tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67722170769870848782024-03-08T04:43:10.949-08:00Gigantt BlogAssafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-47703651572517463662014-06-02T08:08:00.000-07:002014-06-02T08:08:23.472-07:00Gigantt is Shutting Down<br />
Dear users of Gigantt,<br />
<br />
It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing today that Gigantt is shutting down. Starting from today, new users can no longer sign-up for Gigantt. Existing users, please don't worry, your data is safe and you may <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/120071-export">export it in a variety of formats</a>. I highly recommend you do that as soon as possible.<br />
<br />
I understand these news may raise some questions, so here is my attempt to answer some of them in advance. If your question isn't answered below, feel free to contact me at gigantt@assaflavie.com.<br />
<br />
Q: <b>What's going to happen to my work-plans?</b><br />
A: My intention is to keep the system online for as long as possible, so you could export your plans and migrate to another project-management system. Starting from July 2014 you will have read-only to your existing plans, and you will not be able to make changes to them any more. I encourage you to export your plans sooner rather than later, because from this point on bugs will no longer be fixed and the system will run in a reduced-redundancy mode, which means it might experience periods of unplanned nonavailability. Keeping the system running has a cost and at a certain point it will have to be turned off for good.<br />
<br />
Q: <b>How can I export my work-plans?</b><br />
A: <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/120071-export">This page</a> explains it all. Open your plan, go to the menu -> plan -> export. There's no option to batch export multiple plans at the same time, so you would have to do this one by one if you use more than one plan.<br />
<br />
Q: <b>Is it possible to run Gigantt locally on my own server?</b><br />
A: Not as is, no. Gigantt was designed to run in the cloud on multiple servers with various roles. Porting Gigantt to an on-premise installation is possible, but requires more work than I can afford to do at this point.<br />
<br />
Q: <b>Why are you shutting down??? Gigantt is awesome!</b><br />
A: Well, thank you, I agree. :) All kidding aside, I am proud of Gigantt. It was an ambitious undertaking - trying to offer the world a new way to manage projects, one that's both fast and easy to learn but also gives you realistic time-estimates for large, complex projects. The bottom line is that not enough people saw the value in that idea, and it eventually became economically unfeasible to continue developing and supporting Gigantt. Naturally, we have put a lot of thought into analyzing this failure, and the full answer to why Gigantt never took off is rather complex. It's not just one thing and to explain all the reasons why it turned out the way it did is a story much longer than can fit in this post.<br />
<br />
Q: <b>Will you release Gigantt as open-source?</b><br />
A: A lot of time and money went into developing Gigantt, and while I cannot afford to continue developing it at this time, I really do wish to get back to it some day. Some great technology has been developed as part of this project, technology that may end up in future commercial endeavors that are proprietary in nature. So the answer, I'm afraid, is no.<br />
<br />
Finally, I would like to thank everyone that was involved in Gigantt.<br />
First, our loyal users, some of whom have been using Gigantt for years now, and have been sending us great, encouraging feedback.<br />
To everyone that was part of the Gigantt team over the years, thank you for taking part in this adventure. You've done a great job on a heck a product. Even great products can fail commercially, and this one certainly did not fail because of its quality. I hope that everyone involved has benefited and grown as part of this journey.<br />
To our investors, thank you for believing in us and taking a risk on a first-time entrepreneur. There are a lot of things I could have done better, but picking investors is not one of them. You've been supportive all the way, and I hope to share success with you in the future.<br />
<br />
Yours truly,<br />
Assaf Lavie<br />
Founder, Gigantt<br />
<br />Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-80364476966289792732014-04-09T03:38:00.002-07:002014-04-09T03:38:57.609-07:00Pricing for PiracyA post on my <a href="http://blog.assaflavie.com/">personal blog</a> about why so many feel okay about downloading pirated content and what we can do about it: <a href="http://blog.assaflavie.com/pricing-for-piracy/">Pricing for Piracy</a>.Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-49744785451097287742013-07-10T02:52:00.000-07:002013-08-06T02:50:04.224-07:00Use-Case Apps<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I follow <a href="http://betali.st/">Beta List</a> regularly. It tells you about new start-ups in beta stage. I'm an early adopter and I love to try new things out.
Today I saw a post about <a href="https://www.adamandluna.com/">StoryApp</a>:
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.adamandluna.com/"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/07/1373388214.png" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>[StoryApp] enables you to show your friends' photos on your phone by swiping through them, one-by-one, describing what's happening, like in real life. Turning photos into stories.</i></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A neat little concept. I mean, I'm not trying to belittle this endeavor. Executing an app like this <b>well</b> takes a lot of talent, and I'm rooting for these guys. Still, it's a very simple concept. Like Instagram - dead simple: take a square photo and add a filter to it. If it catches on, you sell to [some huge company] and light up a cigar. The world wasn't changed in any significant way. Nothing new was invented. It's all packaging.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which brings me to my point. So many of the most popular apps nowadays are not a lot more than <i>feature appification</i>. Taking an existing feature from well established, powerful software applications, and building an app around it. Of course you could create the above voice & photo stories without StoryApp. Heck, you could have done it with Powerpoint 15 years ago. But it wasn't as easy and accessible. It also wasn't as affordable. Powerpoint is expensive. You wouldn't buy it just to send someone a few narrated photos. Photoshop is expensive, and not that easy to use. You wouldn't invest your time and money into Photoshop just so you could apply a filter to a photo you took at the beach. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you think about it, feature appification is almost inevitable in a world of $1 smartphone apps. It's just like what's happening with music. Albums are passé. Why should I pay $15 to get that one song I like plus 12 other songs that I probably don't like as much? Well, people don't, any more... They buy singles, or just particular songs off an album, because they finally have the option to do so, ever since the physical medium was taken out of the equation. Few people think twice before splurging on a $1 app. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>People would buy twenty $1 apps before buying one $20 app.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That $20 app might have 20 features, but think of what this means:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are probably many features you're not going to use at all, and you're paying for them.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All those unused features crowd the user-interface, making it harder for you to find and use just the feature that you want.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<a href="http://instagram.com/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="103" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/07/1373448781.png" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instagram has one major use-case scenario: Take a picture, add a filter, share it with friends. Instagram is <b>completely optimized</b> for that particular use-case. The user-experience is perfect. The fact that some other photo effects app has the same filters (and more!) doesn't really matter, because it's never going to be as perfect for that use-case as Instagram is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In fact, calling it feature appification probably doesn't go far enough. These apps take particular use-cases <i>of</i> particular features and turn them into a standalone product. Maybe a better term is <i>use-case apps. </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Use-case apps aren't just an inevitable outcome of a software market that's dominated by $1 transactions. They're also the outcome of a user base that expects nothing less than optimal user-experience. The iPhone has spoiled us rotten. We no longer abide superfluous clicks. Any distraction from what we're trying to achieve means we're switching to another app that specializes in doing what we want.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Taking something big like Photoshop and chiseling away at it until you're left with just one optimized use-case (Instagram) is actually more than just a reductive process. It's not just removing unneeded features; by exposing one particular feature through optimized UI you can also enable completely new use-cases. Take, for example, the number one paid app on the App Store at the moment: iTranslate Voice.</span><br />
<a href="http://itranslatevoice.com/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/07/1373447922.png" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It translates audio on-the-go. Basically speech-to-text coupled with a translation engine. Neither is an easy feature to implement well, but nonetheless there has been software to do both for quite some time. Crucially, though, these features weren't available to you on-the-go. By packaging them together </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">iTranslate Voice </i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">is enabling a completely new use-case: real-time conversations with people who don't share a common language. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<a href="https://vine.co/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/07/1373448689.png" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Use-case apps are optimizations and specializations. They take something you could have done with existing software - but didn't - and create a way for you to actually do it. Vine is another great example. It's not just about recording short square videos; it also lets you pause and resume recording with your thumb, thereby giving your video the feel of being edited. Sure, there were video editor apps before Vine, and there were video publishing apps before Vine, but none of them let you create a video that looks "edited" in 10 seconds flat. Optimizing existing features for a particular use-case can create a completely new need. People had no idea they wanted a way to share short, edited, square-sized videos. Now they do. Thus, use-case appification can definitely also be a <i>creative</i> process, not just a reductive one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader: what's the next big use-case app? Take a big, well established piece of software (Microsoft Word?); think of just one use-case for it - something very common (writing a resignation letter?); then quit your job and launch your own use-case app start-up (iResign?).</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-72896750915804527362013-04-30T09:12:00.000-07:002013-04-30T11:21:56.378-07:00Are Google Hangouts The Perfect Office Environment?<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Short answer: no.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<i>This</i> is the perfect office environment:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style='padding-bottom: 2px; line-height: 0px'><a href='http://pinterest.com/pin/174092341818097701/' target='_blank'><img src='http://media-cache-ec3.pinimg.com/550x/7d/c3/3d/7dc33d671a58e792ea697064381b67d5.jpg' border='0' width='530' height ='365'/></a></div><div style='float: left; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;'><p style='font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;'>Source: <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href='http://www.sfgirlbybay.com/'>sfgirlbybay.com</a> via <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com/assaflavie/' target='_blank'>Assaf</a> on <a style='text-decoration: underline; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com' target='_blank'>Pinterest</a></p></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br />But since we can't have that one, let's try to approximate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
Working from home can be awesome. It's certainly not for everyone. Lots of people need that shared office environment to be productive. Some actually prefer to work in an open-space. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know, one of these:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367246970.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="198" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367246970.png" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">your typical open space</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Those that prefer to work in an open space can stop reading now.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
We, reasonable people, we appreciate what a quiet, private work environment means. When you have your own office, with a door and all, you can actually concentrate. You're less easily distracted, and <a href="http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/">less stressed</a>. You can have a conversation with a colleague without breaking everybody else's concentration. And yea, you can also give your brain the occasional rest by checking up on Facebook for a few minutes, or playing a couple of Angry Birds levels. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
Yes, games at work - big whoop. As long as you're not overdoing it, they can actually increase your productivity.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://embed.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="560"></iframe>
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<br />"Okay, we get it", you say, "what does this have to do with Google Hangouts?"</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To answer that, let's imagine the perfect office environment for a programmer (although it's really the same for anyone who has to concentrate at work, while also working in a team setting). The office in the picture above is pretty, but it isn't that practical and it isn't perfect.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the perfect programmer office:</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367252162.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367252162.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Who touched the thermostat?!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You are by yourself. Just you. When you have two programmers sharing a room, at least one of them will have a seasonal allergy at any point in time, and will be blowing his nose every five minutes.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">People can see when you're in, and can knock on your door if they need to pop in and ask a question. But you also have a <i>do not disturb </i>sign for those hours that you're really in the zone.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Your team members are nearby, so you can ask them a quick question if you need to.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You got your <a href="http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/performance-work-chairs/aeron-chairs.html">fancy Aeron chair</a>, your private AC thermostat, and an en-suite bathroom that nobody else uses. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, with a distributed team, <b>each working from home using a permanent Google hangout</b> you get as close to that as humanly possible. </span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367261512.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367261512.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pirate hat effect is optional</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It just requires a few tweaks.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tweak #1</b><br />
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></b>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everybody joins the hangout each morning, and stays on for the duration of the work day </span><b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">but with their microphone muted</b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. This is crucial. Without it you're just listening to other people's typing noises and we're back to the horribleness that is an open space environment. When you want to say something, un-mute your mic and everybody else hears you.</span><br />
<div>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></b></div>
<div>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tweak #2 </b></div>
<div>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></b></div>
<div>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hide the hangout window</b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> when you really want to concentrate and don't want to see movement in you peripheral vision. In other words, you don't really have to be staring into each other's faces the entire day. But when you do need to say a word to someone, it takes just one second to switch over to the hangout window to see if they're there.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tweak #3</b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Need to blow your nose for a second and don't want it broadcast around the globe? </span><b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Turn off the camera for a moment</b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Same if you want to take a short break. Others will still be able to speak up and ask whether you're really there if they have something urgent to discuss. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's really as close as you can get to that ideal working environment. No real office environment is this flexible. It's like your teammates having adjacent offices with sound-proof glass walls that turn one-way opaque at the press of a button. You can see everyone, or hide them. You can be seen, and you can have your privacy. You can play music and not have to wear headphones for 9 hours. You don't even have to get up to walk over to your colleague's office when you need to talk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And Google Hangout has all kinds of other cool features. Being free is one of them. Another one is being able to share a screen and collaborate on documents and chat. I guess other video conferencing solutions have similar features, but not many of them are as well made and still free.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pro tip: if you can dedicate some old laptop just for hangouts, then do. It can sit beside your main screen and you can easily mute the whole thing with one click, turn it away if you want to... very flexible. It feels more like you're sitting alongside a coworker than actually video conferencing. Give it a shot.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The Downsides</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367251139.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1367251139.png" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hangouts aren't</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> perfect. They have a few quirks and missing features, but maybe Google will read this and fix them. Somebody please +1 this.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>No PTT</b> - Push To Talk. You know, like a Walkie-Talkie. Muting and un-muting can get tedious. Occasionally someone will forget to mute his mic and has to be asked to. Occasionally you'll forget you're muted and find yourself talking to the air for a few seconds. It's not a huge deal, but it would be great to have.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Google Hangouts <b>time out</b> after a while. I guess they weren't really designed to be used for hours and hours. After an hour or so a popup asks you whether you're really still hanging out or not, and if you don't answer it it'll close the hangout. Annoying. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Setting up and shutting down the hangout is cumbersome. It's just too many clicks. You can't "save" a hangout and get back to it with one click. You have to invite people manually each time. <b>What Google Hangout really needs is the concept of rooms</b>, like chat systems have. Rooms could have well known links so anybody can join them without being invited. You could also be in more than one room, talking to a different group of people each time. You could have one-on-one rooms. Hangouts should copy IRC. <a href="http://blog.gigantt.com/2012/07/remember-irc.html">IRC is awesome</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>In Summary</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're a distributed team, staying in touch can be challenging. Chat isn't enough. Calling people up on Skype isn't quite it, either. You can have a lot of the good things a real office environment gives you, without many of the annoyances. That's how we work at <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a>, which, by the way, is perfect for distributed teams that collaborate on the same projects. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hey, what do you know, I managed to plug our product in our blog...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HubSpot, give me my marketing grade points now please!</td></tr>
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Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-41592768827093735682013-04-23T08:17:00.000-07:002013-04-23T08:48:59.424-07:00Gigantt is Not Psychic<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gigantt's task scheduling is fully automatic. It requires just one thing: that you estimate your tasks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When tasks are left without estimates, Gigantt tries to nudge you to properly estimate them by showing a little icon beside them (and beside each task that contains them):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Until today, tasks left without estimates were treated by Gigantt's scheduler as one hour long. One hour seemed like roughly the most common task size, so that's what we went with.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Starting today, you can control the default estimate yourself by going to <i>Options -> This Plan</i> and <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/192775">changing the setting</a>:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also starting today, all new plans will have a one-<b>minute </b>default estimate. Your existing plans will still have the one-hour default, unless you change it yourself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why did we change the default estimate to be one-minute?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, we noticed a lot of users wanted to be able to plan ahead very quickly, and only give estimates to their tasks when they're done. The freedom to use Gigantt this way is important, because if you're brainstorming and furiously writing down task after task, we don't want to slow you down by demanding that you stop and estimate each task that you create. The problem with the previous default of one hour was that if you quickly created, say, 20 tasks without estimates, you basically added a 20-hour delay into your plan. This can be very disruptive, especially when you have lots of people collaborating on the same plan. One guy adds a bunch of tasks and suddenly the entire plan is delayed unintentionally.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With the 1-minute default, you can do more than just separate planning from estimating. You can also use Gigantt to manage check-lists. When you create a check-list of tiny one-minute tasks, then you're hardly affecting the overall schedule.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We hope this change won't be disruptive to our existing users. If you would like to give us feedback, please visit <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/">our feedback site</a> and let us know what you think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Above all, remember to estimate those tasks. Gigantt isn't psychic, yet. You need to tell it how long tasks are going to take. It takes just a few seconds to do so, and in return you get fully automatic scheduling and resource leveling. That's a good deal.</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-80427889454751893262013-03-17T06:54:00.000-07:002013-03-17T08:26:50.576-07:00Scheduled Procrastination<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unscheduled meetings can be more productive than scheduled ones.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This might seem counter intuitive so let me explain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some jobs involve doing lots of things at once. Or at least in very rapid succession. For example, a secretary really needs to know how to multitask. Other jobs are more "single threaded", like software development. They usually require a lot concentration, which means it takes a while to get into "the zone" and become truly productive. No programmer says "great, I have about 4 minutes free until my next meeting, let's use the time to do some programming". There's a ramp-up process, and it's really hard to enter this process when you <b>know </b>you're going to interrupt it very soon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Enough theory, let's take an example. It's 9:30 AM and you have a team status meeting at 10:00. Are you going to start working on debugging that tricky crash, or are you going to pass the time with emails and make yourself coffee? You know it's going to take about 10 minutes just to warm up that cache that you keep in your skull, and there's nothing worse that having to stop in the middle of productive work. So you're not going to bother. You will procrastinate instead. StackOverflow. Facebook. Reddit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If it weren't for that 10:00 meeting, you would have dived into work without hesitation. Regardless of how productive you think meetings are in general, all other things considered equal, you'd get more work done if instead of scheduling the meeting at 10:00 somebody would have just popped into your office and said "hey, got a sec to talk?". </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Scheduled meetings are a major source of procrastination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now granted, not all meeting can be impromptu. Some, maybe most, actually require preparation and coordination, so there's not much we can do about those. But some recurring meetings are just a way to catch up. Daily status meetings, morning Scrum stand-up meetings, etc. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The cure is simple. Don't schedule daily recurring meetings. Just let them happen. Let's say you're doing Scrum and this involves a stand-up meeting for 10 minutes every morning. If you schedule it for a fixed time-slot every time you're basically scheduling procrastination for the 20 minutes preceding it. So don't. Just wait until everybody's in and then announce "stand-up meeting in 5 minutes". That gives everybody just enough time to finish off what they're doing, but on the other hand there's no longer this meeting looming on your calendar each morning, making you avoid getting into any meaningful effort before it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't schedule procrastination into your routine. </span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-26786836050091931182013-03-11T01:10:00.000-07:002013-03-11T01:16:14.673-07:00Scrum with Gigantt<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If your company is practicing Scrum as a project management methodology, or if you're interested in getting started with Scrum, we've created a very useful <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/r/examples/scrum" target="_blank">Scrum recipe</a> that you can copy into your own plan in <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/" target="_blank">Gigantt</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Scrum is a pretty well defined process which basically looks like this:</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.gigantt.com/r/examples/scrum" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="251" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/03/1362902417.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We created a 4-minute video tutorial that dives into the anatomy of a Scrum sprint and explains the basics of the Scrum methodology. If you want to learn about Scrum and can only spare <i>four minutes</i>, this video is for you. :)</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/D7gbzL0NctY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(hd, audio)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can find more recipes and demo videos in our <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/c/examples" target="_blank">Gigantt Examples</a> page. We'll be adding more and more of these recipes to help our users get a head start planning their projects in Gigantt.</span><br />
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Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-43180692358508147062013-01-24T00:24:00.000-08:002013-01-24T00:45:56.959-08:00Recipes, Greenhouses and Copying Between Plans<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are all kinds of repeated work that you find yourself doing: scrum sprints, version release procedures or even following some setup guide. These are all examples of things you should only be planning <i>once</i> and then executing a few times. In <a href="http://gigantt.com/" target="_blank">Gigantt</a>, this is trivial to do. You just copy and paste some existing work and repeat it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let's see an example. Something close to home. When we, in Gigantt, are about to release a new version, we first release it to our QA environment for thorough testing. This is like a dress rehearsal for the product before it goes live, so there are quite a few steps that must be followed along the way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is basically a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000" target="_blank">check list</a>, and we repeat it every time we release a new version to the QA team. But unlike a traditional check-list, all the tasks here are already estimated, their order and dependencies are well known in advance, and each task is assigned to the relevant person.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's all contained in one big task called "QA Release Procedure":</span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/01/1358325962.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="63" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/01/1358325962.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whenever we plan a new release cycle for Gigantt, all we have to do is just copy and paste this task into the appropriate place in the plan. In this case, we plop it inside "Release to QA":</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pretty simple, but powerful stuff. It's powerful because it lets you keep all these "recipes" in Gigantt for stuff that you do repeatedly, so you have your documentation right there in your work plan. If you decide to add another step to your recipe, you add it to that <i>template</i> task and be sure it will never be skipped in the future. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So what's new? Copying and pasting tasks is a feature we've had from day one. But <b>now you can also copy and paste tasks between plans</b>. This means you can create separate "repository" plans just to keep track of recipes or experimental plans. You don't need to "pollute" your project's work-plan with recipe tasks that don't really belong there. For example, you wouldn't want these recipes to actually get scheduled by our automatic task scheduler - you want them to just sit there so you could copy them every now and then. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can also use <b>"greenhouse" plans</b> as a place for very early project planning. Meaning, you can create a work-plan for a new project in its own plan, and not worry about messing up everyone's schedule until you've properly planned and estimated all those new tasks. When it's done, you copy it into the "real" plan in one step.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Copying tasks between plans is the same as regular copying. Ctrl+C puts tasks into your visual clipboard; then you open the target plan (e.g. in a new tab) and paste there.</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-42204127475097826162013-01-21T00:48:00.000-08:002013-01-21T00:48:21.800-08:00Mouse Wheel Scrolling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The short story: as of today, <b>the mouse-wheel is used to scroll up & down</b> in Gigantt, <i>not</i> zoom in & out. To zoom, use the zoom buttons or the keyboard shortcuts (+, -).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's why.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From day one we envisioned Gigantt as a zoom-able mind-map for project planning. Our inspiration came, among other sources, from online mapping applications, where the mouse wheel is used to zoom in and out. For example, that's how Google Maps does it, and we tried to make zooming as intuitive as possible to anybody who's ever used Google Maps (which is everyone, right?).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This, it turns out, was dead wrong. For too many of our users, who are very accustomed to using the mouse wheel to scroll up & down, this default zoom behavior was very surprising and hard to get used to. It is mainly for their sake that we're introducing this change. To our dear, loyal, existing users, we're sorry for the hassle of having to get used to this new behavior.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another reason is we observed that most of our users don't really do a lot of <i>partial </i>zooming. They either step into a task completely (e.g. by double clicking on it) or step outside (by double-clicking outside or on the Zoom Out button). Zooming in partially is something our users do rarely - usually when they have too many tasks in the same container and they're too small to read comfortably (hint: use the <i><a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/92781-expanding-collapsing-tasks" target="_blank">collapse</a> </i>feature).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The one place where incremental, partial zooming is very useful is Team View. In team view you can zoom out and see thousands of tasks on the screen at the same time, so it's really important to be able to zoom just enough to see what you want to see. We think this is still pretty easy to do with the zoom buttons. Again, you can also zoom with the keyboard shortcuts +/- and you can change the time resolution with Ctrl +/-.</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-36744928035991488552013-01-06T01:48:00.000-08:002013-01-06T01:55:31.216-08:00Color<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Exciting new features have landed today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">Colored</span> <span style="color: #b45f06;">Views</span></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two new views that show tasks in color based on the resources assigned to them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In both <i>Duration </i>and <i>Future </i>view you can switch colors on/off.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Colors let you focus on <i>who's</i> doing the work inside each task, instead of seeing the sub-task structure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <i>Duration</i> view you get a "tree-map" visualization, where the size of each colored rectangle stands for how many work-days go into each task and its sub-tasks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <i>Future</i> view you see a timeline per resource within each task. This makes it a lot easier to identify blocked tasks, who's waiting for whom - that sort of thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The keyboard shortcuts are still the same. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(1) Logical, (2) Duration, (3) Future, (4) Team</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hit 2 once to switch to duration view. <b>Hit 2 again to turn color mode on, and again to turn it off.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Same with 3 (future view).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We've also beefed up the view selection drop-down. It's bigger and hopefully helps understand what each view is good for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Customized Resource Colors</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Naturally, since things are getting a lot more colorful, you can now customize your organization's resources and select the colors you like best.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>New Icons</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A small face-lift to our user interface to brighten things up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-51301730963727137902012-12-23T01:26:00.000-08:002012-12-23T02:11:38.674-08:00New Feature: Work Calendar<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A big new feature coming at ya today: work-calendars. </span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/12/1356254353.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="301" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/12/1356254353.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not everybody works the same days and hours. Work calendars let you define, first, your organization's standard work-week. That is, <b>which days are working days</b> and how many hours people work in general?</span><br />
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<a href="http://gigantt.com/static/images/features/scheduling.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="http://gigantt.com/static/images/features/scheduling.png" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Naturally, this affects Gigantt's automatic task scheduling. With this new information the schedules you're going to get will be a lot more realistic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can customize further, defining the work-week of particular people or resources. This lets you handle <b>part-time employees</b>, resources with special availability (e.g. available only during </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">weekends), and so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another thing you can do is define <b>vacation periods</b>, for everyone or for particular people. These are days during which no tasks get scheduled. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Read all about work-calendars in our support page: <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/146771-work-calendar" target="_blank">Work Calendars</a>.</span><br />
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<a href="http://gigantt.com/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://bit.ly/gigantt_not_excel" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-82891297480828212902012-12-19T01:02:00.000-08:002012-12-20T03:53:58.415-08:00Fire your most irreplaceable team members now<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">The most replaceable employees are the irreplaceable ones.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">Let's take a moment to parse this sentence carefully. It's true in two ways.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">An employee that voluntarily shares his knowledge</span><span style="color: #666666;"> with his coworkers, keeps nothing solely in his head, but rather strives to document publicly the knowledge and know-how he acquires on the job, is the most precious employee the company has. He knows that if he quits tomorrow, he is totally replaceable, in the sense that there's nothing he would need to teach his replacement - it's all there in the open. No knowledge is permanently lost. This </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">is the guy you never actually want to replace</span><span style="color: #666666;">.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">An employee that hoards knowledge</span><span style="color: #666666;"> and positions himself as the omniscient guru, to whom all must come for answers, </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">should be the first one fired</span><span style="color: #666666;">. Sometimes people do this unintentionally. They don't see a problem with having all the answers. That's why managers need to instill into them the following mantra: </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">t</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">he stuff you keep in your head should only be a copy</span><i style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;">. </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">Let's </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">call it <i>brain cache</i></span><span style="color: #666666;">.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">What you bring to the table as an employee is your attitude, your ability to reason, make smart decisions and learn. Everything else is basically brain cache. A cache is a powerful thing, mind you. But if the problem of </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">replacing an employee boils down to warming up a new brain cache</span><span style="color: #666666;"> - that's at least manageable. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">p.s.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">I'm trying a new format in this post: </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">highlighting sentences for readers to quickly skim the text</span><span style="color: #666666;">. The idea is that if you read only the highlighted text you should get a succinct version of the post, but still in sentences that make sense together and form a continuous and coherent version of the text on their own.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">As an avid blog follower, I find myself practically always skimming posts - sometimes hundreds each day. I don't really read any blog post word-for-word unless I know for sure it's interesting enough. Especially wordy ones (like this one). There are just too many of them. I suspect I'm not the only one who does this. If you're reading this (and you're able to see the subtle HTML formatting I've applied), I'd be interested to hear you opinion. </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Is this actually helping you read, or is it just annoying?</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://gigantt.com/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://bit.ly/gigantt_not_excel" /></a></div>
<br />Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-39386196193590267432012-12-17T08:15:00.000-08:002012-12-17T08:15:05.007-08:00Scheduled System Maintenance - Sat. Dec. 22<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gigantt will undergo a scheduled upgrade this Saturday (2012-12-22) at 05:00 UTC. There will probably be a few minutes of inavailability. We'll update our status on Twitter in case there are any surprises: <a href="https://twitter.com/giganttweets">@giganttweets</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Check back with us afterwards for some fancy new feature announcements.</span><br />
Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-89923138324797324052012-12-11T23:56:00.000-08:002012-12-11T23:56:00.015-08:00Planning Release Cycles - Behind The Scenes of Gigantt's Development<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We try to release a new major version of Gigantt every month. Sometimes it takes us longer, depending on how challenging the new feature is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our development effort normally runs parallel to our QA testing effort in a series of release cycles. Here is the actual snapshot of our next version's progress.</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/12/1355237859.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/12/1355237859.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gigantt v0.21 as of 2012-12-12</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Green is what's already done. As you can see, we break down our work to a few chunks. First the big stuff - the major new features. When that's finished and tested by developers, the QA team can already have at it, to try and flush out the most outrageous bugs as early as possible (and also provide us with some feedback in general). While the major features are being tested, we start working on minor ones and on our bug backlog. Finally, we reach the stabilization phase in which we do nothing but fix bugs that QA has found.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And so it goes every month or so. Develop, stabilize and repeat. What you see above is a good way </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to organize any project that follows an iterative flow. Things are nice and parallel when they need to be. Also a great way to plan scrum sprints.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon we'll be releasing a much requested feature: <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/forums/105995-vote-for-features-suggest-new-ones/suggestions/2908961-vacations-resource-availability">team calendars</a> (i.e. vacations, part-time workers). As you can see above, we just have to stabilize it a bit more before we unleash it on the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're managing a software project, <a href="https://gigantt.com/accounts/register/">try organizing it now in Gigantt</a>. It takes just a few minutes to get started.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/XiD4ga2s13w?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-87771055678245910082012-12-05T01:36:00.001-08:002013-04-04T03:26:04.383-07:00Work-Decibels - How Projects Should Be Estimated<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1365071140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2013/04/1365071140.jpg" width="213" /></a>Try this experiment: Blindfold yourself, put your hands flat out and ask someone to place one 5gr cookie in your left hand and two 5gr cookies in your right hand (on top of each other, so you can't feel how many there are by touch). Now there's 10gr of weight on your right hand and 5gr on your left. Can you tell which is heavier? Science tells us you shouldn't have a problem telling apart 10gr from 5gr.<br />
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Now do the same with a package of cookies. Put a 100gr package in each hand, after removing one cookie from one of them. The weight difference between them is still 5gr - but it's going to be much harder for you to say which is heavier. Sensing the difference between 100gr and 95gr is much harder than between 10gr and 5gr.<br />
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Lastly, if you try it with 200gr and 195gr, you should no longer be able to tell them apart. <br />
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Our perception works largely on a logarithmic scale. It's not just true for weight, but also for loudness of sound, brightness of vision and other kinds of perception (distance, taste and more). The "bigger" things are, the more difference between them it takes for us to be able to tell them apart, a phenomenon described by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law">Weber-Fecher law</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens%27_power_law">Stevens' power law</a>.<br />
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So what does all this have to do with project management? I'd argue that this quirk of perception and estimation applies to estimating tasks in a project as well. We're usually quite good at estimating whether a task is going to take one or two days, but estimating whether a task is going to take 30 or 31 days is nearly impossible.<br />
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That's why we at <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> think <a href="http://blog.gigantt.com/2011/06/t-shirt-sized-estimates.html">t-shirt sized task estimates</a> are a very good idea for projects. It makes little difference if a day-long task actually takes 8 or 9 hours, so you may as well avoid talking about hours in such cases and just say one day. Similarly, if a much bigger task is going to take 20 or 23 days there's no real difference and you're unlikely to be able to nail that estimation so accurately, anyway. So just say it's going to take one (work) month.<br />
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(Of course, you shouldn't be estimating anything in such large chunks. The right thing to do is break 20-day tasks into smaller pieces and estimate them individually, in the process also realizing how much unexpected work actually goes into them, and thus getting much more reliable aggregate estimates.)<br />
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The Weber-Fechner point of all this is to avoid comparing things of similar magnitude. Those are too hard to tell apart. If you limit yourself to t-shirt sized estimates, like [1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, etc.] you're going to round off a lot of estimation errors and make your life much easier. It also makes life easier within the organization. You won't need to haggle over whether something should take 9 or 10 days - just call it 2 weeks and move on. Everybody can agree on whether something is going to take one or two weeks. Your under- and over-estimations will even out.<br />
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I think the reason we're such poor estimators has something to do with our logarithmic perception. If you're listening to music at 50db and someone increases the volume to 60db it <i>feels</i> like a 20% increase in magnitude, but it's really a 10x increase (1000%). Decibels are a logarithmic scale, and that's similar to how our hearing works when it comes to stimuli of different magnitudes. That's why Decibels are such a useful scale to us. I'm saying we need a similar scale for estimating work. <b>We need work-decibels</b>. When faced with estimating a new task - something you haven't done before - a lot of the times you would try to look back at something similar and say "well, this looks like 20% more work" and a lot of the times you're going to be dead wrong. You're just not that good at comparing things of similar scale.Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-52907163988154628102012-11-08T09:19:00.003-08:002012-11-08T09:19:49.374-08:00Is log-in with Facebook/Google better than with normal passwords?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know how there are websites where you don't have to think of a new username and password when you register, and you can just log in with Facebook or Google instead? That's called SSO - Single Sign On, and there's a huge trend towards adopting this approach all over the web.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The arguments in favor seem strong: </span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's easy. Users don't want to generate a new set of credentials. SSO will thus cause less users to drop out before registering.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's secure. The more credentials a user has to keep track off, the less secure his online world is going to be, since he'll likely choose the same easy-to-remember passwords over and over.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's faster. One less thing to do to register. Just click on the big, familiar Facebook button, then up comes a pop-up from Facebook asking for permission, and you're done.</span></li>
<li>It's ubiquitous. Basically everybody already has a Facebook/Gmail account.</li>
<li>It's less headache. You're not storing user credentials, so the townspeople won't come after you with pitchforks when you get hacked. </li>
<li>It's easy to implement. In fact, there ain't much to implement, since it's been done a thousand times before and is offered as a library or a service.</li>
</ul>
So, easiest decision ever, right? Our new website shall be a beacon of progress, relying only on SSO for authentication.<br />
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Or <i>is it</i>?<br />
Pam, pam, paaaaaam!<br />
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One of the popular proponents of SSO is <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/">Stack Overflow</a>. From the day it launched, Stack Overflow never offered a traditional log in option - only SSO. Here's what their log-in screen looks like:<br />
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So, which account <i>did </i>we sign-up with to Stack Overflow? Was it the Google or Facebook option? <b>What happens if I choose the wrong one</b>? Would a new account be created? Are these the sort of questions you need your users to be asking themselves constantly?<br />
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In short - SSO is not <i>that </i>easy, at least when there's more than one SSO option to choose from. <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html">More choice isn't always good</a>. Too much of it can lead to inaction - users turning away.<br />
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There isn't always that much choice. Here's <a href="http://meetup.com/">meetup.com</a>'s log in page:<br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/11/1352360999.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/11/1352360999.png" width="306" /></a></div>
Granted, I still need to remember if I registered with my own credentials or with Facebook, but I guess that's a bit easier to remember.<br />
<br />
At least SSO is still faster, right? You don't have to type anything or try every one of your different passwords till you get the right one. But then again, doesn't the browser already do that? Every browser now offers to remember your log in details for you, and some even go ahead and fill out the log in form for you automatically. Browsers have become password managers, and pretty good ones at that. With a password manager working for you, logging in becomes just one click. That's actually faster than with SSO. With SSO, first you have to click on your SSO provider (click #1) and then, depending on whether or not you're already logged in to Facebook or whatever you have to also wait for their pop-up (so slow...) and either click inside it to confirm, or (worse) actually do the whole log in thing with Facebook.<br />
<br />
So, traditional log in: 1 click.<br />
SSO: 1 click + a whole lot of waiting for popups + potentially an additional log-in<br />
<br />
But wait, there's more! If you really care about security and speed, you're likely using a full fledged password manager, like <a href="http://lastpass.com/">LastPass</a>. LastPass doesn't just keep track of your passwords <i>very securely</i>, it also generates them for you - nice, long, random ones. But, most importantly, LastPass works very hard to make sure it knows how to auto-fill every bloody log in form on every bloody web site. It's not a hit-or-miss feature, like the ones inside browsers. And, if you choose, <b>it will automatically click on the log in button for you</b>. So if you're using LastPass you can actually skip the entire log-in process entirely. <b>Zero clicks. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
To recap: SSO - 1 click at the very minimum; Traditional log-in: 0 clicks.<br />
<b>SSO is actually much, much slower than traditional credentials</b>.<br />
<br />
And SSO isn't really more secure than using a good password manager. In either case once your main password (for Facebook/LastPass) is compromised, hackers can log in to any of your SSO accounts. Granted, more people use Facebook than LastPass, so SSO still has the upper hand in terms of ubiquity, but, with time, I believe we'll see the equivalent of LastPass built into every browser.<br />
<br />
The last point is about implementation. Here, traditional passwords are easiest, no doubt. They're built into any decent web framework or CMS, so there's really nothing to implement. I've done both and getting SSO to work is pretty easy, but certainly not easier than traditional authentication. And as long as you're not rolling your own, you're likely using a very well tested and secure implementation, which doesn't actually store passwords - only <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29">salted hashes</a> thereof - so hacking your site won't give hackers access to your users' other accounts.<br />
<br />
All of this is why <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> has been using the traditional log in method until now, and we're not likely to change it soon. Down the line - maybe, if it actually helps us reach more users. But we probably won't offer more than one SSO option and we'll almost certainly always keep the traditional log-in option around.Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-80151158958303395642012-11-01T05:32:00.000-07:002012-11-01T05:32:46.521-07:00Due Dates / Deadlines (Feature Announcement)<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm glad to announce we've released the <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/forums/105995-vote-for-features-suggest-new-ones/suggestions/2908948-deadlines-due-dates-for-tasks">much awaited</a> due-date feature </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(a.k.a. deadlines)</span>. </span>It took us a while to implement; we wanted it to be just right.<br />
<br />
This is what it looks like when a task has a due date defined for it.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350395123.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350395123.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Green means relax - you got some spare time.<br />
<br />
When the due date approaches, it turns yellow:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350395054.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="130" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350395054.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" width="400" /></a></div>
Better start paying attention... you don't want your task to be late:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350394959.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="130" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1350394959.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
That's just a tiny sample of the different ways we visualize due-dates. Read more about this feature <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/128588">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Go ahead and <a href="https://www.gigantt.com/">take her out for a spin</a>. Let us know what you think.Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-37311115366513253682012-10-24T11:14:00.000-07:002013-04-04T04:49:29.300-07:00Users Don't Care About Bug Fixes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We were trained to always write a "what's new" list when we ship a new version of our product. User have come to expect these lists, as you see them even in app stores. Each app update comes with a "release history" that's supposed to tell you why you should bother updating.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This, in itself, is a good thing. Problem is, people who write these lists often <b>confuse "<i>what's new</i>" with "<i>what we've been working on since the last version</i>"</b>. Users (and this is a gross generalization, but still) do not care how your team has been spending its time between versions. They care about what's <i>new</i>. Shiny new things.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The worst offense in this respect is including bug fixes as part of the release history. Sure, you've spent 80% of your time fixing bugs and 20% actually adding new functionality - but users don't care. Yes, yes, of course some do, like the ones that reported some of the bugs, but they're really the exception. Your <b>release history is a <i>marketing</i> document</b> aimed at getting more people to upgrade to the latest version and convert inactive users to active ones. Most users could care less about how many bugs you've fixed along the way. In fact, nice going, advertising the fact that you have shipped so many bugs to begin with... Sure, it's reality, but reality isn't the point. You're not logging, you're advertising.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So <b>don't include a list of every single bug you've fixed</b>. For God's sake <b>don't include bug IDs!</b> But most pointless of all is to just write "various bug fixes". O... k... what's the value in that? Why are you sharing this with users? It's not their fault that you only managed to squeeze one new feature into this release. Adding this "but we really worked hard to fix a lot of problems you may not even have noticed" excuse is just silly.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://gigantt.com/c/history">We've done this</a> in the past, I'll admit. No more. If you can spin a bug fix as a positive improvement to functionality (e.g. things run faster), then go ahead - but don't force it. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One exception to this rule is for mega-bugs. Bugs that were so horrible, they caused half your users to flee your product. It makes sense to mention those, but really only those. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Think of every addition to the release history as adding another line to your product's CV</b>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What goes into a CV? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Good idea: mention the ways you've grown during your last job.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bad idea: mention that anger management course they forced you to take. That's the sort of "bug fix" you can keep to yourself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-54559179686386281612012-10-17T02:19:00.000-07:002012-10-17T02:19:26.612-07:00New Feature: Export Your Projects<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sadly, not every single person in the world uses Gigantt. Not yet. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a travesty.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But don't despair, early adopter! You can now export your plans from Gigantt to a variety of popular file formats, which you can then share with your clients or co-workers who haven't yet jumped on board the Gigantt train.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here are the export formats we currently support:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Microsoft Project</b> (XML) - The ubiquitous project-management tool we all love to hate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Excel </b>(CSV) - </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #292c33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;">Comma Separated Values. A simple textual format that can be opened by Excel or any text editor.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Image </b>(PNG) - This is like printing your screen into an image that you can then attach to emails/PowerPoint/etc. You even get a chance to preview your plan and tweak it before saving it as an image file.</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/10/1350463217.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/10/1350463217.png" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">image preview</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>HTML</b> - Gigantt will export your plan into a single, interactive HTML file in the shape of a task-tree. You can then view it in any browser.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>JSON </b>- <span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;">The "source" format Gigantt uses internally to save your projects. It's a very programmer-friendly text format. Software developers should find it easy to use for developing their own export formats.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><b>DOT</b> - This one is just for fun. It exports the "shape" of your plan so that it can be rendered as a DAG in </span><a href="http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4f8af0; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">GraphViz</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;">. This is a very technical format that only software developers find relevant</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These are the formats we're starting with. We plan to add more. Go ahead and <a href="http://gigantt.com/">try it out</a>. If you'd like us to add support for any specific format please <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/forums/105995-vote-for-features-suggest-new-ones">let us know</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2e2f33; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><br /></span>
<br />Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-25166669406851828522012-10-10T05:26:00.000-07:002012-10-10T05:26:42.226-07:00It's Tasks All The Way Down...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> is a project management tool that does not know what a project is. It's all just tasks. Tasks that can contain other tasks.</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/River_terrapin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/River_terrapin.jpg" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"<strike>Turtles</strike> Tasks all the way down"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It makes everything much simpler, really. You don't need to define projects, milestones or versions. It's up to you to build your task hierarchy in any way that makes sense to you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Consequently, plans in Gigantt don't really have names. Or, more accurately, the name of the plan is just the name of its top task. </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/10/1349867822.png" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Renaming a plan</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rename it and you've renamed your plan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Normally, when you create a new plan, the top task is assigned to you, and so is any additional sub-task you create. You're the <i>default </i>owner, in other words, of any top level sub-task. We've recently added a way to change this. So if you want to assign the top task of the plan to somebody else you can do it by visiting the <i>This Plan</i> dialog inside the menu.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1349865244.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F10%2F1349865244.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" width="373" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Changing the default owner of top-level tasks</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This comes in handy, for example, when the person who created the plan is no longer part of the project.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our fractal approach to projects, where it's all just tasks containing other tasks, makes <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt </a>simpler to learn and more flexible.</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-35702327366641900452012-09-30T02:10:00.002-07:002012-09-30T02:10:48.161-07:00Wiggle<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our latest release of <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> introduces a cute little feature called <i>wiggle</i>.</span><br />
<a href="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993365.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993365.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 14px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The <i>wiggle</i> button lets you rearrange the tasks you see on screen. Each click on it cycles through a different method of arranging tasks and drawing arrows between them.</span><br />
<span style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">See, there's no one perfect way to layout your tasks on screen. Plans are sometimes complex and have odd shapes. Just like no one <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/98010">view</a></i> is always what you want to see, no particular layout is always the clearest way to visualize your tasks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For example, the following plan has 10 tasks with all kinds of connections between them.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993407.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As you can see, some of the arrows cross each other in confusing ways and pass "through" tasks on their way. Not so easy to tell what connects to what.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now let's cycle through some possible wiggles to see alternative ways of laying out the same plan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One option is to use straight arrows instead of bendy ones:</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993543.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's already an improvement. Making the arrows are less parallel makes them easier to distinguish from one another. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another wiggle option is to leave the arrows the way they were but change the order of tasks on screen:</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993628.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's a different sort of improvement. The example above uses a different method of ordering tasks called a <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4f8af0; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">topological sort</a> </i>(programmers may have observed that the default method is a DFS).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But still some arrows intersect unrelated tasks on their way. Good thing there's another wiggle option that makes sure no two tasks overlap horizontally. Here's what it looks like:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" src="https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fgigantt_pub_imgs%2F2012%2F09%2F1348993796.png&key=afea23f29e5a4f63bd166897e3dc72df" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Arrows are easy to follow in the example above, but, of course, this comes at the cost of making it harder to tell which tasks we can start with (i.e. have no prerequisites). </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are more wiggle options than we've shown here. This video cycles through all the currently available options:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gLEmfF-roZY?wmode=transparent&fs=1&feature=oembed" style="background-color: white; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292c33; display: inline; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="500"></iframe><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bottom line - you don't always need wiggles, but every now and then they can take a complex-looking plan and make it look simpler. No layout method is perfect since plans come in all shapes and sizes. </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some wiggle room is a good idea.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font: inherit; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Take a moment to <a href="http://gigantt.com/accounts/login">log in to Gigantt</a> and try it out.</span></span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-66677838231394159882012-09-23T06:07:00.000-07:002012-09-23T06:07:44.774-07:00What's On The Menu<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We've been listening to your feedback and tallying up <a href="http://feedback.gigantt.com/forums/105995-vote-for-features-suggest-new-ones">the votes</a>. Today we've released a version of Gigantt with quite a few new features. We'll be blogging about each new feature in the weeks to come. Today we just want to draw your attention to one big design change: <a href="http://gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> now has a zoom menu system.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Behold!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/09/1348140219.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="532" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/09/1348140219.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's what it looks like in action:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/t_C6WBqNXsQ?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="360" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can find plenty of new features inside. Go <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/">try it out</a>.</span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-75423287981720295472012-07-13T01:29:00.001-07:002012-07-13T08:22:25.932-07:00Santa Claus, Project Manager<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Seasoned project managers know all about the various ways project tasks can depend on each other. Finish-to-start, start-to-start, and so on. But do we really need all these different dependency types? Turns out it really depends on your PM tools. With <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a>, for example, you don't.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But first let's recap on the different types of dependencies. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_(project_management)">Wikipedia</a> actually does a pretty good job at it. Here's a shorter version. Also this version uses Santa Claus and is thus inherently better.</span><br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Finish-To-Start</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Example: Santa can't deliver toys before his elves make them.</span><br />
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</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342095491.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="40" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342095491.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<h3>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Start-To-Start</b></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Example: Santa can't <i>start </i>performing quality inspection on toys before his elves <i>start </i>making them.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342092931.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342092931.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Finish-To-Finish</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Same example: Santa can't <i>finish</i><b> </b>inspecting toys before his elves <i>finish</i> making them.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342093017.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342093017.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Start-To-Finish</b></span></h3>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Example: A senior elf wants to retire, but first he has to spend some time training a new elf in his place. The new elf's training may go on after the senior elf retires, but there has to be some period of overlap.</span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342093389.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="100" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342093389.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This last example (F2S) also introduces a new variable into the mix - the amount of time those tasks must overlap. e.g. we could say that a retiring elf must train his replacement for at least a week.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Aside, then, from the purely logical connection between tasks, we can also talk about how they relate to each other over time. The terms used in such cases are normally <i>lead </i>and <i>lag.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Lag & Lead</b></span></h3>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Santa has to rest for a week after delivering toys before he can start working on next year's toys.</span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342095423.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="38" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342095423.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The time between tasks is called a <i>lag.</i> A <i>l</i></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>ead</i>, on the other hand,<i> </i>refers to the period of time when tasks overlap. You can sometimes think of it as a negative lag. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Example: </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Santa can </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">start </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">inspecting toys after the elves </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">start </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">making them. However, Santa first has to let the elves actually finish making at least a few toys before there are any toys to inspect, right? So we can define a </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">one day lead </b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">between the time they start making their toys and the time he starts inspecting them.</span><br />
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</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342097063.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="85" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342097063.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Real easy to get a headache from all this stuff... Why can't we just have one simple type of dependency to rule them all?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The Gigantt Way</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a> draws arrows between tasks it always means one thing - a classic Finish-to-Start connection. Most of the time that's enough. </span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342106758.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="91" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342106758.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then of course you can put tasks inside other tasks, which is basically a S2S or F2F dependency, although an implicit one. If a task contains other tasks then </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">they </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">can only start once their container starts, and their container can only finish once they're finished.</span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342106855.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="48" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342106855.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These are simple, intuitive dependencies and we find that they'll do the job most of the time. But every now and then we get questions, usually from experienced project managers, who miss all those other fancy dependencies and their lags and leads and what have you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Could Gigantt still be useful if it doesn't let you define a negative lag in a finish-to-finish dependency? The answer is almost always "break up your tasks to smaller ones and you won't need anything more". In fact, if you do it this way you'll have a better plan, plus you won't need to bother with complicated dependency types. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let's see some example.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Case study: Negative lag in a Finish-To-Finish Dependency</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A user asked us how he could model the following work-plan in Gigantt. His project has a long design stage before development can start. However, two months before the design is finished something else needs to start - provisioning (buying equipment). He wanted something that looks like this:</span><br />
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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342107572.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342107572.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We asked him to explain why exactly provisioning can start two months before design finishes. He then explained that at a certain point during the design, once "preliminary design" is finished, the team already knows what sort of equipment they're going to need, and so they can provision it. At that point the solution was clear: break the big-old design task into smaller pieces. </span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342108011.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="129" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342108011.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not only is the plan now simpler, it's also safer. Why safer? Because that two-month lag was really just an implicit estimate. What if preliminary design took <i>more</i> than 50% of the total design time? What if it took 75%? A plan that relies on some fixed two-month lag would have been out-dated. But once we break it down to smaller parts we could easily see that provisioning is going to be delayed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let's see how some of the Santa examples above work out with simple F2S dependencies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Start-to-Start:</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">You'll recall that a few toys need to be made before inspection can start. Alright, then let's break it down a bit. We'll split the first batch of toys into its own task and let inspection start after this new task finishes.</span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342109199.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342109199.png" width="295" /></a></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bam! No more S2S with a lead. We can also track how much time the first batch took and use it to adjust our estimates.</span></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<h3>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Start-to-Finish:</b></span></h3>
</div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Arguably the weirdest dependency of them all. So let's take the training period example we used earlier. Why should there be a week's overlap? Probably because there's some basic training without which the new elf can't start working, and this is estimated at a week's time. Great, let's model it.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342167524.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigantt_pub_imgs/2012/07/1342167524.png" width="239" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></h3>
</div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is our experience that almost all of the time when people say they need various types of dependencies it's for <i>prolonged</i> tasks. Tasks that take weeks or months. <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/">Gigantt</a>'s power is in enabling you to dive in, break tasks down and uncover hidden work and risks. Once your work chunks are much smaller there really isn't much you cannot model with simple Finish-to-Start dependencies and with tasks containing other tasks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We're not saying these features are never needed. In some cases they are. But they're always a bit harder to grasp and they complicate your PM tools needlessly. If you can think of real-world examples please share them here. We welcome the discussion. But for the time being we're going to keep Gigantt simple and stick with plain old Finish-to-Start.</span></div>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-84456196206430594902012-07-05T20:59:00.000-07:002012-07-08T00:49:39.541-07:00Remember IRC?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Email is evil. This isn't news. It's an information black hole that sucks away at your company's IP. The perfect organization doesn't use email at all. Kind of like the mob.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But seriously, email stinks out loud. So what can we use instead?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've recently been struggling with this issue. <a href="http://www.gigantt.com/">Gigantt </a>uses Google Apps for emails, calendars, some documents, and, well... that's about it. Okay, SSO as well. Google is pretty dominant as a single-sign-on provider. But I digress. I was certain Google had at least <i>some</i> reasonable solution for internal company discussions. Probably just have to search the Google Apps Marketplace and choose one. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nope.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Turns out the offerings are slim. Why is nobody doing Exchange "public folders" for Google Apps? This is begging to be implemented.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So we gave <a href="https://www.yammer.com/">Yammer</a> a shot. Yammer is nice. Hopefully it'll stay nice even after being acquired. Come to think of it, Microsoft might as well turn that into it's <i>public folders 2.0.</i> But right now it's just not that useful for discussion boards. It's more about being able to <i>like </i>the fact that somebody brought cake to work or released a stable version of something. It certainly has it's place, but it's not where you want to keep your precious, precious corporate discussions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What about Google Groups? Google <i>Groups </i>just doesn't work well with Google <i>Apps</i>. Don't ask me why. I sure wish it did. But I could not for the life of me create a new Google Group with my Apps account. And besides it's really just a different way of labeling email, when you think about it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So strike two.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then I stumbled upon <a href="http://grove.io/">grove.io</a>. They'll host a private IRC server for you. Real easy to get started. In all honesty it's almost just as easy to host your own server on some cloud machine, where you'll have a bit more control over things, but who has time? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So - IRC. Remember? Gosh, it's been years. But apparently some isolated internet tribes have been using this ancient tool all this time. We gave it a try. And you know what, it's pretty f-ing great. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our organization is distributed. That's another way of saying we're not paying for offices. Or, more accurately, our employees are the ones paying for office space by working from home. The challenge when working from home is to walk the fine line between feeling close to each other, like you could knock on someone's office door and pop-in for a question, and still each having his own space and the ability to get work done. Also, I find it critically important to be able to listen to WHAM occasionally at high volume. Working from home accommodates this need. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But email is horrible and way too offline/async. Chat is evanescent, ephemeral, fleeting and various other synonyms. It's just as bad at sucking away information as email. Once the chatters quit you basically have no idea what the chat they were chatting about. And it's pretty low-tech, too. Chat has like two features - send a message and set your status. That's it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">IRC, on the other hand, is a dream. You've got channels. Channels are by and large public (within the organization). You can search them. You can archive them. Everything is preserved. And you've got commands. Delicious, delicious commands. It's really programmable, configurable, hackable chat. You can make it behave a certain way when you're away, you can tell it which keywords should draw your attention with an audio "bing!" and which can be quietly ignored. You can mash it together with your source control to get commit notifications. Whatever. The point is it's a platform. But above all it just feels cool to be able to hang out in an old-school, ASCII environment. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I realize I sound like a total newb lamer extolling all these virtues that many people have been taking advantage continuously since I last used IRC like 17 years ago, but I can't help it - I'm excited. IRC is just fun. Nostalgia is part of it, I'll admit. But I'm really optimistic about adopting this tool as a core piece of corporate gear. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The baseline is a solid, tested, simple way to discuss things in real time. That, by itself, is quite a lot. But on top of it you can tweak and hack the hell out of it with your own bots and your own inner jokes and rules. I really feel I've been missing out for quite a few years. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So go give <a href="http://grove.io/">grove.io</a> a try. You might end up installing your own IRC server, but that first quick taste of that familiar IRC flavor is just a sign-up away, so take a shortcut and try it out (free 30 days trial).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">/away playing Song Pop</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6772217076987084878.post-13331074722530756202012-05-31T02:38:00.000-07:002012-05-31T02:38:55.940-07:00Team Invites, Time Estimates and More<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We're very excited to share with you three pieces of big news today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. Registration is open</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you haven't already you can <a href="https://www.gigantt.com/accounts/invited/">sign up for Gigantt right now</a>. <b>No more waiting list. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2. Invite people to join you</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Starting from today you can freely add team members and resources to your organization.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can assign tasks to any resource. A resource that's really a coworker can also be invited as a collaborator. This person will then be able to edit your plan alongside you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://help.gigantt.com/wiki/Adding_People_and_Resources">Read more about adding people and resources</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3. Flexible time estimates</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You're no longer forced to choose an estimate from a fixed set. Now you can just type your own estimate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Go <a href="https://www.gigantt.com/">sign up</a>.</span></div>Assafhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07807112192107539607noreply@blogger.com1