Project Management, Guaranteed Fun and No Management Overhead?!
This is guest blog post by Stefan Richter on behalf of TheDeadline, a HackFwd alumnus.
People love our project management tool TheDeadline: Create tasks, share them with your co-workers and TheDeadline will keep you up-to-date on all important status changes and events. You save a lot of time because you don’t have to ask for all the information anymore.
We built TheDeadline for ourselves. My company freiheit.com technologies has about 70 developers and we work on small and large projects for the “Who’s Who” of German and European internet companies. We are famous for our reliability. We don’t like bureaucracy. And we only use tools that save us time.
But something was missing in TheDeadline: We never had a complete overview of all the people in our company who were using TheDeadline because the functionality was more focused on clusters of individuals working together in changing teams and projects. How many groups do we have? Who are the members? What are they currently working on?! How much progress has been made? Which customers or partners are working together with us in these groups? Every single group was able to answer these questions but, from the outside, again we had to ask around to get the information.
So in the last couple of months, we have been working on a feature set we call “team features”. Now you can create a team, which can be a company or just a department of a larger enterprise. You add members to your team and then you can create groups. A group can be a department, like “Marketing”, “Sales”, “Development”. It can be project, like “strategy planning”, “website redesign” or “charity event”. Or it can be a role, like “office”, “administrators”, “data security”.
This means that you can now add your own company structure into TheDeadline.
And then you can assign tasks to these groups. People in these groups cooperate with each other and have a common stream of tasks and a customized status newsfeed based on their group membership.
In addition, we enable every team member to view all groups: Who are the members? You can view the profiles of all members, what tasks they are working on, etc. And you can also have private groups if you need them.
So TheDeadline didn’t just get more powerful. It now also serves as a tool for internal corporate communications: You get more transparency about what is going on in your company/team and new people are much more easily integrated into your team environment because they can see who is working on what.
And last but not least: We added some nice game mechanics. We’ve been using the game mechanics internally since August 2010. At first, we weren’t sure if we should offer this to our customers as the new features might be dismissed out of hand because customers need TheDeadline for work and not for play. But now we are sure: Our game mechanics are an added bonus for fun and motivation.
You receive “experience points” (XP) for different actions, especially for completing tasks. You can use your XP to put out extra rewards on tasks to prioritize them. Now you have to think twice before you prioritize something because you give away some of your hard-earned XPs and so now only really important stuff gets a high priority.
People are more eager to use the TheDeadline on a daily basis and sometimes people even start fighting about who really completed that task and really earned the XPs. To encourage this even more, we added a high score board, where you can see the achievements of the team as a whole, the sum of the XPs of all team members, the top ten most experienced members, etc. We will add lots more statistics and scoreboards in the coming weeks.
We have “dogfooded” the new team features in our own company for a couple of months now and we are really happy with them. And finally, here is our business model for TheDeadline: we will provide features that are more company-specific as a paid service. But the existing TheDeadline as you see it today will always remain free. So you don’t have to upgrade but, of course, we would be happy if you did!
Find more info here. And we’d love to hear your feedback!
