Hi,

I am a fan of the product and have brought my team on board with it; we are now considering an enterprise license. A bit of context; I work in social research/program evaluation – we investigate government programs and help them make better choices about spending public money.

A few suggestions for enhancing TeamGantt, both minor and more significant.

A few small things

• Milestones: People use milestones in different ways – some to signify meetings, some to signify delivery dates, some to signify billing milestones. In the context I work in, being able to change the milestone colour would be very useful. I would note that I have discovered that you can set colours for milestones in list view, and this carries over to filters, but the visual representation remains the default yellow. Suggests to me that the information is being captured, so it’s just a matter to updating how the GUI represents it.
• Sticky notes: It would be useful to be able to add more than one sticky note to a task.
• File management integration: Longer term perhaps, but some mechanisms to enable integration with sharepoint or other file/document management systems so that critical project documents can be accessed directly through TeamGantt would be good. At the moment, have to upload things which creates version control risk.

3 bigger things, in order of value
Resource management
• I currently can’t use TeamGantt to do effective resource management because there are some critical functions missing. The first and most obvious one is the inability to set resource availability; I have part time team members, people on holidays etc, and not being able to program this in means the TeamGantt availability output is unfortunately of very little value. The visual representation of hrs/day is really hard to read in any case.
• The second problem here is the inability to split tasks. Split tasks are a common feature of my line of work, where we are doing many projects at once and there is a lot of stop-start. Adding the ability to designate when a task was ‘active’ or ‘inactive’ within a given period (daily, weekly, monthly) would be really, really useful.
• Resource-level progress updating: where multiple resources are attached to a task, it would be useful in some circumstances to allow individual resources to update their progress or flag overruns, rather than doing so at the overall task level.
• Finally (and this is a lower priority), being able to attach a cost to a resource (hourly/daily/fixed) lets me link TeamGantt with my external budget management.

These three enhancements substantially increase the utility of TeamGantt as a resource management tool, and for a multi-project environment like mine, managing resources working across many projects is a critical part of my role. A development focus on resource management functionality would be the biggest step up I can see for the product. These changes would also make it viable to track project costs via TeamGantt, provided there was a good export function as well.

Reporting
• Printing or Exporting the list view is not terribly functional – the print function looks messy etc and is not ‘client ready’. It would be far preferable to have an export to .pdf or .xls with appropriate indentations/colouring etc so that it is immediately presentable. I understand that the export is designed to enable subsequent porting between programs, and this functionality needs to be retained, but a reporting option that is presentable to a client with minimal tweaking would be terrific.
• A secondary, minor feature that would be very handy is the ability to specify which heading level you want to print/export at. I have some very large projects with up to 4 indentation levels and I don’t want to report on every single one, nor do I want to just have the top line headings.
• It would also be great to export the schedule view to .jpg or some other image format, as we are frequently dropping the schedule view into a project plan or report, and PDF is not the right format for this function.

Enhancing reporting would add a lot of value to project managers; at present, TeamGantt is a great tool but then I need to do quite a bit of work to transfer information into my reports for clients and my superiors.

User management
At the enterprise level, there are a few things that could be enhanced in relation to user management. Once you get over a certain number of people, it starts to get a bit messy trying to manage things with the current set up.
• The first is enabling admin establishment of accounts rather than requiring individual registrations. This is important to the acceptability of the product and the adoption strategy within our organisation. While relatively minor, registration by individuals is a barrier we can do without.
• The second relates to user groups/workteams. It would be useful to be able to make projects available to pre-defined groups rather than manually selecting all players, and to have this access carry over when group membership changes (e.g. we add a new staffer). Similarly, I want specified groups to have access to certain project templates.
• At an enterprise level, it would be useful to be able to ‘broadcast’ via TeamGantt to specific user groups rather than on a project basis.

Utilisation at the enterprise level is at present limited by the absence of these features; there’s a practical cap on how many people we could bring online via TeamGantt. Addressing these issues makes it a more attractive proposition for larger organisations.