Introducing New Project Management Features

October 13, 2011 0 Comments

Over the weekend we published a release that pushes the Central Desktop platform ahead significantly. We responded directly to many customer requests by delivering some key functionality like Gantt charts, budgeted time and a revamped project management interface.

Before I get into a description of the high-level changes, let me explain the reasoning behind this release. I spent a good amount of time scouring through customer feedback, having conversations with users and reading feature requests in the Ideasphere to figure out how our customers actually managed their projects. A few common themes emerged from these discussions:

  • Project managers need a complete view of a project schedule.
  • Staff members need to always understand the tasks that need to be completed.
  • Some customers only track to-do lists, not entire projects.
  • The collaborative component of project execution is equally important to the planning and management of the project.

With that in mind, we set out to design an interface that solves these problems.

Online Project Management Upgrade

Gantt charts

Gantt charts better support project managers who need a global view into an entire project schedule. Gantt charts are the project managers’ go-to visualization; thus, it is only fitting that we display your project data in this form.

Simplified interface

We spent a significant amount of time examining usability and navigation of the project management interface, then used these learnings to created an extremely fast interface that focuses on quick interactions to better handle typical projects while providing the ability to scale for large projects.

The future

This release is just the first step in our broader project management improvement roadmap. Additional features that we will be adding over the coming months are task dependencies, task reminders, advanced date shifting and even better reporting!

To see a full tour of the changes in this release, please see our Project Management Interface tour.

 

Chris Goodrich

Chris Goodrich

Chris Goodrich is an early adopter and strives to be at the convergence of business and technology. As Product Manager at Central Desktop, Chris is able to express his early adopter personality by creating new products and technology to solve real business problems.
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