Blimp: project management for doers
elweb.co
elweb.co
I like "high level" goals that can be prioritized ("User signup flow" is the most important thing we're working on this week, after that, it's probably "..."); the details for the high level stories can be done just-in-time.
My perfect PM feature for this is some sort of LRU expiry of stories. If someone hasn't opened a story (no views) or modified it within the last few months, move it to an archive. After a certain period of time in the archive, delete it.
Organizations and dev teams have a memory - if something is important, it'll be in the collective cache of the team. If something is relatively unimportant, it's waste (in the lean sense) to write it down until you have to (shortly before you need to prioritize and use it).
Bugs are the same thing. A bug is usually either worth fixing immediately (aka "next") or "never". Many bug trackers get clogged with stuff like "on IE7, the user dialog is 5 px to the right". It's either worth fixing right now or "never". Delete it, and if another user complains and it's recent enough that we remember the other story, then it bumps up the priority. But if it happens long after we all forgot it happened, it's still not important enough to fix.
This would go a long way to keeping the most important things at the top and avoiding the hell of "Did we have a story for that or something like 6 months ago?" associated searching. Both Pivotal and Trello have this sort of rosy picture of the world that folks will only be entering in "this is the most important thing we must do it this week" sort of stuff, which is unfortunately not how most project teams work. A more holistic PM tool would take into account user behavior and have a solution for this. Heck, something like HackerNews' front page algorithm would be pretty interesting applied to PM.
The feature works like this. When you mark a tasks as DOING that state will only last for 24hrs. After that the "worker" will be notified that the "Blimp robot" removed the DOING state. The idea is to approach the problem you are talking about. Many times projects become filled with stuff that nobody works on. I know this is a very simplistic approach but it's a start. We have a few cards up our sleeves.
I'm an architect and work in an enterprise environment that's obsessed at the minute (to put it mildly) with Agile. A typical project will use Pivotal to capture requirements, track progress and manage changes.
Project plans are non-existent, and a vague project schedule is done in Excel to convince the project sponsor to authorize the work.
The result is big surprise all around when release one is unusable because the hipster tech doesn't integrate with Active Directory, the awesome server push engine doesn't resolve clients behind NAT, and a change to a business rule requires two weeks' refactoring.
The team has talent, but they lack direction. What I need is something that a). captures high level requirements, b). does some basic risk management (plan, track, control) and c). does some stakeholder management so that the team knows whom in the organisation to ask about things like hosting.
P.S. Curious handle.
The problem here is more one from up high. The CIO has decided that GMail, the iPhone, SCRUM, Ruby, Zend and Mongo are where it's at, kindof bypassing the CTO who has to manage a legacy estate that operates on AD, Oracle, SQL Server, Java and .NET.
Culturally it's really good - everyone seems to feel really empowered, they have real talent but it's a young team so they lack experience.
I'm glad I work here.
Spearchucker Jones is a character from M.A.S.H. The 1970 original is one of my all time favourites.
Without that context, it's also a racial slur. Just keep that in mind.
Bugs are the same thing. A bug is usually either worth fixing immediately (aka "next") or "never". Many bug trackers get clogged with stuff like "on IE7, the user dialog is 5 px to the right". It's either worth fixing right now or "never". Delete it, and if another user complains and it's recent enough that we remember the other story, then it bumps up the priority. But if it happens long after we all forgot it happened, it's still not important enough to fix.
it's definitely not easy to develop something like this right.
2. If I want to tie myself to a particular version, I can't, meaning that if I don't like a $hot_new_feature, I'm SOL.
3. The browser is still very limited, and project management is very content intensive.
One single company willing to do actual applications programming could sell a ton of software.
I think a successful PM tool needs to be able to do two things well: track things that need to get done and organize communication. I love desktop software for the former, I still use Things.app — even though Flow is better for me — because it's a simple desktop app.
However, I think web apps are best for communication. I'm not dependent on any installed software, and I don't need to walk my clients through installing software.
Also, a take a bit of issue with "anyone with a few hours and a CRUD generator can make..." :-) While it's true that "projects has_many tasks" is the typical setup, intuitive workflows and easy-to-use interfaces take a lot of time and work.
I most appreciate the ToDo->Doing->Done implementation. However it does assume that all to-do comprise an equal proportion of the job. It doesn't allow for a list with 10 items, where number 2 is actually 50% of the work. But that's probably not something easily quantifiable to begin with.
One typo I noticed on the files tab (when empty): "Upload files to share with you team."
Also I couldn't get the photo upload to work on my settings page. The spinner would appear then go back to the default image, and saving didn't help.
- Free: $0 / 1 project / unlimited users / 10MB of file storage - Beta testers: $12 month / unlimited projects / unlimited users / 100MB of file storage / access to new features including Dropbox support (coming later this week) which will not count against you file storage allowance.
We have other plans available but they are not relevant right now since the beta testers plan is the best deal. You can see all plans after you sign up at https://app.getblimp.com/company/billing/
This is probably 'good enough' (and certainly is beautiful) for people not currently using anything for project management, but probably most of the HN audience already has something that's working somewhat for what they're trying to do now, and you're trying to supplant that.
There's almost no amount of screenshots that are going to get me to give up on the devil I know, so at the very least a product tour that shows interactivity is needed. Better than that would be a free trial, where I can get in there and try out some scenarios and compare them to the pain points I already have with my existing tools.
Like I said though, it really does look great. Fantastic even. But without being able to click on anything, I don't know that it isn't just pretty.
You can invite as many collaborators as you need. The only limitation is the number of projects that you can manage simultaneously, one for the free plan.
Thanks!
From - http://www.getblimp.com/
Nice tool though!
All kidding aside, it looks pretty and well designed, but I don't see any value in yet another project management tool.
We are trying to fix problems for folks that need help with their PM methodology. The idea is "trick" them into using a somewhat formal process.