Form: Project Update

OVERSING UPDATE

We are down to 111 open issues that we must close before we open the beta program, and of them 56 are reports we need to complete (50%). Leaving 55 issues that are sources of confusion for users because they do not work as expected.

There are two controls: timecards and forecasts that are not right (they need full workflows, rather than the simple states).

The workspace is not displaying the management query when no programs, projects, or deliverables are selected (meaning

Saving the workspace is still a non-standard operation.

The Calendar Control on the workspace isn’t quite right.

The Progress Bars on the schedule panel aren’t updating

Drag and Drop isn’t working on Table View.

The subtasks of Stories are still showing on the board view.

The tasks that need scheduling this week aren’t correctly displaying on the panel.

Smart Search is missing some variables.

Permissions on who can configure workflows.

There is a usability change we want to make, which is to move the task-types into a panel, and out from under the task filter panel so that we can show counts.

We want to break the ribbon for selecting states into stages so the user more clearly sees the relationship between stages(which cross programs and projects) to stages which are specific to programs and projects.)

NITS

The rest are largely nits, most of which fall into usability.

BIG STUFF

Web site content.

Documentation.

I”M NOT SURE

That costs are working correctly.

OVERSING UPDATE – VERY COOL STUFF: “GAMIFICATION”

Kirill and Vitalii are coding the ‘Gamification’ features in Oversing. It;s very much like a MMPORG or adventure game, where there is an internal economy by which you give feedback and ratings to work by your fellow work-citizens, and were you can accumulate various kinds of ‘coins’ and ‘inventory’ for whatever you work on by which to obtain bonuses.

We also include a sort of “karma” which is the balance between your gives and gets, as well as ‘likability” which is a pretty elaborate calculation. So you have ‘likeability’, ‘karma’, an inventory of rewards (that you can use to win gift cards and days off for example),

This ‘economy’ allows us to create all sorts of interesting measurements and ‘games’ in Oversing – again with the purpose of invalidating arbitrary middle management opinion, and creating systems of social (egalitarian and informational) peerage in the workplace rather than managerial (sucking-up and disinformational) hierarchy. The idea is that we want to search for and reward work behavior that we desire.

After Gamification we will add the Culture, Moral, Personality, and “IQ” surveys to the profile , as well as the ‘Survey’ entity (a type of task container) – visible only to you the user. These statistics will allow you to see how you, your personality, abilities, background and skills map to others in your discipline, those with similar skills, others in your organization, and compare yourself to their performance. (next year we will expose cross-organizational data as well).

We see this as perhaps the most important user-centric feature in Oversing.

Why? ‘Cause it merges game, social, and business to provide feedback that encourages inclusiveness through transparency rather than perpetuating the alienation of the industrial and information eras.

Curt

(personal workflow) (dropbox, evernote, box, mac) (oversing thoughts)

In Oversing, We need to rely on either our own storage technology (as does Slack – which is just Amazon), or use one of Evernote, Box, or Dropbox’s technologies.

So today I’m working through integrating Evernote into Oversing (or Oversing into Evernote) and as part of the research, I”m going through the new Dropbox apps today. (I am biased toward Evernote because of a similar design philosophy)

I use Mac “Notes” for quick ideas, notes, reminders and my to-do list. I write long pieces in Evernote’s Web UI, (which is still the best text editor I have found). And for very long pieces and complex work I use Textwrangler. And for business stuff I use Word. Everything is always stored ‘somewhere’.

For backup and file storage across devices, I use Dropbox. I don’t need any user interfaces other than the one’s I have in the operating system. I put everything I could ever want to save under the dropbox folder, treating it as ‘~/documents’. I don’t use the ~/documents folder, I have changed the default screenshot directory in osx to point to a new directory ~/screenshots to save on performance and desktop clutter. And I have folder shortcuts on my doc so that I can drag items to certain folders without using the Finder app. Also, I do NOT back up my ~/downloads folder, and I clean it every now and then.

So when I go through the dropbox addins I just don’t sort of get why you need them. Very transparent technology.

Box on the other hand has taken the enterprise route by providing security and permissions that Dropbox and Evernote dont’

So you sort of have this hierarchy (which I’m sure most people understand) of Evernote (personal) -> Dropbox (Professional) -> Box (enterprise).

Unfortunately, the only viable price alternative is to do it ourselves. And that seems a shame. The cost of enterprise applications is not so much the data and servicing the data, but the costs of storage of large volumes of work related files. So you sort of have to price as such. One of the tricks is to only store small things and then send the user to Dropbox/Box/Google account for large file storage but that doesn’t work for IP related work which we have to guarantee providence over, and which must be subject to audits.

Argh.