Unfuddle Blog

The Four Primary Pieces of Project Management

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 01:00:00 UTC

Getting immersed in big projects requires more than just hard work and elbow grease. For teams to come together and execute something that becomes more than the sum of its parts, it requires a certain dedication, commitment, and strategic vision that runs through every part and parcel of a project. However, many of us in the tech space take advantage of the cloud. Rather than the luxury of a central location or office space where we can verbally reinforce a particular product’s strategic vision, or casually chat with the team about direction and strategy, these crucially important mission statements need to come through email, group chats, or sound-bytes in phone correspondence.

However, dispersed teams can find pathways to effectively communicate and delegate work, and echoed throughout project management software solutions. While these nimble project management solutions can help keep teams on task no matter where they may be, they need to address four critically important components to the project management ecosystem: detailed communication, deadlines and shifting priorities, delegation, and downtime.

Detailed Communication

Transparency and communication are the fundamental components of project management. No matter what direction the directives may be coming from, it’s so important that people are kept in the loop about how a project is taking shape.

This is crucially important in the tech space; while designers may be trying to put their mark on a particular image, marketers may be concerned about how those images connect with the overall branding. A programmer may make a decision that may streamline the coding process, beating deadline--only to find that it conflicts with potential directives about UX/UI. Project management software tends to help keep things from straying too far from overarching design by keeping everyone on the same page.

Keep All Key Stakeholders Informed

Sometimes, too much information can be a bad thing; users become inundated in irrelevant correspondence, and as a result, may miss crucial messages as they fail to realize how its needed. Alternatively, stakeholders may resist the project or work against it if they feel as if it might work against their own interests. The only way to ensure that a project moves along the pipeline without bottlenecks in the workflow is to ensure all interested parties are kept informed. Somewhat serendipitously, it comes as no surprise that one method to help better identify a process to communicate with interested parties is the INFORM method -- Identify, Nominate, Feel, Observe, Review, Manage. This allows users to identify the important members that need to be included on team correspondence, and nominate those that will take leads and take responsibility for certain responsibilities, and nominate others that may be impacted or affected by parts of a project. The feel component is one of attitude, primarily--some team members in a project may have differing views about what items should be made a top priority or how a project will affect them moving forward. As these stakeholders are identified and assessed, it’s critical for us to have a system that allows for communication to become a fluid and transparent byproduct of every step in the project management pipeline. Stakeholders should feel informed, their input monitored, and progress regularly reviewed to ensure that the project is effectively managed.

Automating Communication

It is also critical for communication to be automated during the project management pipeline. Let’s face it: We’re all very busy, very active people who are working together to achieve some major milestones. Automation can be a tricky tool, and one many have struggled with implementing correctly. By leveraging a project management system that keeps all key stakeholders informed, automating key processes, such as an automated weekly summary of communication, can change the game. Using multiple notification systems, like in-app push notifications, alert bubbles, or simply just automated emails to go highlight items that have been updated by another team member can help users know that things continue to keep moving regardless of their part in the project.

Tech Republic identifies how different types of communication can be preferable to different parties. Think about the types of communication to manage the best types of projects--from email to Instant Message, from project status meetings to intranet boards stored on a cloud, different communication styles serve different functions. It is increasingly critical that teams set precedents about how they prefer to communicate, and ensure that these become the standard operating procedure for the life of the project.

Deadlines & Shifting Priorities

Deadlines are a hard reality behind any major project. Whenever we try to launch a new product or service, roll out an update, curate our content strategy, one of the best ways to ensure a smooth launch is to set realistic, achievable deadlines. Segmenting deadlines and shortening to-do lists can actually enhance productivity by breaking down important projects to small, achievable goals.

Working Backward to Get Your Launch Date

Instead of planning major milestones out, one at a time, in front of one another, consider a vision-focused plan that sets the biggest deadlines out first. If your product launch is what you’re working to achieve, then set a reasonable date for a product launch. Write out the amount of milestones that will be required in order to see something like this happen. Let this be a natural, organic brainstorming process that helps account for all of the different nuances that you and your team think may be necessary for the product launch. Add up the time that each milestone might take, and pad it to allow for planning, scheduling, unforeseen circumstances, and shifting priorities. Instead of starting in sequential order, some project managers suggest that the best launches can come from planning backwards from your launch date to set firm deadlines for concrete milestones.

Project calendars allow the deadlines to “drive the process”, according to the University of Northern Iowa. “A team might realize that advertising must begin three weeks prior to the event, for instance. The team will then ‘back’ into the dates that each of the advertising tasks must be done, and in which order, to ensure that brochures are distributed on time.”

Shifting Priorities & Triage

Editorial calendars and projects seldom unravel exactly how we plan. No matter how detailed our planning might be, unforeseen circumstances, politics, personnel, or procedure might derail our original plans. Perhaps more detailed plans actually leave more things to go wrong! However, it’s crucial to solve these issues with communication. By quickly identifying the concerns of key stakeholders, the roles of major players on your team should be able to address, prioritize, and shift major milestones to keep your team on track.

Delegation

Among the most important components of any project management system is delegation. Delegating work can be among the most difficult decisions of a management team. Anything from protecting the quality of your work to being cautious about a team member’s ability to deliver can keep something from being effectively delegated. However, the best teams should always push themselves to strengthen their skill set and spread the work to maximize efficiency.

The Rule of 70

In a recent piece on Inc, Jim Schleckser dictates that the savvy leader will delegate work by the rule of 70. This rule states that if an employee can do a job 70% as well, then the CEO will delegate that work to the employee. This frees up the CEOs time and ensures that the most important work is delegated to lower-level workers; in addition to freeing up the time of upper management, it also empowers employees to develop their skill set. Delegation is an important and crucial cog in any team, and something that requires transparency and open communication.

Down Time

Rather than a piece of project management, a productivity tip that comes from many is one of relaxation. Detaching from distractions and delving into the depths of life outside of the office can be among the best ways to detach oneself and feel the freedom to work unencumbered in the following day.

Connecting with nature, taking breaks, or enjoying art all offer important distractions from the office that are actually scientifically proven to increase productivity. Getting some down time away from a project can actually be just as important as meticulously planning the project from the off.

Are there any other project management musts that we missed? Tell us in the comments below.

SSLv3 Vulnerability Addressed

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 01:00:00 UTC

Last month a vulnerability was discovered for SSLv3 by the name of POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) allowing man-in-the-middle attackers to view encrypted information in plain text. With that said, SSLv3 is no longer secure and we have removed this protocol from our servers in favor of TLS.

For most of you, this will be completely transparent, however there are still some SVN clients which rely on SSLv3 for encryption during communication with remote repositories. Unfortunately, these clients will not be able to interact with our servers over https and attempts to do so will now likely result in an SSL handshake error.

If you have been experiencing this issue recently, please be sure to update your client to the latest version. Upgrading has solved the issue for most of our customers experiencing this. If upgrading your client does not work for you, feel free to contact us at Support so we can assist you further.

We hope to see SVN clients that rely solely on SSLv3 get updated to support TLS in the near future.

More technical details on the POODLE vulnerability can be found here: https://www.openssl.org/~bodo/ssl-poodle.pdf

Two-Factor Authentication in Unfuddle

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 01:00:00 UTC

Today we're happy to announce that we've enabled two-factor authentication for all web access to Unfuddle accounts!

Two-factor authentication adds a strong layer of security to accounts by requiring not just a username and password, but also an additional code which is tied to a device you have in your possession, typically a mobile device, such as a smartphone. This means that, once enabled, in order to sign in to you will need to provide both your username and password AND have your device with you in your possession.

Setting up two-factor authentication in your Unfuddle account

Next time you sign in to your account, you will be prompted to enable two-factor authentication for your user account. If you choose to continue with the setup, you will be guided through the necessary steps. You do not have to turn on two-factor authentication for your account, but we highly recommend that you do in order to increase the security of your data. When you are ready to do so, you can turn it on in your personal settings.

We've chosen to use a service called Authy to do the heavy lifting here. In order to use two-factor authentication with your Unfuddle account you will need to install the Authy app on your device. This app will generate the code you will enter along with your username and password when accessing your account. Don't worry, we walk you through the entire process when you begin setting up two-factor authentication in your personal settings.

Signing in with two-factor authentication

Once you've entered your username and password, you will be prompted to enter an additional code.

This code is generated by the Authy app as mentioned above. You will have a certain amount of time to enter and submit the code before it is invalidated and a new code is generated by the app. Once you've entered the correct code, you will be logged in to your account.

For more help on setting up two-factor authentication for your account, please follow the instructions during the setup process, or contact Unfuddle support.

We hope you enjoy the added security and the increased peace-of-mind it brings!

Notice: SSL Heartbleed Bug

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 01:00:00 UTC

On Monday, April 7th, a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library, known as Heartbleed, was publicly disclosed. OpenSSL is a very popular library used for providing secure and private communication for services such as websites, email, virtual private networks and more. This includes most communication with Unfuddle and similar services.

The bug essentially allows an attacker the ability to access parts of a vulnerable system's memory compromising the keys used to identify the service providers and encrypt communications. An attacker who obtained the private keys would potentially be able to eavesdrop on these communications and steal data or impersonate other users.

How We Are Handling This

There is no indication that Unfuddle servers have been attacked via this vulnerability. However, in response, we moved quickly to address any risk to our service:

We have upgraded OpenSSL on our servers to a new version which is not affected by the Heartbleed bug.
We have removed our old SSL keys and created new SSL keys on our systems.

What You Can Do

Again, there has been no indication that such an attack was carried out against Unfuddle. If you wish to be cautious, we recommend taking the following steps in your existing Unfuddle accounts:

Change your password.
Reset your account access keys. These are the keys used to access certain parts of your account via RSS. This can be done by an admin from within your account settings.

The security of your Unfuddle accounts is a top priority for us. We will continue to monitor our systems and be sure to immediately address any other issues which may come to light.

Introducing: Task Boards (Schedules)

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:09:30 UTC

Good News

Our Unfuddle Alchemy project represented a complete rethink of how Unfuddle could help software teams work better. Through the feedback received, we have learned an enormous amount about how to help our customers better manage software projects. However, rather than continuing on as a standalone product, we have decided to integrate the best of Alchemy directly into the existing Unfuddle service.

We want to be clear that we consider Alchemy to be a great success! And this is good news for a number of reasons. First, Unfuddle is getting some really great functionality brought in. And second, we are no longer splitting time and energy working on two products at the same time. Instead, all our energy is going into making sure your existing Unfuddle account is helping you and your team become increasingly more productive. Also, as you might guess, this means we will not be accepting any more requests for invitation into the beta.

Custom Statuses and Task Boards

We’ve already introduced custom ticket statuses, the first of the Alchemy features to make its way over. And now we’re excited to let you know that the second feature of Alchemy has now made it’s debut in Unfuddle: Task boards. We like to call them schedules and accordingly, you’ll find them under the Schedules tab.

The regular ticket reports that you’re used to aren’t going anywhere,however, for those on the Compact plan or higher, custom statuses and schedules introduce some great new ways to plan and track progress throughout your team’s development cycle.

Updates to Milestones and Schedules

Speaking of the Schedules tab, we’ve begun making some much needed updates there as well. How many times have you had to change the date on a milestone because it represents an ongoing process rather than a specific time-bound goal? Well, now it is possible to create milestones which have no due date.

As you can see, we’ve also updated the layout a bit to make it easier to scan the list of milestones. And you’ll notice the page is much easier on the eyes with less glaring color and friendlier notification of lateness. In all, we feel this is the first step in making this view of project milestones much more useful.

Give Them a Try

We hope you give schedules a try. If you do not already have an Unfuddle account, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial at https://unfuddle.com/signup. If you do already have an account, regardless of plan, we have made schedules available to you for free for the next 30 days so you can experience just how valuable this new tool will be.

We hope you will enjoy these tools coming to Unfuddle. As always, please contact us at support@unfuddle.com if you have any questions or if you just want to say hello. We’d love to hear from you and will be happy to respond to any inquiries!

Custom Ticket Statuses and Project Workflows

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 13:08:30 UTC

Custom Ticket Statuses

As you may have already noticed, we have just flipped the switch on the new ticket view for all Unfuddle accounts. You may recall that this new view paves the way to some new and exciting features, namely custom statuses and task boards.

So, today, we are simultaneously launching custom statuses to all of our customers who have Compact plans and above. Go ahead. Define as many statuses as you like. Bend Unfuddle to suit your own specific workflow. It’s now easier than ever!

Statuses can be added and removed by administrators from the project settings page. Please note that some statuses are required for certain powerful commit messages to continue working. For example, removing or renaming the “Resolved” status will prevent any resolve actions from being processed in the future.

Schedules

Custom statuses are awesome and really help Unfuddle to map to how each team thinks and works. But task boards are what we are really looking forward to introducing in Unfuddle. We are calling them “Schedules” and each milestone in your project essentially represents a schedule.

You may have even wondered at some point about the “Schedule” tab and thought, “why isn’t it just called ‘Milestones’?” Well, this is why! Even while we have been working on the new ticket view and custom statuses, we have also been working feverishly on Schedules and are looking to deploy them in the very near future.

Continued Bug & Issue Tracking Improvements

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 13:08:05 UTC

Thanks for all of your comments! As we expected, our latest post regarding our updates to tickets has been quite popular. We've received a ton of great feedback and have been busy working to address your concerns and improve the way the new ticket view both looks and works.

We deployed a bunch of these updates at the end of last week. Here are the most significant changes in this new version:

Added new ticket report navigation in the Tickets tab
Added the ability to easily cycle through tickets in a given report
Updated the display of the Time Tracking and Associated Changesets sections so the most recent items are quickly visible
Added the ability to move a ticket to a different project
Added resolution description functionality
Updated a number of drop-down menus with a filter feature to make it easy to find specific items in a long list
Fixed a bunch of little interface bugs

Please continue to give us your thoughts on how this can be improved even more. It's most helpful to us if you use the feedback form in your account but feel free to leave a comment on this post too.

Upcoming Ticket Improvements & Additions

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:07:05 UTC

We are super stoked to be deploying a significant ticket-related update today. As you know, tickets are the heart and soul of Unfuddle. Whether you use them to track bugs or plan your projects, tickets are what you use to get things done.

We have been working hard to pave the way for some useful and much asked for ticket-related features in Unfuddle, including custom ticket statuses and task boards. Of course, anything that affects a core part of Unfuddle requires a lot of thought and a good dose of feedback from our customers.

We've already given this a lot of thought but that doesn't mean it's perfect. Now we are revealing an updated ticket view in all Unfuddle accounts so you can share your thoughts with us. You won't see custom ticket statuses or task boards yet, but, as stated above, this update is necessary for us to make a smooth introduction of those features in the coming weeks.

Since the ticket view is so core to many of your workflows, we are not yet retiring the "old" version. In fact, it is still the default view for now. However, you can toggle the views easily right from within the interface.

We want to make sure this update improves your workflow and makes Unfuddle even easier to use and more helpful to you and your team. And the only way for us make that happen is if you give us your feedback!

Please use the feedback form in your account to send us your comments and questions. We will read and respond to all, as always. And, oh yeah, did we mention that custom statuses and task boards are coming to Unfuddle?!

Preventing Lost Form Data

Fri, 24 May 2013 05:32:34 UTC

We have all been hit by it at some point. You spend 30 minutes writing the most perfect ticket, message or comment only to accidentally navigate away from the form. Seriously frustrating.

We have just launched an update that addresses this workflow issue. If you have entered any data in a form on the page, Unfuddle will now warn you when you attempt to navigate away from the page (either on purpose or accidentally).

It is a small change, but we trust that it will save everyone a lot of frustration.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:05:08 UTC

We've just deployed an update that will boost your efficiency in Unfuddle so you can get more work done faster. Introducing Unfuddle keyboard shortcuts!

Throughout Unfuddle it is now possible to create new items, navigate to different projects or tabs within a project, modify a ticket, comment on tickets and messages and more, all without touching your mouse. You can quickly see what is possible by tapping "?" on your keyboard. This will popup the window, shown below.

Want to create a ticket? No problem! Simply type "nt" and go. Or do you want to accept the ticket you are currently viewing? Just type ".a". It's that simple.

Here is the full list of available shortcuts. What do you think? Are there any shortcuts you feel are missing? Let us know!