Projects are at the heart of most of our client’s businesses - they bring in the most revenue but their size and risk means the stakes are a lot higher. While Accelo had has built-in project management since we went into beta, the hard truth is that this module has remained largely unchanged over the last 2½ years.
But that’s all about to change, with a brand new projects module which will make it easier to plan, manage, work on and bill for your projects than ever before. Let’s have a look at what’s around the corner.
The first thing we prioritized with the new Projects Module was our planning interface. The current (painful) workflow editing screen with components and a lot of hidden information has been completely thrown out and replaced with a beautiful, easy to use gantt chart interface.
This interface, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever used MS Project or a similar project planning tool built on the gantt chart model, is super easy to get started with. You simply come in and start creating your project plan with milestones and tasks. That’s right, we’re moving away from “components” towards “milestones”, and we’re also making it easy to create tasks as part of your project plan, with infinite nesting and embedding. [applause]
While titles and dates can be changed straight from the table view, a bunch of extra power is available for users through a fast-loading details pop-up for each milestone and task. Users can choose the tab they want to edit and once there you’re able to modify things like dependencies, rates, budgets and more.
Another thing we’ve heard loud and clear from our users is that they want the hierarchy of a project to “roll up”. This is central to the new Projects Module, where you’ll be able to define milestones, sub-milestones and tasks. Each milestone can have its own budget of time and money, and you can even override the calculated sub-totals and define your own fixed-price budgets for parts of your project.
While our users love being able to template their project plans for easy reuse, the “all or nothing” approach has proven itself to be challenging. Not a week would go by where we haven’t had a support email saying “I created my project plan with Template A, but now I want to add in Template B”.
The other things we’ve heard - a lot! - is that templating components (now milestones) is all well and good, but what you really want to do is able to template tasks too.
The good news is that with the new Projects Upgrade, you’ll be able to pull in templated milestones, complete with sub-milestones and tasks, so you can re-use the project attributes that you use commonly in your business, saving your time and building service consistency across your team.
Of course, being able to plan a project more easily is only half the battle - the next challenge is to actually manage your project successfully. To help, we’re completely redesigning the Project View screen to provide project managers and users with better real time information so they can see how their project (and its milestones) are going.
From our new overview screen you’ll be able to see a traffic-light style view of budget usage and progress so you can get on top of problems before they turn into crises.
Another thing our users have told us they wish we’d do a better job of is invoicing. Projects are big, complex and an important part of your success, so having a flexible but smart way to bill your clients is important.
With the upgrade to the projects module we’re going to be able to support much more complicated budgeting rules and format, with the ability to have some parts of a project fixed price while others are T&M and still others are pro-bono (or hours only). Keeping track of what’s been billed already, giving you more options around what finds its way onto the invoice you send to clients and other improvements are all part of what we’re working on in this part of the Projects Upgrade.
One of the features we’re keeping - and making even easier to use - is our concept of Hybrid Project Management. For those users who aren’t familiar with it, we’ve found a lot of success with mixing “top down” project management (like defining milestones, budgets and dependencies) with “bottom up” project management (allowing people doing the actual work to create their own tasks, re-estimate time remaining and even update task deadlines).
This new upgrade is going to enhance this principle, making it easy for project managers to define the budget and deadline envelope of a milestone and create some sample tasks for their team to use. Then, when it comes to doing the work, team members will be able to create their own tasks within the milestone envelope, split tasks (so a manager can be “high level” when planning but the user doing the work can be more detailed) and of course allowing users to re-estimate the time remaining when they’re logging work (so project managers can have real-time forecasts of budgets roll up instantly).
We’re going to be working hard throughout October on the Projects upgrade, and we’re hoping to be able to offer a sneak peek and more details on the timing of our rollout of this important upgrade in the last week of the month. Of course, if you’ve got any questions in the mean time, please don’t hesitate to email us.
