SmartQ is based on Kanban, a lean production process I have never encountered before. According to Wikipedia, kanban is “a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.” The system was developed by Toyota. Through the use of kanban cards (signs on a board), you can signal what parts of production are at what stages, and what resources or supplies are needed or are in use. Efficient production can be attained knowing how many cards — or tickets — are needed in a process to produce something, and by keeping an eye on the transfer of or accumulation of these cards during production.

Using SmartQ

When you start using SmartQ, you begin a new project and start new “tickets” (i.e. kanban cards) that you can assign to team members complete with a deadline and the status or stage each ticket is at, such as “submitted”, “assigned,’ “work started,’ “completed” or “approved.”

Using the “Board View,” you can see your tickets begin to lay out across the screen in sequence. You can also easily drag and drop each ticket box to rearrange.

I was immediately pleased to see what I normally have created as a written checklist in a much more visual layout.

What a difference seeing tasks (or “tickets”) laid out according to status can make! Of course, if you still want to see a list, there is also a “List View:”

Under “Settings,” you can manage team members and their admin controls and roles per project. You can also design and modify your workflow process by editing or adding to the default workflow stages (submitted, assigned, work started, completed or approved). You can even design your ticket form to include more features or have input fields in different positions.

When you create a new ticket, you can enter a ticket name, description, the stage it is at, when it is required by, who it’s assigned to, and you can opt to send by email to everyone involved with the ticket. There is a space to add comments, and you can attach files to each ticket as needed.

Rethinking Workflow Management

When I started using the app, I was puzzled by the way I could see which tickets I had created, but I couldn’t see who I’d assigned the ticket to or the deadline.. So I asked the company why this might be, and a representative responded:

You don’t care to see who created the ticket, since you create them right now. In systems we use, they are viewed from workers side. So they need to see the requester. And the required date was rarely used in the scenarios we observed so far, since the board is fluid — tickets move when they can, and managers are alerted when too many get accumulated in one stage or another.

Going back to the kanban concept, tickets on the SmartQ are placed in certain buckets (“submitted,” “assigned,” “work started,” “completed” or “approved,” by default). At a glance, managers can see where there might be a bottleneck in workflow and address those areas to keep the process running smoothly. I have always been so tied to deadlines, and yet SmartQ and the kanban concept is reconfiguring my own ideas about workflow. SmartQ provides a new way to visualize and frame work projects and tasks. I’m looking forward to testing the system out with my team members to see how it works with more people, projects and tickets added to the mix.

How are you visualizing — and managing — your workflow?

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If you’re a WorkflowPerfect user frustrated by its seeming demise, I’ve gathered together a few potential alternatives:

• 

  ProcessMaker

  ProcessMaker: If the business process management (BPM) features of WorkflowPerfect were what drew you to the app, check out ProcessMaker. It’s an open-source BPM tool that offers more powerful features than WorkflowPerfect, such as process mapping, a form builder, business rules and LDAP synchronization. Two editions are offered: the free Community Edition, and an Enterprise Edition with a greater range of features.

• calc{list} With Passive Automation: This oddly named app is a CRM tool. It combines a contact manager, email system and company-wide workflow automation tool. Three editions are available, but for the Passive Automation features, you need to get the Pro edition, which costs $495. A 30-day free trial is available.
• 
  

  ProWorkFlow

  ProWorkFlow: ProWorkFlow is an easy-to-use project management, workflow and time tracking solution for small to medium businesses. Plans start at £10 ($15 USD) per user per month. A free trial is available.

• 5pm: If the task management — rather than BPM –aspects of WorkflowPerfect were why you were using the tool, you might like to check out 5pm. It’s an intuitive, easy-to-use project management app (see Jason’s review here). Plans start at $18 per month, and a free trial is available.
• LiquidPlanner: If 5pm is too simplistic for your project management needs, another app that’s worth considering is LiquidPlanner; Mike sang its praises in his review. It has dynamic scheduling, Gantt charts, estimation, time tracking and analysis features. LiquidPlanner plans start at $25 per user per month, and a free trial is available.
  

Unfortunately, none of the suggestions I’ve listed above are exact like-for-like replacements for WorkflowPerfect, but hopefully one of them will have the sort of functionality that you’re looking for.

One lesson to take from the disappearance of WorkflowPerfect is that if a web app has no obvious business model or means of generating revenue — WorkflowPerfect was only supported by Google ads on the site — there’s a greater risk it could disappear without warning. While most of the apps listed above are more expensive than the free WorkflowPerfect, they’ll hopefully have a better chance of staying the course.

List your WorkflowPerfect alternatives below.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

In my previous post, I examined the specific needs our team: communications, management, archiving and interaction. Then I identified the processes that fall under each of those needs. Here’s an updated diagram illustrating this:

Also in my previous post, I identified the software solutions — all cloud-based — that my company was testing out or using to fulfill these needs. Here’s how I illustrated the disparate applications that we cobbled together to try to create the illusion of a seamless solution.

One of the main things this diagram shows is that there we were using many applications in an attempt attempt to mimic the experience of working in a single physical location. Our virtual team has the fundamental need to keep everything in the cloud, because we don’t have the ability to pop our head into the cubicle next to us to ask a question, or walk down the hall to access a shared filing cabinet to retrieve important documents, or gather by the water cooler to get to know one another better.

But how do you pare down these multiple online solutions to be able to use fewer applications and yet get more functionality? We’re finding that, over time, developers are contemplating these same needs and processes and coming up with more integrated solutions. For example, in just nine months since I wrote my last post about virtual teams, a new cloud-based workspace solution called Glasscubes has come onto the scene that seems to take a different approach to distributed work and project management.

Glasscubes starts with the premise that virtual teams need a “space” in which to work and that all of the functionality should then reside within each space. In most cases, cloud- based apps seem to come from the standpoint of their specific function — such as “project management” or “task management” or “time tracking” — and then work to solve that problem. In the cases of some services — such as 5pm – the app’s “environment” derives from its functions.

But when you fundamentally begin with the “environment” — such as with Glasscubes — it appears to me that you end up with a solution that is better at fulfilling our need for a “place” or “space” for working in the cloud. Because of the more integrated feature set in Glasscubes, much of what we’ve been using prior to it is quickly becoming redundant. Here’s a diagram that shows the changes in our process distribution, thanks to Glasscubes’ more complete virtual workspace solution.

As you can see, we’re still having to use other solutions, because even Glasscubes doesn’t cover all of our processes. However, now many even seemingly disparate needs are fulfilled with a single solution.

The Adoption Quandry

As our team grows, we continue to struggle with the problem of adopting new software solutions that each team member can embrace. Because of our different personalities, we’re each comfortable with some, but not all, of the different solutions we’ve been testing out to improve work processes. That’s why, for example, we’ve never adopted SugarSync for file syncing, sharing and archiving for example even though, in theory, it could be an amazing and seamless solution for us. It’s also why never did adopt Socialtext, even though I personally can see the tremendous functionality of that product to integrated distributed teams.

Glasscubes, however, took me seconds to begin using and, more importantly, to understand how it worked and how I could use it. And even though I had the benefit of a personal demo from the company’s founder, every team member who I brought into the Glasscubes system took to it straight away. When our most creative team members and our most linear team members both felt comfortable within a single solution, I knew we were on to something.

Cost Considerations

One problem with having to piece together multiple solutions can be cost. As a boutique agency, we don’t have massive budgets for technology and while many of the applications we are using have both paid/premium and free versions, we have to pick and choose which ones we can afford to purchase.. Luckily, many of the freemium applications offer a good amount of features for free.

Right now, we are paying $125/month for a professional account with Glasscubes. This is more than we were paying for 5pm, but with the new addition of time tracking on Glasscubes and the overall comfort level everyone on the team has with the solution, we’re feeling the extra expense is worth it. We are still having to pay a minimum of $18/month for 5pm at the moment as we try to figure out how to get our archived files, content and conversations off of that system in an organized fashion.

What are your team’s needs and processes? What are the solutions you are using and how adequate are they?

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in what makes the type of cloud working that Aliza describes in this post possible, check out our Structure conference in June.

When it comes to collaborative tools such as project management apps, you can usually apply different levels of access to each team member. Still, have you figured out what to do when someone from the team departs?

You have a few options:

1. Delete their account. But what happens if that account contains data that applies to work you’re still doing, or time reporting you are still running?
2. Make the account inactive. But does this mean the account still counts against your user quotas, or will it give you an open space to add a new member without increasing your service level?
3. Change the username and password. But is this really a secure option?

My company’s virtual team (over a dozen people) are using 5pm, so I contacted the company to see what they recommend doing in the situation of a team member leaving and what their service supports. They acknowledged that workers leaving a company is an interesting issue and recommended changing the login email address used on the account and the password. While they suggested using a fake email, I’m thinking using an alternative email address to which you have access would be a better solution.

5pm’s programmers are able to restore data if you accidentally delete something you didn’t intend to remove, but they also pointed to the “Backup” feature that allows you to pull your data from the cloud onto a computer before you make any changes if personnel has changed. The company is considering an “active/inactive” flag for users, but also said that since their plans are based on the number of users, they were concerned that people might turn this feature on and off to get around upgrading to a premium level.

Curious to see how other project management tools handled the issue of security when a team member departs, I approached Wrike and LiquidPlanner with my scenario as well.

The folks at Wrike suggested that the best way to protect against potential sabotage is to deal first with the issue on the HR and legal side, rather than relying on your cloud vendor. While I agree with this in theory, most startups don’t have an HR department or a legal team to enforce issues, and much of what happens with team members happens swiftly and potentially irreparably in a bad situation. Contracts can’t keep disgruntled individuals from commiting sabotage. Wrike has a “merge” feature so you can actually merge the data of one user into the account of another. The account can be kept active with a changed username and password, or removed after merging data to downgrade an account if money is an issue. The Wrike folks also say they have multiple levels of backups and a friendly, helpful customer service team at the ready to assist in a crisis situation to help retrieve lost data or protect an account. They may, however, require a fee to cover the time of their programmers.

LiquidPlanner lets you immediately “disconnect” a user from the collaborative workspace if they leave the team, so a former employee can no longer log in to view or modify the team’s project information. This feature makes their account inactive. This disconnection feature eliminates the need to change a login and password as a stop gap measure. The workspace remains secure. The inactive user’s projects and tasks will remain accessible and intact so the rest of the team can access all the data related to their account. Inactive users do not count against the user quota for a LiquidPlanner account. If you disconnect a user from a workspace at any time and then they return to the team, you can simply invite the same person back into the space by “reconnecting” them.

Before you run into a crisis situation with your project management system, here are a few things to look into today:

1. Check to see if the apps you use have a way to back up your data.
2. See what the company recommends in terms of security actions to take if a team member leaves abruptly.
3. Check if there are fees for restoring data via the company’s main backup system.
4. Write out your internal plan for keeping your company’s project management space secure.

What is your plan for keeping your collaborative spaces secure?

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A relatively new entrant to the market is 5pm, a product is built by a very small team. Even without venture funding, the 5pm team has built a visually attractive project management utility, but how does it stack up to the competition?

Signing up for 5pm is easy – they offer a 14 day trial and there is no “wait for your email” to verify your account.  The signup and onboarding processes is very quick and painless, giving off a great first impression.

Like Projjex, 5pm delivers the familiar Project/Task view you’re used to seeing in project management software.  5pm is easy on the eyes and features many pop-ups offering contextual how-tos and tips on usage.

There are tabs for projects, timelines (gantt charts), reports, and user (resource) profiles.  The right hand pane is a contextual menu that refreshes whenever you click an item on the left.  For example, if you click on a project name, the right hand pane will display details on that project, eliminating an extra click to retrieve this useful information.

5pm has built in some very useful features surrounding projects and tasks.  Each project has its own RSS feed and direct link.  The company has also built in iCalendar support for projects which gives you calendar integration with any calendar software the supports this format including Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Mozilla Sunbird, and others.  Projects can be grouped, given deadlines, and status.

Additionally, 5pm allows for client login with the ability to restrict rights for different audiences.  All items in your 5pm projects are searchable for easy access.  You can upload documents and files and attach them to tasks.  For report portability and customization, 5pm has made it possible to export reports to CSV.

A feature that really stands out is their email integration.  Not only can you email from 5pm to a project member, but that person can update the progress of a task, simply by replying to the email address provided for the project.

5pm has many features that are found in various project management utilities and combines it with a fantastic look and feel.  The company should spend more time building a dashboard for project managers to get a pictorial way of tracking their projects.

Overall, the site is useful and worth potential users giving the 14-day trial a run through.  Their prices are a bit steep, especially considering competitor Projjex allows for unlimited users/clients on a project.

5pm’s plans begin at $14/month that allots you 5 users, 10 open projects, and 150 Mb of file storage.  The most expensive plan is $84/month and gives you 40 uses and 80 open projects with a gig of storage space for files.

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