We have added a new notation in project discussions to address a specific participant. It looks like this: @firstname. It’s like a ping or a nudge.
You see, Ofuz has an approach to project management that’s very much oriented around discussions.
For us, managing a project is primarily about communication and secondly about metrics. Most of the project management software I’ve personally used in the past were mainly metrics oriented: hour per hour estimates, hourly rates, time line Gantt charts… Those are very cool features but most of the time they get in the way of doing the real work, which is communication.
So in Ofuz, projects are firstly a discussion with everybody involved in the project and secondly about metrics (yes, we have them, but it will be the topic of a future blog post)
In Ofuz, the project tasks have a flow of discussion; to make sure we do not miss anything it’s integrated with emails. So each new comment in a Tasks discussion sends an email to all of the project’s participants. The discussion can then continue with emails – if one of the participant does a Reply All, that email response will also be added to the Tasks discussion.
The result are very well documented tasks, with all the details, progress, and changes that are happening. Yet, it can also be overwhelming.
If you want to get the attention of a particular participant, you can address the discussion note to him.
Thus, we created a special notation. For twitter users it will look familiar: it’s @firstname or @lastname.
If you nudge a participant, s/he will receive a special email alert that is different than the regular tasks discussion alert.
It starts with: {Ofuz:Nudge}
The participant will receive it even if they have the email alert discussion turned off.
Inspired by the twitter notation, we felt that the “nudge” enables quick internal dialogue within a project discussion, limiting the message overload.
That’s all for today…
Let us know what you think. Are you using the feature the same way we do ?
