New Feature: Agile Project Management 3

Posted by Roger Neel Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:53:00 GMT

 Most of you on Mavenlink are not software developers - you come from many different industries with many different specialties. For those of you who aren’t familiar with building software, there’s a relatively new methodology called "agile" that many of us use to develop our products, including the team at Mavenlink. Our agile methods are what we use to prioritize our work and meet your requests, requirements, and feedback in a timely manner.

From the wikipedia entry:
"Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals."
 
Substitute out the words "engineering", "software", and "development" with words like "client deliverables", "tasks", and "work" and you now understand Mavenlink’s approach to helping you manage your projects. We just finished building what we call the ‘Project Tracker’ into the workspace for you to manage any of your projects in an agile way. We feel this is the best approach to fostering teamwork, collaboration, and frequent adaption in what teams are working on. It also has the side benefit of making it far easier to manage each task & deliverable, keeping things clean, simple, and, most importantly, ON-TIME.
 
This feature has been out there for nearly a week and is already getting some great feedback from projects large and small. I think you’re going to love our PM tools as much as we do. Keep an eye out for an upcoming screencast, but in the meantime, give it a try.

New Feature: Private Workspace Messaging

Posted by Roger Neel Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:18:00 GMT

 

No matter what your area of expertise is, who you consult for, or what your role is on a project, there is almost always a need for a private conversation between a few of the participants.  People working on a project generally have a role:

  • The guy who’s the main collaborator with his feet on the ground
  • The lady who signs the checks, but isn’t really involved in the day-to-day
  • The boss who’s fragmented and should only be involved in the final review phase
  • The peanut gallery that asks if "that should be blue…?"
  • Etc…

In our old workspace, unless you kept the project participants fairly tight, it was difficult to keep things private without reverting back to email and losing the power of capturing all conversation/documents in one place.  With the new Mavenlink workspace and private messaging, this is an issue of the past.  You can now have all interested parties participating in the project, but be confident that you can include only the right audience on any message/attachment.

We were pretty sure this would be a big request and we were correct. We didn’t want to build it until enough people asked. Try it out and get on our GetSatisfaction page to let us know what you think and what we should build next!

New Feature: Email Integration and Response

Posted by Roger Neel Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:09:00 GMT

I’m excited to be introducing our newest feature: the ability for you to reply to workspace activity directly from your email!

Many of you have asked for it and we agree - this is definitely one of the most useful features we’ve developed to date. While managing our own projects in Mavenlink, we have found that sometimes it’s more convenient to just respond via email versus logging in. This is particularly true while on the road.

Now, clients and consultants working within the Mavenlink project workspace can use their iPhones, Blackberries, and desktop email clients to not only keep tabs on their projects, but also keep in touch with the other project participants.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!