aC forum: Milestones & Checklists - Why Do We Need This? http://www.activecollab.com/forums/topic/2515/ Recent posts on topic: Milestones & Checklists - Why Do We Need This? en-us Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:09:06 CDT http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/12194/#post12194 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/12194/#post12194 Post #24 by Brian Brian Ilija, with all due respect, don't fall into the trap of building a product that is optimized for your personal workflow. You know all the "warts" now and how to work around them so you may be minimizing the priority of what John and I have pointed out.

]]> Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:41:29 CDT http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/12189/#post12189 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/12189/#post12189 Post #23 by Powerlet Powerlet Ilija you have a wonderful product. I like aC. However, I would like to tell others "I love aC".

We consciously avoided the Corp version to keep things simple. Money was not the issue, we wanted a "basecamp" like product were they advertise "we offer less features than the competition". After 23 years of engineering I am convinced most people can design a complicated system; few can design a simple system that performs.

That said, add me to the list of those who assumed tickets were the traditional "trouble tickets", not an alias for "tasks" or "checklists". When your pinched for time it is easy to miss. So for marketing purposes I would look at this hard Ilija, most likely this issue will not go away for future customers.

Currently we use the small biz version like this: Projects > Milestones > Checklists > Tasks

But as pointed out in prior posts, this is flawed. For what it is worth here is how I would recommend fixing the warts:

First, the small biz product needs to stand on it's own two feet, no compromise. This means "checklists" need people and deadline assignments. When selecting the checklist tab they need to be sorted by milestones. Printouts need to show the full path and be sorted by project, milestone, checklist and task. Small Biz needs the calender. A calender is not an option, it is essential to complete the small biz product.

Second, the Corp version should have simply "more" for those who need it. I would suggest:
1. Projects > Milestones> Checklists> Tasks > Sub-Tasks (sub-tasks & task comments would be worth the price of admission)
2. Traditional "trouble tickets" (again well worth the price if you need this functionality)
3. Time Tracking
4. Pages

To clarify: for marketing, upgrades, user interface consistency, and development sake I would only add features to the same path to differentiate small-biz from Corp. I would drop having two paths (checklists for small-biz and tickets for corp ) as it is today.

]]> Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:29:41 CDT http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11938/#post11938 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11938/#post11938 Post #22 by Brian Brian Can't argue with that wisdom. ;-)

]]> Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:14:46 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11934/#post11934 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11934/#post11934 Post #21 by Ilija Studen Ilija Studen
Brian:
Ilija, my sense is that you don't see this issue as a priority but I think Brandon's comments point out that the longer you wait to address it, the more difficult it is going to be for you to make any changes. And without those changes, you're constraining new customer adoption.


Next version of activeCollab is frozen so no new features or major adjustments will be made until it's launched. It's just one of the methods to make sure that software is shipped - as soon as development hit "feature freeze" no new features or big system changes is being introduced. Every new feature added after that is potential treat and could make testing more complicated and delay the release.

When done we'll consider this change to be introduce in one of the later release, but currently our priority is to ship v1.1.

]]> Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:40:20 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11933/#post11933 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11933/#post11933 Post #20 by Brian Brian Good comments Brandon. It sounds like you are using the classic interpretation of Tickets. ;-) However, I'm getting the impression that what most users are doing, is using Tickets the way you are using Checklists.

In fact, for your situation, if Tickets was renamed to Checklists and Checklists was renamed to Tickets, wouldn't that give you everything you're looking for?

Ilija, my sense is that you don't see this issue as a priority but I think Brandon's comments point out that the longer you wait to address it, the more difficult it is going to be for you to make any changes. And without those changes, you're constraining new customer adoption.

]]> Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:21:07 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11916/#post11916 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11916/#post11916 Post #19 by cbtrussell cbtrussell I'll chime in as someone who does NOT want to see checklists eliminated.

We are just starting to actively utilize aC for our projects. We have a well defined project process and use the same steps for every project.

Milestones represent phases of the project (usually only 4 or 5)

Checklists represent groups of tasks required by the project process
- each checklist has anywhere from 2-10 subtasks that are assigned to project participants with due dates as appropriate

Tickets are used to track issues/requests that are NOT explicitly addressed by the process - in other words, anything that comes up outside of the process is documented in a ticket and then assigned to a participant for resolution.

So from our perspective, it is critical that the checklist function remain in aC, and be separate from tickets. But I would like to be able to comments on checklist tasks and also be able to attach time to them.

Brandon

]]> Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:21:53 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11907/#post11907 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11907/#post11907 Post #18 by Brian Brian Yes, I hope we hear from others on this...

BTW, In the meantime, here's what I did:

1. Used the tip previously posted on hiding the time tab but instead I hid the Checklists and Pages tab from everyone.
2. I hid the Time tab from the client view using the tip. We don't have plans to use it but I thought I might want to play with it.
3. Changed the text displayed on the Tickets tab for everyone to "Tasks (Tickets)". I'm still going to have to explain this but at least it will cause users to ask questions instead of thinking it's a Trouble Ticket.

Took me about 10 minutes do this.

]]> Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:30:20 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11904/#post11904 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11904/#post11904 Post #17 by Sebastian Tänzer Sebastian Tänzer Brian,

I don't see any use in checklists either. Never used them.
A ticket with subtasks has way more functions and does the same.

But perhaps someone out there is using checklists for something useful?
Feedback from the community on this would be great!

I'm all in for the changes you supposed. It would make the whole system a lot easier.
When we introduced aC 2 months ago about the only question I received from our team was about tickets (i.e. "Where does the customer send the email to to open a ticket" and so on...) - most of these because the term "ticket" was known from existing support ticket systems. One can't reinvent the whole project management system and tell the customers "Well, from now on we'll redefine tasks as tickets ...". Just does not work.

]]> Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:55:17 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11889/#post11889 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11889/#post11889 Post #16 by Brian Brian Good comments Andrew... Couldn't you use Tickets to accomplish the very same operating model?

Well, we've (reluctantly) made the decision to upgrade to the Corp edition. Frankly, it was a close call with the alternative being to pay one of my programmers to tweak Webcollab or PHPCollab to meet our needs exactly. But with comments like Sebastians, we've decided to try 30 days and a couple projects to see if we can fall in love as well ;-)

I do hope to see a further momentum on the need to change this Tickets thing. IMHO, this is a totally confusing misnomer...

One more time:
1. Change Tickets to Tasks
2. Change Tasks to Subtasks
3. Eliminate Checklists (or move it to Corp if there is some reason to keep it that I'm not understanding and change tasks to subtasks).

Make that your small biz edition, raise price to $249 or even $299

Corp edition adds Time, Pages, Calendar priced at $399

(You might also add a free version that is the Small Biz for 1 or 2 projects).

==> Happier, less confused users. And therefore more users, more customers, more funds for development.




]]> Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:33:34 CST http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11886/#post11886 http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/11886/#post11886 Post #15 by andrewCharron andrewCharron Something everyone needs to remember is that not everyone uses aC the same. Something which you may have a dire need for, everyone else may not want or need, and thusmay not be as needed as you think.

For example, I have no use for tickets, yet we currently use the corp version. The way we have it set up is that milestones are set as milestones and assigned to project leader. Easch milestones have parts that need to be finished, and thus checklists. In all reality, we dont need a checklist to be assigned to anyone (Although it might be useful). Inside the checklists are tasks that need to be finished in order to complete the checklist, and each is assigned to whoever is responsable.

However, we can see this from the other side as well. Ilija may need to realize that not everyone can use the software the way it is written, and some features that he doesnt know about may be in desperate need of being added.

]]> Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:58:36 CST