Team17

Tell us more about you, your company and what do you do?

I'm Ian Lindsey a lead programmer at Team17 Software Ltd. Initially we made our name self-publishing a number of Amiga titles back in the early 1990's - titles such as Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog and Body Blows to name but a few. Our major breakthrough title was Worms, released in 1995 which was a huge hit on all systems, making UK number one in the All Formats chart and going on to become one of the worlds' most revered game-franchises.

How did you find out about activeCollab? What were your first impressions?

I found activeCollab by simply searching and trying various task management systems out there on the Internet. It was clear that after this research activeCollab best suited our needs and proved to be an obvious choice. When we started using it people got to grips with it straight away and the amount of manual work involved with task management reduced dramatically.

How were you managing projects before activeCollab? Email, pen and paper, another project management tool?

Looking back it seems so rudimentary now. We used to have our schedule laid out in excel and manually pull out tasks on a weekly basis then print them out per person. They would be then pinned to the relevant person's notice board ready for them to complete them during the week and once the allotted time is over (sometimes a check now and again to see how things are going) we would manually check what had been done over the week.

How did activeCollab help you improve your team's collaboration? What are the tools you use the most? If you were asked to pick one "killer feature" which one would it be?

Given our old system used to be paper based it's a great benefit having a schedule that is in 'real-time', having a simple overview of the tasks that have been done as soon they are complete without manually checking and rechecking saved a lot of time. It's easy to see people's workload at any point and assign tasks accordingly, it's especially useful if the project is made up of very small dynamic tasks like ours. Also, given our company relies on close communication of the different disciplines (such as Art, Design and Programming) it's helpful for the other departments to know if a specific task has been done if they are waiting on it. Having activeCollab allowed us to not only keep track of requests from other departments but allow them to see if they had been done, thus reducing time waiting.

What do coworkers think? How have they adjusted to activeCollab?

We have been using activeCollab for the Programmers on the last three projects I've led and given its success we're aiming to extend it to the design and art departments too. The programmers who have been using so far have been very comfortable with it and I've not had any complaints about the system at all. It has been very straight forward to setup and easy to use.

Thank you for your time! Anything you have to add?

Thank you for supplying a great tool and friendly support, we look forward seeing what future versions of activeCollab have in store. Anyway, must dash, I've added filling out this questionnaire as a ticket in collab and I don't want to miss the milestone date!