will not sharply conflict with acquired user habits, and will have a rich integration with the rest of the system.

Examples of what we did include:

– “boards”
– sticky notes
– to-dos
– a calendar

All these have a natural integration with project management, bringing together personal and team management. So we put them together in a unique, integrated solution; you don’t have to get three separated products from us to get this functionality.

Examples of what we didn’t include:

– e-mail client
– chat services
– file management

The three integrations above are probably used by most in standard ways, and happily too: you are not going to change those user habits with the new project management software; so the work we have and are doing is to integrate with the existing applications, as smoothly as possible.

Notice also that probably most users already have a calendar application, and others that may overlap with what we provided built-in, and for that we are working so hard in extending seamless integrability (most previous posts talk about this in fact).

Current and future developments

Wikipedia logo

Wikipedia logo

This is for the actual situation; but usage of the web is evolving all the time, and more integrations are now needed: in Teamwork we always assumed that the contents and documents related to projects and work which would not be articulated in tasks, issues and to-dos would be handled by other document management software, and then somehow connected to projects (say for example with file storages). But with wiki and blogs, content is more and more inserted directly online, and we should support this also inside Teamwork. One can currently do this by simply creating custom portlets connected to a Wiki service. But as with most of our solutions, we would like something organically integrated with the rest of Teamwork functionality; for example, content editing would naturally blend with exposure of Teamwork objects to REST and similar services, and in-place customizations of pages. So this is one of the (non trivial) directions we are now exploring.

If there is an organic integration that we are missing, just post it on our feedback service!

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