OVERSING UPDATE Not sure this is the right place for status updates to friends o

OVERSING UPDATE

Not sure this is the right place for status updates to friends on the status of our product development. I generally write these long emails and send them out directly. But now that we’re farther along I think it might be fun to share.

Permissions

The guys checked in the permissions service today. We used the ACL list solution, which means that your permissions are just a list of strings, and we just check that array to see if you can do one thing or another. Groups get assigned permissions and people get assigned to groups. And people can belong to multiple groups, so as long as one of the groups you belong to can do something, you can do it. This allows us to construct permissions for any organizational structure and set of duties that any client has. Pretty simple user interface. Not grand. Not innovative. Just well organized.

Agile Boards

Well, it has taken a long time to go from farmers, to militarily structured industrial organizations, to socialist organizations, to lean organizations (kicking out useless middle management) to entrepreneurial organizations, to family-unit organizations consisting of no more than 150 people, to adopting the Kanban process of japan into western businesses, so that people actually work as teams rather than cogs and wheels. But it’s becoming increasingly popular to adopt the team model and some form of agile in all aspects of business.

The Board rather than list management technique is showing up everywhere. Everywhere from list to project to document to team management. And it’s exceptional because it’s collaborative.

Now, our software doesn’t distinguish between WBS (Gantt) style projects and agile projects. It’s all just task objects underneath. So you can view any project as you see fit – Gantt or Cards or queues or jobs or any combination. This is important because while internal shops are trying to efficiently maintain a burn with a fixed resource base, most large agencies and consulting firms are managing to a budget and delivery date. So we keep the time and dependency relationship all the time. It’s just up to the team whether they use it or not, and in what context they use it.

So, the agile boards are coming together right now. We’re sort of conflicted between the requirements of being able to use this on a touch screen like an iPad and the density of information we want on a large screen but we think we have that solved. User testing will tell us whether we’re right or not.

OK

That’s enough for today.

Cheers