MS Outlook, Email, Tasks, Google Wave?

I had an interesting meeting the other week. Demo’ed our new product to a director of project management at one pharmaceutical company and tried to learn about his challanges at the same time.

The most interesting discovery was the following:

Reading e-mails and distilling project information for inclusion in project plans is a major part of what project managers do these days.

How about that? Surprised? Maybe not. Now, think of your favorite project management solution (MS Project), even one of those new web-based ones (Clarizen, Zoho, BasecampHQ, …). Do they solve this “email management/organization” problem for project managers?

Microsoft seems to realize the issue  better than anyone else then? Because MS Outlook does try to provide a solution here by integrating Email & Tasks. Although their approach is again a bit incomplete, the personal planning part is kind of missing (well, they want you to use MS Project for that I guess). But MS Project’s “command-and-control” model, I am afraid, is not going to fly. In the time of social networking, teams seem to be looking for more de-centralized approaches.

Google also seems to have realized that the email clients we use dont cut it anymore. How many times do you find yourself looking for an email message in your Inbox that had some short but quite important comment relevant to an active project? You know it is there but it is just not  easily accessible, maybe already archived by MS Outlook and gone. First, the Gmail threading email organization and now Google Wave make alot of sense to me. I think such email channels would also make alot of sense for project managers. Imagine if each request listed in your project plan had this email channel associated with it, and you could easily see all relevant email communication in it? Wouldn’t that improve productivity significantly?

-Alexey

Personal Commitment Manager (PCM)

We have been working on a new exciting product this last year and finally the new product, Yoxel PCM,  is entering its beta stage. We are looking for beta users / early adopters so I thought I would post this info in my blog.

The Yoxel PCM is a personal productivity tool. This is a perfect desktop application for those who collaborate on projects via email. It automatically extracts project related information from emails and allows you to focus on managing what is important: what needs to be completed by when and for whom.

It automatically extracts project

related information from emails and allows you to focus

on managing what is important: what needs to be

completed by when and for whom.

Here is a one-page brochure in PDF: Yoxel-PCM.pdf

These two Q&A records recently added in our support portal will help you start:

What is the Yoxel PCM?

Getting Started with the Yoxel PCM.

We would really appreciate your feedback!

Anonymous Feedback: Bugzilla

 

I need to know

1. How do I use yoxel to extract info from Bugzilla on failures in the past, potential

failures etc

2. An outline of the clearcut benefits of using Yoxel + Bugzilla and how this is superior

to using only Bugzilla.

An anonymous user asks:

I need to know:

1. How do I use yoxel to extract info from Bugzilla on failures in the past, potential failures etc

2. An outline of the clearcut benefits of using Yoxel + Bugzilla and how this is superior to using only Bugzilla.

Please visit our KnowledgeBase question/answer: How can we enable Bugzilla import?

Yoxel + Bugzilla combo is meant to be a temporary solution when evaluating Yoxel capabilities and transitioning to Yoxel. The idea is to provide an easy way to show benefits of Yoxel Release Manager and advantages of Yoxel Request Tracker UI without disrupting your current Bugzilla (or Mantis, Trac, Retrospectiva, GNATS, …) processes, plus a way to transfer Bugzilla bugs into Yoxel.

Enjoy!

Anonymous Feedback: Customizable workflows

 An anonymous user writes:

This looks like a good tool however its missing customizable work flows. Also I don’t know if you have proxy users. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems you might get an idea for more features. Also the layout could use some work. Over all though it looks like a very decent tool.

 I am not sure what the “proxy-user” feature is but as for the customizable work flows Yoxel does support that. Please see our KnowledgeBase question/answer and add comments if you’re interested to learn more: Does Yoxel support customizable workflows?

 

Enjoy!

Creating a useful product management environment

More development in the area of customizing and integrating bug-tracking and project management tools to create a useful product management environment: Product management nirvana

I have pointed earlier to the effort started at Splunk in my post Bookmark: Automating and opening up product planning . It is quite interesting to see what they are trying to do. Once again, I am just glad that the vision of our project Yoxel Agile Product Management is aligned with what real agile product management teams try to address. Here is what I mean by that:

Think bigger, Think Agile Product Management

Bridging the worlds of PLM and CRM

Bugzilla -> Yoxel synchronization module

Technical reporting with YOXEL SW: HTML, PDF, EXCEL

Project management software is social software

Release planning with YOXEL SW: Starting a new release

Release planning with YOXEL SW: Collaborative planning session

Cheers!

Rolling wave planning compromise.

David @ 37signals is saying, You do not need a product road map:

It’s better to turn customers away than to placate their instincts and lure them in with vague promises. It’s incredibly rare that a single feature will truly make or break your chance with a customer. If your software is a good enough fit, most people can make do without that one or two things that they’d like to see. 

John @ SplicedNetworks is saying, Goodbye Roadmap:

The concept of a roadmap has been thrown out, replaced with list of initial functional features . These features are currently in development, and will be the initial AppOS 4.0 release. AppOS 4.0 won’t be the bells and whistles release initially, instead it will be functional. Features will be expanded and added based on customer feedback , as well as our own use of the product.

These are agile companies talking. I support this concept and I am pretty sure they know what they are talking about. Our backlog is our idea of a road map, it is telling us what could be coming in the future releases (most probably the higher priority items) although you can not really say when exactly and in which order. One or two iterations ahead the situation is much clearer but beyond that not really, it is all driven by the changing market requirements.

But then, even scrum masters keep bringing up the concept of the rolling wave planning, which basically means: lets still try to maintain our road map and long term release plans, even though we’re agile. Isn’t that somewhat contradictory to the iterative “agile” concept which tells you that it does not make much sense to predict that far ahead?

I think Jerry Manas expressed it very well in his comment to  Forced Into ‘Agile’:

But even in the Defense Industry, Rolling Wave scheduling is becoming the norm, where each horizon is planned at a more granular level as it approaches (although the whole project is laid out up front at a higher level). I look at Rolling Wave as a hybrid between Agile and BDUF (and it’s appropriate for most projects most of the time).

So is the rolling wave a vehicle for transition to agile or a means to keep your business/management/VC folks happy (by giving them a plan that wont survive the reality)? What is your take on this issue? Do you create product road maps in your agile environment? Do you use the rolling wave concept? How practical is that? It would be very curious to learn.

Our product Yoxel Agile Product Management  is quite straight forward in this sense. You’ve got your backlog and your iterations, which we also call incremental releases, because for us those are the same (~1month: implementation+testing). No rolling wave with long term release plans and even longer term road map plans. You can start planning next iteration while you’re implementing/testing one and so you will have a good idea for what is coming in a month or two but beyond that your best bet is the prioritized baclkog .

Cheers!

Bookmark: Is Distributed Agile Development as Hard as it Looks?

An interesting and, in my opinion, very valid opinion expressed in Is Distributed Agile Development as Hard as it Looks?, by Dean Leffingwell.

 … of all the challenges enterprises face in adopting large-scale agile, the problem of distributed teams ranks fairly low on the list.

While everyone understands the virtues of face to face communication – (agile manifesto principle: The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation) – at the same time, no one derides distributed open source communities, which in some facets are paragons of agility, for the fact that team members are not collocated, and no one challenges the quality, productivity or delivery velocity of that model.

Bookmark: Agile SCM – Review of 2007 and Predictions for 2008

Agile SCM – Review of 2007 and Predictions for 2008, written by Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham and Steve Berczuk. An interesting read.

Installable vs. Hosted

This 37signals’ post started a long thread of interesting comments Ask 37signals: Installable software? Quite insightful opinions although mostly leaning towards the hosted SaaS approach.

It would be highly unlikely that we’d sell installable software. This question is actually more about business than it is about software. 

• We’d be a different company
• Hosted = Controlled development and deployment environment
• Installable = Lots of room for things to go wrong
• Backward compatibility headaches
• Upgrade cycles

And then also this interesting follow up  Installable vs. Hosted , by Kevin Dangoor, in defense of installable software.

However, I think for a many apps, quite a few potential customers will be left behind by only offering a hosted version.

I’ve seen a number of products start off with one approach and then add the other. I can name two off the top of my head that started off installable and added a hosted option.

Our experience is quite opposite, we have started with a hosted version and later added an installable one. We distribute a free open source version of our product so if you study and de-bug our code it is fine with us, that only helps us make it better

The SaaS model was a good start, it helped us to mature our product and test the market. It is a significant part of our offering. One of the main reasons though vendor companies choose SaaS model is because it is easier for them. You do not have to worry about all those bullets expressed by 37signals. Is it always a good model for your customer? Not always, if you start paying more attention to your data security and privacy.

Our SaaS/OnDemand version offers a number of free services and we do not lock-in your data (you can always take it and move to your own server). And still, we see that more users prefer to download our open source version and install it on their premises (even though it takes some of their precious time). I bet the data security (in our case we are talking about release/project/feature plans) and in some cases compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act plays significant role in their decision making process. We are not Google or Salesforce so we did not expect that everyone would trust us with their critical business and customer related data so we went for an installable version too. And it has been quite rewarding: more users, more useful feedback, our code improved significantly, even the article in O3 magazine.

Our software is riding on UAMP (Unix,Apache,MySQL,PHP) stack which makes it easier to produce the installable version of our product. The release and testing process actually makes our SaaS solution (http://yoxel.com) much more robust. It was quite a challenge and alot of work to create a proper development infrastructure and to start producing the installable version but now after over a year of releasing it I should say it is not that hard anymore.

There are many advantages for a vendor to use SaaS model but here are a few that I personally like in the installable open source software model too:

• More potential customers who otherwise would be concerned with SaaS
• We are not responsible for the security and privacy of customer servers/data
• You can test at a few selected beta-sites before rolling out new version to everyone
• Our users help us make our software much better by seeing our code

We really like our SaaS model too. Would the trust/security/privacy issue be easily solvable this would be just enough, I think. But at the moment the combination of hosted and installable makes alot of sense to us. Appliance is a good model too, unfortunately we have not reached that stage yet. A good example is SugarCRM which offers all three models!

Enjoy!

http://yoxel.com

Bookmark: Automating and opening up product planning

Here is an interesting post by Christina Noren, Automating and opening up product planning. Yet another example of a team trying to hack and integrate a few existing tools to build a useful product management flow. The problem I have been describing in my earlier post, Think bigger, Think Agile Product Management. Seems like many teams face the same inconvenience and some new, more integrated tools could help.

So the experiment: We’re hacking Jira, our bug tracking system, in order to automate the entire product planning and marketing process and facilitate real-time communication back to customers, internal stakeholders and even the community at large via our public roadmap. 

…

This means that we setting it up to automatically bring enhancement requests from our SugarCRM system into a PM work queue within Jira; asking PMs to enter call reports and market datapoints; linking all of these to problem statements;

What I especially like about this post is that it confirms our efforts with our project Yoxel Systems. Yoxel is exactly that integrated system: request tracking, release planning/tracking, key CRM capabilities, and even customer portals! And if you really like your Jira, Bugzilla, Mantis, GNATS, Yoxel can connect to them too.

Customers with enhancement requests tracked through the support portal will be able to see how they’ve been triaged, how the problem has been interpreted, and what requirements are at what stage of delivery to meet the request.The public roadmap will be maintained in real time, with the potential for drilldown into more of what’s behind each listed feature. 

Once again, Bridging the worlds of PLM and CRM  seems to be creating value and helping you build better products.

Check out our demo accounts as http://yoxel.com