Cheers,

David

We also have improved the Gantt chart. Now you can see all your tasks graphically much better. In addition we have improved the dependencies and the predecessor options for both tasks and milestones.

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We also upgraded our email service and now using Sendgrid.com for all emails sent by the application. This has improved the delivery of the email service tremendously from the previous versions of the application.

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We did also a lot of code cleanup and fixed quite a few annoying bugs which seemed we never had time to fix. Open a free account and see for yourself all the advance features which Binfire offers to your team and bring your projects to fruition faster than you ever thought possible. We love to here your feedback. Leave a comment here (no spam please, we read all comments before we approve them for the post here) or send us email to support(at)binfire(dot)com. Dan and his team in the customer support will do everything possible to get back to you as soon as humanly possible and answer your questions.

To see our latest press release click here.

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Cheers,

David Robins

But there’s really no such thing as a silver bullet… Granted, remote work and distributed workspaces will give incredible potency to small teams seeking to innovate and outmaneuver. But what of larger organizations, corporations and institutes? Comprehensive studies have shown that while remote collaboration grants both greater agility and innovation to small teams, it can actually detriment large teams when employed incorrectly. Not only do large teams often become less efficient when remote work is introduced, but they often also become less innovative! The army of ‘bloggers’ on the web today point the finger damningly at the notion of remote work in its entirety, simply marching to the beat of the drum of the latest tech celebrity, Marrisa Mayer (interestingly enough, a great many of these opinionated bloggers are contract workers…working remotely).

In reality, the real culprit for this insidious symptom of remote work in large organizations is actually a simpler one: Psychology. Large organizations have a sinister tendency of becoming overly centralized; it’s a natural corollary to any system that grows more complex in human organization. As an organization becomes more centralized, employee visibility decreases dramatically. In other words, when a team gets huge, employees can easily get lost (or go into hiding). Yahoo knows this all too well. Over the years, Yahoo saw incredible centralization in management and departmental architecture. As teams got fewer and larger, the innovative spark that the company once had began to wane (Yahoo’s trajectory ever since has been laden with aimless management and a rapid succession of failing CEO’s). Likewise, as Yahoo further dabbled in remote employment to cut costs, they saw remote workers taking advantage of an inefficient system. No one’s watching, the work is listless, why not slack off???

Marrisa Mayer didn’t suddenly lose faith in remote work; she had to face a reality. The reality is that Yahoo has been bleeding money and talent and needs to cut overhead even further. Marrisa didn’t tell these hundreds of remote workers to relocate to Yahoo offices; she fired them. Unfortunately, unless these efforts at cost reduction are paired with organizational reform and decentralization, Yahoo will continue to suffer.

This and the previous article about remote woking were written by Dan Rob

Marketing- Binfire

In order to answer this question, we first need to understand the origins of the viability of remote work and distributed teams. Viability stems from the following three factors:

1. Wide availability of high-speed broadband in homes that parallels and even sometimes rivals office internet connections
2. Proliferation and constant development of ‘cloud’ collaboration services (‘web 2.0’ software) such as Google Apps, Dropbox, and Binfire
3. A corollary of factor (2): Efficient real-time text, audio and video communications like Skype that not only facilitate communications at a high level, but can also promote accountability

These three factors have in large part catalyzed the prevalence of remote and distributed teamwork over the past ten years. But as any econ major could inform you, supply doesn’t necessarily imply demand; Just because people can work remotely, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily will work remotely.

But they do!

Why?

Because every time a resource is unlocked, efficiencies can be enjoyed.

Which resource was unlocked by the above factors?

Skilled labor.

The introduction of the above three factors effectively unlocked a previously trapped supply of skilled labor. Today, a budding startup is not restricted to recruiting on its own home turf; Any firm can recruit talent from anywhere in the world. This reality has offered a great opportunity to teams seeking efficiency by allowing them to forego the cumbersome costs suffered by their larger and more traditional competitors. Distributed teams not only can draw from an international well of talent in order to find highly skilled and relatively inexpensive workers, but they can also avoid the immense costs of an office plus the wasted time of traveling back and forth to work. These two new realities in the world of the workplace can afford great advantages to teams seeking efficiency and agility.

• Traditional teams- All team members are in the same physical location. This model is happening less often these days.
• Distributed team- All team members work remotely and rarely meet each other. This is seen more in web design, graphic art and software engineering disciplines than other fields
• Mixed teams- A combination of the above two. Like teams which meet 1 day of the week in one location and the rest of the week work remotely or teams that consist of several smaller teams. These small teams work together in one location, but the larger team is separated across the globe. These teams use new technology to create a virtual office to communicate & collaborate. This model is becoming more accepted and seen as a good comprise between the above two.

Each of the above models has its own advantages and disadvantages like the remote teams are more environmentally friendly but collaboration suffers without extra effort. In this article I am not arguing which one of the above models is better (that is for a future writeup), but that all three models may fail due to one or more of the following problems:

1. Lack of clear and realistic goals: The primary job of a project manager is to set clear and realistic goals for the project. He or she needs to know what could be achieved with available resources ,time and the budget. It is great to have all A performers in the team, but in most cases this is not true and the team is a mixture of A and B performers. The project manager needs to consult with his team to come up with realistic goals for the project.
2. Lack of clear & achievable timetable: It is important to set deadlines and stick with them. Don’t rely on heroic performances by the team or individuals to make the deadlines. Divide the project to short and achievable segments (like sprints in Scrum). Divide each project segment to logical tasks and divide each task to subtasks. Keep doing so until each task is totally understood and could be done in a short time. Write a clear definition for each task (this should be done by team leaders for large projects). Ask the person responsible for each task to make a three points estimation on how long each task might take. Use the three points estimations to come up with task duration. This should give you a 80% probable chance of making the task on-time. Use a good collaborative task manager to make this work more manageable.
3. Lack of clear ownership: One person should own the project and no more, too many owners kill any enterprise. It does not mean that the project manager can’t delegate part of the tasks & responsibilities to team leaders, but at the end the box should stop at the project manager’s desk.
4. Lack of team members history: This is the least understood issue amongst the other problems listed here. Every team member has certain capabilities and weaknesses, do you know them? How do you gain insight on how an individual will perform? The answer, by checking the past performance. You need to review as many of the projects an individual has worked on and gain insight on how she or he will perform in the future. Ask team leaders to rate each team member on scale of 1-5 (5 is super star). Get rid of anybody rated as 1-3. Keep all members rated at 4 or 5. If you hire new members to your team, do a through background check on what they have done in the past. For recent grads, give the them smalls task, measure their performance and figure out where they fit in the team.
5. Lack of clear directions: A project needs to be defined clearly and the project manager and the team leaders have to communicate and document the scoop of the project, when the deadlines are set and in case of problems what to do about them. Have at least one weekly meeting with your team and ask what they done in the past week, what they plan to do next week and if they are facing any issues. Document and publish every meeting online. This data will come handy to analyze the performance of the team later on.
6. Lack of clear information: In many cases the team members are in dark about what is going on. They really don’t know the ultimate goal of the project for the company and its customers. They can’t access project information easily and are in dark what other teams in the project are doing. You need to make sure everybody in your team has access to the information they need to understand the project and complete their tasks.
7. Lack of communication: Communication is important for the success of any projects. As a project manager you need to make sure there are frictionless ways for everybody in the team to communication with others at anytime. Communication could be face to face or online, the important thing is that the team should know they can communicate with anybody in the team.
8. Lack of collaboration: Collaboration is the biggest booster of productivity within a team, without it, teams waste valuable time working on the wrong things or duplicating what others in the team have done and are doing. Make sure your team values collaboration and create an environment where collaboration is rewarded.
9. Lack of reviews: A project needs to have many milestones set in time for reviews. Every team within the project needs to review all activity and accomplishment once a week and publish them for all to see. Each team member work has to be reviewed by the team leader and the result documented.
10. Lack of accountability: It is important to find out who is not performing well and find out how to resolve it as fast of possible. A bad apple can make a whole basket go bad real fast. Get rid of those that can’t keep up.
11. Lack of rewards & fun: You need to reward high achievers and create an atmosphere which is relaxed and fun. Make it clear to the team from the beginning that high performers will be rewarded. When you reward high achievers make it a public event (Party  time).
12. Lack of documentation: You need to document not only project related documents like Specification, UI design etc, but the daily diary of what is happening in the project. Doing so manually obviously is not practical, but there ate tools which record most actions and events in the project. This data could be used to analyze and learn how to improve productivity of your team for the next project.

Every team regardless of organizational model and size faces the above issues to some degree. Even traditional team that work together,  have communication and collaboration issues due to ego or personal conflicts within the team in many cases. The project manager’s job is to make sure the team stays focused and work together on a common goal without distraction. Using a good collaborative project management tool is highly recommended. Such tools make it easier to plan, inform and track projects and store project data to be analyzed during and after the project has ended.

Best,

David

We just released the latest version of our project management application. In addition to making the UI look better and easier to use, we have added the functionality you and your team need to be more productive. Below I have summarized new features and improvements we have made in the new release.                                                                                  .

1-Inline task edit

Now you can edit  any task by clicking on its title. When you do that, an inline form opens in the page which lets you add or editing task’s details. You can change the task’s description, start and due dates, assign it to a team member, add tags and files or comments. This makes editing task much easier and faster than using the inverted triangle we used before to get to the edit form (that form is still available).

To edit the task title, click on  the pencil icon next to the task title to enable editing. To close the edit mode just click on the task title. All changes are saved automatically.                                                        .

2-Add subtasks in one click

Each task now has a add subtask link next to it. Just press this link and a new inline text box open to add the task’s title. The system know what level task you are creating and will adjust automatically.                                                                                                                                                                        .

3-Better Search

Now you can sort tasks by task owner, the person the task is assigned to, status (due today, late,  shortly due, open or closed), if a task is followed, tags or any free text. This makes it much easier to see the information you need. For example to see all tasks due today which are assigned to John (a team member), type status in the search box and select due today. Then, type “assigned to” and choose John. Now when you click on the search button all tasks due today which are assigned to John are shown.                                                                  .

In the next article I will describe other changes we have made to make your team more productive.

Cheers,

David

Traditional expert-driven approaches to routine work redesign aren’t effective for knowledge work. Frederick Winslow Taylor, regarded as the father of scientific management and one of the first management consultants in the early 1900s, believed workers were incapable of dissecting and improving their jobs. Taylor expected workers to comply with a standard set of steps defined by process experts (including Taylor himself). But today’s jobs are far more complex and workers make more complex decisions. They can no longer sit back and wait for directions as Taylor’s mindless and expendable cogs in the organizational machine.

Another complication is that lifetime employment has all but disappeared from most organizations and workers often change jobs several times during their careers. We can’t rely on people to pass on the best way to do work by word of mouth. Instead, we need to document and share them, before they become lost.

At Nationwide Insurance, the $20 billion financial services provider, online social collaboration has become part of the workplace and a key tool for engaging workers. Anyone can ask online questions, post comments, make announcements, recognize a peer, or search the network to find answers. Like Facebook, the Nationwide network enables people to share with groups or friends, with easy access through mobile devices. When workers ask questions of the community, they usually get faster answers than from the help desk or e-mail. Some leaders are now posting quick (less than two minutes) video announcements about new or changed processes, instead of sending e-mail. This has been a real hit with generation Y employees in Nationwide’s contact centers, for example, who are comfortable with this type of communication.

Nationwide’s social collaboration tools help people get conversations started, make faster decisions, get work done more quickly, communicate better top to bottom, recognize peers and better engage workers. All this by making the company more like the real world we live in.

So why are most companies slow to adopt online collaboration tools? In one progressive utility with thousands of employees, only one or two percent post or read blogs on their intranet more than once a week (vs. 20% at Nationwide).

Nationwide has been successful because it has managed its adoption of collaboration tools as part of a broader cultural change program. Chris Plescia, leader of marketing, collaboration and corporate Internet solutions, told me that the first step for leaders is a little bit of a leap: “We’ve made it okay to try something new. A couple years ago, it took me about five minutes to post my first question. I was worried I might make a mistake, so I spell-checked it several times before I sent it out. When people responded I realized I needed to quickly interact with them and eventually became comfortable with potential spelling errors. Another challenge was knowing that these conversations are public. So we spent time up front to define policies for compliance and governance.” Another key success factor has been senior leaders who have led by example and used the tools, such as when the president posted a photo from a visit to a field location.

The potential of online collaboration tools is as big in enterprises as it has been in the consumer realm. 20-something workers will continue to chat and tweet on social media outside of work. Will your organization provide them with equivalent tools to support them in their work and treat this as a cultural change?

Have you seen workers use online collaboration tools to do their jobs better and discuss how they can improve their work?

Reprinted from HBR by Brad Power

Remember you can move or copy tasks which have subtasks in them. All subtasks belonging to the task plus  comments and attached files are also copied or moved. Below I have attached 3 images, the first one shows how to get to the Move and Copy tool, the second & third are boxes which open to let the user select the task’s destination for move & copy.

We are constantly improving the task page. Soon you will be able to drag and drop both vertically and horizontally. This will allow you to change a task’s level using drag and drop or change its postion in the task list.

David Robins

1. Use our site’s domain names instead of a particular site IP address as IP addresses can change frequently and without notice. Please configure host names to recognize any sub-domain of:

*.binfire.com

For example, this includes:

www.binfire.com, shaveet.binfire.com, upload.binfire.com

2. Enable HTTPS (port 443), HTTP (port 80) and port 90 for the domains above.

Due to the numerous firewalls available we cannot provide specific instructions for each firewall beyond what is listed above. Please forward this write-up to your system admin and tell them to contact support@binfire.com if they have any questions.

Cheers,

David

One thing we have not done yet and we know that are not good at is marketing our product and our brand. Here we need help of our Royal customers again. If you like the product, we appreciate if you refere us to your friends, talk about us in the social media and any other way that helps us to be know to a wider audience. We also would like to hear your suggestions and recommendations on this subject!

Cheers,

David Robins