Project Timeline & Other New Features
It’s time to get you caught up with the delicious updates we released in our Pie visual process and project management application. We’re continuing our focus to bring you value that help drive project end results.
This update covers only a few of many features that we released recently. To see the list of all features and bug fixes, go to our release page.
We follow a continuous deployment agile mode, which means features and bug fixes are deployed directly to your live Pie as soon as they pass testing. This happens any time during the week and could be as often as a few times a day.
Project Timeline
The Project Timeline is available for your projects under an organization on the Triple Berry à la Mode Enterprise plan. Watch the last video on this page below to see how you can upgrade a workspace and its projects to a 30-day Enterprise trial.
The Project Timeline displays your tasks in a list view with Gantt-style chart bars showing their start and due dates on a horizontal calendar view. You may say so what, other tools have this. True. However, we do bring some real differences that you will love. Here are four examples:
Project phases (pie slices) and key deliverables (process boxes) stand out. We designed it with a simple visual that is not only beautiful, but effective.
Filter your timeline view to a phase (slice) or process box with one click. This helps you zero in quickly on work important to you.
View a timeline from a hybrid agile-waterfall project. This is probably the first tool in the market to give you a wonderful visualization of your work across phase that work better with mixing agile and waterfall processes.
Drag left or right to see different periods or zoom in or out for details or the big picture. You can pinch or expand with your fingers to zoom on an iPhone or iPad.
Play the following video or go to the Help Center on project timeline for more info.
Portfolio Timeline
This Enterprise plan feature is in our reports page and it displays a similar Gantt chart start at the project level across your portfolio of projects. You can also view projects in a stack (i.e., program) and see their timeline charts. This is like looking at a project with sub-projects.
The value of this portfolio view includes:
Plan projects based on their start and end dates and how this load affects each project.
Monitor progress across your portfolio of projects and look for where they are running late or ahead of schedule.
Click for instant popup that indicates issues and risks and one more click to jump to the issue and risk log of that project.
Drill down by opening a project to see its own project timeline with one click.
Drag left or right to see different periods or zoom in our out for details or the big picture. You can pinch or expand with your fingers to zoom on an iPhone or iPad.
Play the following video or go to the Help Center on portfolio timeline for more info.
Milestones
Sometimes you have critical steps in your project that need to be singled out as key milestones. Our new Enterprise plan milestone feature is great for monitoring what’s most important in your projects.
A milestone is like a color tag, but it has extra features. For one, it stands out with the black diamond or as a white diamond when you’re looking a timeline chart. Secondly, when a milestone is linked with a predecessor task and that predecessor is marked done, the milestone task with get automatically marked done. This makes it easy to use milestones as a statement of accomplishment rather than an action.
Play this video or go to the Help Center on working with milestones for more info.
Self-Serve Billing (Per Organization)
This may not seem novel compared to other project tools in today’s age, but there is a huge differentiation that Pie offers. This is the ability to set up different payments for different organizations with their own workspaces and projects.
It’s a wonderful value for consulting firms or agencies that have multiple clients under different billings and budgets. With Pie, you can set up your clients with their own organizations and workspace and associate separate billing payments that can be managed either by your or your client accounts payable person. This is nice because you get visibility to the different organizations under your one login.
Play this video or go to the Help Center on upgrading to a premium trial for more info.