Customized Project Status in addition to Active and Inactive

We recently received this feature request and I am curious to get other feedback:

One thing that intervals is missing that some other applications have is the ability to customize project status. You guys currently have "active" and "inactive" . For my company, I would love to be able to add in "In Process" "In Planning" "Archived" "Rejected" etc. Additionally, the ability to designate each project (and thus each attached task) a color tag would make things much easier to track visually. I love being able to look at a chart and see what projects are going on in what time-frame, based by color tag.

A lot of the Program Management type of software does indeed feature this functionality. It is meant to help manage your portfolio of projects from concept to completion. Intervals is deliberately light on the Program Management features (including Project Management features like Gantt Charts for that matter) to keep it easy to use and keep its primary objective in the forefront which is Time Tracking and Task Management.

Any likes/dislikes or other thoughts would be great to hear...

- Michael

We would definitely use this feature exactly as msheldonjr describes. I also requested this feature in this post: https://www.myintervals.com/forum/discussion/398/project-status-and-billing/#Item_1

The word "Project Management" really means a lot of different things to different people. For some people it does mean traditional project management things like earned value and Gantt charts, but for others it means something completely different. For many small businesses organizing work and fulfilling contracts is project management.

If somehow you have felt misled my sincerest apologies. That is not our intent. Our tour tries to articulate this and we try to make it as easy as possible to try Intervals and determine for yourself if it is a good fit. The trial is fully functional and free so you can try Intervals and see if it is a good fit without any obligation.

Intervals was built around our web design and web development flow at Pelago and our development practices are very similar to Agile development. We used to make very detailed project plans with Microsoft Project and eventually found that it did not work for us. Too often one client delay would wreck the whole plan and we spent our time managing the schedule as opposed to managing the project and client relationship. We changed up our methodologies to be more flexible. Intervals is built around that sort of iterative philosophy with an ever changing schedule.

We do have plans to add task imports and exports via CSV and the API. I know that some customers plan to export and import tasks back and forth between Microsoft Project to utilize the powerful scheduling side of Microsoft Project with the time tracking, task management, and reporting of Intervals. It will be interesting to see how well things work together.

Regarding not responding to certain forum posts, this is intentional at times. Our hope with the forum is that it will be place where users can articulate ideas and have conversations that we moderate. This has been hit and miss to be completely honest but I believe that is the nature of forums. We are slower with the forum than email or the feature request and bug submission links within each account. If you ever have a question about a feature you can always email support@myintervals.com. We typically categorize feature requests into the following groups:

0. ruled out
1. being contemplated
2. on the development plan
3. active / under development

We typically get a few hundred feature requests a week so there are a lot of items in the #1 camp. Our goal is to add features that add the most value for everyone while keeping Intervals easy to use. Thanks again for the honest feedback.

John here. Thanks for the idea on tracking requests from our customers. Although we don't anticipate having any type of customer login for checking on the status of these requests, we do encourage you to use the feature request button in the footer of the Intervals project management app. This way it gets assigned a unique case number and is placed into our database where our support team can access it. I apologize if this is redundant, but it is the best way to ask us about features.

Thanks for the kind words about Intervals. We are glad you are finding it a good fit.