Recent Intervals Time, Task & Project Management Updates

We are excited to announce another round of Intervals project management software features and updates, based on our roadmap and feedback from our customers. Read on to find out how these online software updates will benefit you. Meanwhile, keep sending in the great ideas!

Milestone Improvements

Two new features have been added to milestones — document uploads and time and task productivity graphs. The ability to upload documents to milestones simply rounds out the current document sharing features found in both tasks and projects. Now you can collaborate on documents at all three levels of the project management hierarchy — at a high level with projects, a mid level with milestones and a low level with tasks.

The addition of time tracking and task management graphs to milestones now gives project managers a visual overview of milestone health. Similar to the project dashboard, the milestone graphs will reveal milestone progress by task status, task modules, task assignees, as well as time tracked on milestone tasks broken down by person and module. The goal of implementing these graphs is to help project managers keep milestones evenly balanced.

And to round out the updates to the milestones feature we’ve improved the comments section, making it even easier to collaborate with other people and keep historical notes. Now you can customize who receives an email notification when adding milestone notes.

The New “Junior” Administrator

We’ve layered in more granular restrictions that allow administrators to be demoted to “Junior” administrators. This feature is useful for companies who need administrators to handle the day-to-day project management work flow without granting them access to more sensitive areas of the account, such as billing information and settings. This addition makes the suite of user levels even more flexible, allowing Intervals customers to set up their administrators in multiple ways, depending on how much access each one needs. For example, you may need an administrator that can run with creating people, projects, clients, and so on, while restricting them from updating settings and defaults.

Periscope Report Improvements

Don’t call it a Gantt chart. However, our Periscope report has been expanded to look more like a Gantt chart. In addition to projects, milestones and tasks have been layered in to the report, giving project managers a detailed timeline. The Periscope report provides a visual overview of all projects, milestones and tasks, and shows how they are progressing. This report is useful for scheduling new projects and getting a clearer picture of progress on current projects. In addition, the report can be filtered by individual team members to see how they are progressing on their tasks for a particular project or milestone.

Task Followers

Traditionally, issue tracking systems will have a feature that allows people to follow a bug or task without playing an active role in it. Intervals now allows people to become task followers, allowing them to stay up-to-date on a task. Task followers can view tasks and will receive task updates via email. This feature allows task participants to be broken down into three clear categories based on their responsibilities — owner, assignee, or follower. This can be useful for project managers that want to include other people in the collaborative aspects of a task (for example, a client or a web developer) while keeping a clear distinction from the assignee’s responsibilities.

Widescreen Views for Client and Project Lists

Due to the positive feedback we’ve received after adding widescreen views to the task and milestone lists, we’ve gone and added them to the project and client lists as well. What, exactly, is a widescreen view? Well, it’s difficult to design a web-based app for a common screen resolution when our data shows that our customers screen resolutions range anywhere from 1024 to 1920 pixels wide. By enabling the widescreen view in Intervals, additional columns of information will be displayed. If you’ve got the additional pixels to spare, why not give you the option of getting more out of your online project management software?

Other Miscellaneous Improvements

In addition to all of the above goodness, we’ve made some more subtle tweaks and adjustments that should prove useful for managing projects and tasks:

• Notify executive users via email when a document is uploaded
  Uploading new design comps or copy for your clients to review? Simply check a box to notify them via email when you upload the document.
• Faster task comments
  The less we can make Intervals sweat the faster it will perform for our customers. As part of our commitment to continually make Intervals faster, we’ve made some updates to the task comments section to speed things up.
• More verbose title tags
  Title tags tend to get neglected by online software but we’ve found them to be especially useful. So we’ve made them more verbose, rounding them out with information like task and milestone titles. The next time you bookmark a project, milestone, or task, or go digging through your browsing history for that last task you were working on, detailed titles will make it much easier to find what you are looking for.
• Task notification modifications
  We’ve changed up the subjects on our task notifications that get sent out when tasks are updated. The subject now begins with the action performed encased in brackets (similar to popular mailing list software). This change decreases the amount of time spent skimming the inbox to see what’s going on. For example, you’ll now see [Task closed], [Task updated], and so on, prefixing the task number and title.
• Runaway timer notification
  We’ve all done it. We’ve started a timer and walked away from it, leaving it running for hours, days, sometimes weeks. Intervals will now email you to let you know if a timer has been running for longer than six hours.