I’ve been with Teamwork for over four years and this has been the busiest quarter that I can remember. We’re constantly working to make Teamwork Projects the best it can be. A lot of the time, that work is invisible to you, the customer — but one of our core values is that we always want to be transparent about what’s been going on behind the scenes, and what’s coming next. So we wanted to share our product vision for Teamwork Projects for 2019. We want to let you know what we’re building, why we’re building it, and what you can expect upon release. It’s a big one, so pour yourself some coffee and pull up a chair. Let’s start by talking about the biggest four milestones on our product roadmap right now. Then, we’ll quickly go through some of the other major improvements being worked on at the moment.
The big 4
1. Teams
Teams will allow you to scale up how you work with other teams within your organization, allowing for large scale, more efficient user management.
Why are we building it?
Lots of activities in Teamwork Projects involve working with similar groups of people or “teams”. In order to work as efficiently as possible, you need to be able to manage and communicate with everyone in those teams at once, rather than having to do it over and over again on an individual basis. Some customers have been using the Companies feature as a way to create groups to work around this — but we want to give you a better, purpose built way to achieve this. We’re also thinking about the potential for cross-product teams. We’re working on getting that in place in the same timeframe, meaning that when we officially launch Teams in Teamwork Projects, the teams you create have the potential to also be used across Teamwork Chat, Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Spaces. Just imagine being able to contact everyone on your team with a single handle in any product. (We’re excited just thinking about it.)
What will Teams help you to do?
Some of the things Teams will help with include:
Rapid communication: Mention an entire team in a comment or message and they will all be notified
Dynamic privacy: Set the privacy for a team and everyone on that team will inherit the same privacy settings for that item
Dynamic followers: Mention a team in a comment, message, or task and all members will become followers
Dynamic task assignment: Assign a task to a team and all members (current and future) will be assigned to it
Redesigned people, companies, and login history pages
Redesigned and unified pickers for adding users to projects: See the same type of interaction for assigning tasks, sending messages, adding followers, and more
Bulk user and company interactions:
Bulk delete
Bulk permission setting
Bulk removal from projects, teams, and companies
When can you expect it?
We expect to be able to deliver this to all Teamwork Projects users by the end of Q2.
2. Dashboards
Our new Dashboards feature will help you to manage the big picture, and zoom in on the details when you need to.
Why are we building it?
Our customers wanted a place to be able to quickly view mission critical information at a glance, so we created the original Dashboard area. But we quickly realized that dashboards had the potential to do so much more. So we got to work to support the concept of multiple, customizable dashboards that would really bring the power to you and your team to decide what information you wanted to see. So the artist formerly known as Dashboard is now Home. The purpose of the Home area in Teamwork Projects is to provide a big picture, high-level view of the progress and status of the projects you and your team are working on, so you can stay more aligned and quickly move work forward. And we’ve also built a dedicated Dashboards area, where each team member can customize the information that’s most important to them, and quickly get direction on their tasks for the day.
What will it enable you to do?
A lot of our customers will already have seen our new Home area, which is currently in beta. We’re refining the Dashboards feature at the moment, and we’re looking for feedback — we’ve already made some great improvements based on customer requests, so keep them coming. With the new release, we’ll also be adding some dashboard functionality specifically for Enterprise customers. Talk to your customer success manager for more information about this.
When can you expect it?
We expect to be able to deliver this to all Teamwork Projects users by the middle of Q2.
3. Resource management
Resource management will provide users with a thorough understanding of and transparency into the capacity of your team. Having greater visibility over your people’s time and workload allows you to maximize efficiency and optimize the way every team member applies their time and skills.
Why are we building it?
Resource management is a feature that’s been on our roadmap for a while. And for good reason. Through a lot of analysis and customer feedback, we concluded that resource management is not just one feature. Rather, it’s the sum of many parts, all working together to give you the insight you need to make better decisions. This is a conclusion we came to after talking to our customers about what they want to achieve with resource management, as well as looking at other products and what they label as “resource management”. Our Workload feature already solves some of this pain point for customers. Currently, Workload is intended to give people an overview of how much work is assigned to individual people within a particular period. But there are a few issues raised by the functionality as it currently stands:
There’s no way to take someone’s capacity (that is, how many working hours they have available) into account
You have to look at a table full of numbers and make sense of it — you can’t just see at a glance where the potential issues might be
It takes a bit of clicking around to reassign tasks to other people when you want to address someone’s overload
What will it enable you to do?
To address these issues, we’ll be adding a new visualization for data in Workload, a way to easily reassign tasks, and introducing the concept of “capacity” as “number of hours per working day for this person. Then, a visual representation of the comparison between someone’s “capacity” and their “workload” (the total estimated time on all tasks assigned to that person) will allow you to better understand — and allocate — your team’s resources. The re-architecting of Workload is phase one of rolling out our Resource Management features. Later in the year, we will be rolling out phase 2, which includes Budget Management and Project Scheduling.
When can you expect it?
We expect to be able to deliver the improvements to Workload in Q3 and Budget Management and Project Scheduling in Q4.
4. Reporting
Our goals for Reporting are to make it easy for users to get important data without needing to log in to your site, and make it easy to regularly share this data with stakeholders.
Why are we building it?
With the introduction of our new and improved Dashboards feature, particularly when combined with other features like saved filters and views, Teamwork Projects’s reporting functionality will become even more comprehensive. With these updates, we aim to improve how people can receive and export their data. By building the initial functionality of scheduling an export of data based on a saved filter, we can address the biggest missing element of our reporting and provide something of value without needing to reinvent the wheel, while building a foundation for the rest of the work.
What will it enable you to do?
With the introduction of a new centralized Reports section which will bring all available system reports, as well as reports users build up across any section of the product, into a single place, you’ll be able to ensure the delivery of relevant information to different levels of stakeholders. Users will be able to set schedules on any report they have access to and choose to send them to others stakeholders in the company too. This feature isn’t about redesigning the formats of our reports; instead, we aim to introduce the concept of custom schedules on any exportable item in the product. Once that’s implemented, the next phase of this feature will be to start introducing further customization across all existing reports.
When can you expect it?
We expect to be able to deliver this in the third quarter of the year.
The best of the rest
Project-level tags
One of the issues we see regularly from customers is related to the sheer volume of information and how difficult it can be to compartmentalize it all. Project-level tags will allow customers to scope their work at a project level, and, when paired with other functionality — like filters and dashboards — offers massive automation potential. This feature is currently in testing and we expect to be able to deliver it this quarter.
Project templates
Put simply, we think project templates will be a game changer for a lot of our customers. With project templates, users will be able to build entire projects loaded with content and a collection of scheduled tasks and milestones, that they can then save as templates for use when creating new projects going forward. Particularly when paired with some of our other new introductions, like Teams and project-level tags, project templates could help make adoption even smoother for larger customers and their teams. We think it will have a huge impact for users, saving you time and helping you to iterate on your best practices — so we’re pretty hyped about this one. This feature is also in testing and set to be delivered this quarter.
Gantt chart overhaul
We’ve been rebuilding our Gantt chart feature so we can make it better than ever. Primarily, this has been going on quietly on the back-end side of things (TL;DR: we’re rewriting it in a different programming language) but it’s given us the opportunity to add a few neat new features while we’re at it, like an undo/redo capability. Next up for the Gantt rebuild: filtering and critical path. When complete, both of these features will make for a version of the Gantt chart that can deliver enormous value and make people’s lives much easier. And by working on the filtering architecture, we’ll also be able to then move onto two enormous features: task list-specific Gantt views, and cross-project Gantt charts. We expect to have this rebuild fully completed by Q4.
Mobile app
Our Teamwork Projects mobile app is being fully redesigned to be more modern, fast, and beautiful — and fully native on both Android and iOS. As part of this, the redesigned app will have a new Calendar, simplified tasks, and the ability to see everything you need for the day ahead in one glance. We expect this to be in Beta in Q2.
Overall product experience
We’re not just building new features. We’re also spending a lot of time refining and simplifying the product UI and UX. We’re introducing new patterns to the UI to bring more consistency across features, which will improve how people interact with data and enhance the overall customer experience. The biggest impact you’ll notice is when it comes to working with tasks. We’ll be improving the list design, introducing new table views, and improving how we add and edit tasks, so you can move quickly and add tasks rapidly. So as you can probably tell, we have huge ambitions for Teamwork Projects in the coming months. We’re really excited about the changes to come and we hope you are too — we think they’re going to be really impactful across the board. As always, we love your feedback. Let us know your thoughts (and what you’re most looking forward to seeing) in the comments below.