October 2015 Newsletter

Welcome to our October newsletter.  Here you will find an update on GamePlan, and a short story about our own personal experience showing the benefits of project planning.

The current look of the product is shown below:

Recent enhancements include:

• meetings and milestones can be added to your plans
• you can upload your own custom images
• task group bars are shown on the Gantt chart
• a project summary gives you high level project information
• you can specify a time delay between tasks
• you can plan for a task to start when another task is partially complete

GamePlan Launch

For most of this past summer my thinking was that the first GamePlan release was about two months away.  We kept working hard on our task list, but as the months passed our release date remained two months away.  We weren’t getting any closer.

The issue was that we did not have a real plan and so I was guessing at when GamePlan would be ready for our clients.  Which was ironic because we were creating a project planning tool!  But this also showed us why we were creating it: to solve the very issue that we were having – poor planning.

In late September we developed reporting in GamePlan, and this allowed us to change our planning tool from a spreadsheet to GamePlan.  We transferred our list of tasks from the spreadsheet into GamePlan and estimated the amount of work for each task.

This gave us good news and bad news.  The good news was that for the first time ever we had a real plan.  The bad news was that GamePlan showed us that our release date was mid-February, 2016, still five months away!

At least now that we knew this, we could take action.  We went through our tasks and lowered the priority on those that could wait until after our first release.  That brought our release date to mid-January.  We then changed our working calendars to reflect our real working hours, and we added another developer (me) to our coding team.  These changes brought us to mid-December.

Another significant benefit of GamePlan is that as you complete your tasks, GamePlan keeps your plan up to date.  We discovered that this is very motivating.  As we completed tasks ahead of schedule, our project end date moved closer and closer, and is now sitting at December 1st.  This is shown in the project summary below.

Our project start date was September 29th and our project end date is now December 1st.

There are 43 tasks in our project, and a total of 321 hours of planned work.  The planned work is now 37% complete.

The project end date has been moving closer because we have completed 120 hours of planned work in 56 hours.

Now that we have a real project plan, we have the confidence to say that we will have the first release of GamePlan in early December, 2015.

First Release

Our first release will be to our Early Adopters.  These will be organizations who would like to work closely with us for a few months after release to make sure that GamePlan completely meets their needs.  If you are interested in being an Early Adopter of GamePlan, please let me know.  There will be no cost to you for this.  We simply ask for regular communication and testimonials that we can put on our website prior to our global launch.

GamePlan Demonstration

Would you like to see GamePlan in action?  I would be happy to show it to you and get your feedback.  Please contact me and if you are not in Vancouver we can organize a GoToMeeting.  You can even take the controls and create your own plan if you’d like.

Thank you for your continued support of our new venture.  Please feel free to contact us at any time.