Product Roadmap - Q1 2015

In previous quarters we've published product roadmaps that were, for want of a better word, aspirational. They highlighted our priorities and gave you insight into what we were working on and doing through the quarter, but with a quality attitude and an agile approach, more often than not things took longer than we anticipated to get into the hands of our users.

Starting 2015, we're making a few changes to this approach. This is partly because we can - our engineering team is now 150% bigger than is was this time last year. This is partly because we want to - no-one likes missing targets, no matter how aspirational. But it is mostly because you deserve it - we appreciate that putting your trust in Accelo to run your whole business in the cloud is of critical importance.

In light of this, I want to outline the specific schedule we're working on through the remainder of this quarter.

Team Scheduling

Engineering Due Jan 25th, Delivery Due Jan 30th.

Earlier today we set our major enhancements to our Team Schedule module live. While there's still a few things we want to tweak here, this major part of this significant module is now live. This is actually a module we've been working on - and working towards - for the last 3 months, and our ambitions stretch back a year or so.

We've always had the ambition to create a single platform where you can manage all of the work that goes on in the business in one place - and forecasting what's around the corner (and adapting to change) is a normal and natural part of day to day management.

With this new module, you'll be able to see, in real time, what everyone else in the business is working on. As projects get bought forward or pushed back, people's scheduled will automatically adjust. Now you can simply drag and drop to assign or move work between team members, and even schedule work to appear in their calendars from one, simple screen.

Global Search

Engineering Due Feb 3rd, Beta Available Feb 6th.

While it was common twenty years ago to find information based on codes and file numbers (of course 2003-03-C-03 meant the third complaint in March of 2003!), the modern world uses plain text search as its way of finding information.

We're excited to be one of the first business applications outside Google to deliver real-time search across your business information, regardless of the type of information you're searching for.

Given the power of this new search engine - searching across all of your clients, contacts, sales, projects, issues and retainers - we want to tread a little carefully in terms of roll-out. If you're someone who's keen to live a little dangerously and you want to join the beta, email [email protected] and we'll make sure you get this powerful new feature as soon as we can give it to you.

Triggers on Retainers

Engineering Due Feb 6th, Delivery Due Feb 13th.

Also in the category of underestimation in late 2014, we've been working on adding enhanced functionality to our new triggers module, The focus here is three-fold (and related):

1. Implementing triggers on retainers, particularly warnings and notifications when a client is getting close to using their allocated budget or amount of hours spent in a particular period.

2. Implementing related/linked object rules, so you can make sure only clients who are of a status=vip get the escalation email tell people it is an emergency to get on top of their issues.

3. Allowing custom fields to be used in Trigger rules - meaning you can create more powerful and relevant rules to match your business processes.

Contractor Module

Engineering Due Feb 27th, Delivery Due March 6th.

Managing contractors is an important part of the daily lives of our clients, and something Accelo hasn't done a great job of previously. After a few false-starts (it is a pretty complex area, involving access control, costs/profitability and billing) we've assigned the entire engineering team (150% bigger than this time last year) through much of Feb to finally deliver this to our users.

Firstly, contractors will only be able to access the work items (tasks, activities) that they're assigned to work on in Accelo, limiting their visibility into your client database, sales pipeline, work in progress projects and the rest of the things you're probably happier to share with your full time team members than someone who's working temporarily as a contractor.

Secondly, contractors will be priced differently than Professional and Admin users in Accelo. While we're still modelling/finalizing the details, they'll be billed in a way that is linked to the amount of work they do in Accelo, so someone who does no work will be free (or very cheap), if they do some work they'll be billed at a higher tier, and if they do a fair amount of work they'll be billed at the same price as a regular user.

Finally, this module will be the first time we'll be tackling the "costs" side of work in Accelo, and we'll be making it possible for you to designate the "cost" of a contractor as well as a fully loaded hourly cost for your regular team members. The result will be the ability to map profitability on a project, issue and overall company basis - something we know a lot of our users are excited about!

Instead of delivering things in a single launch, we're also aiming to launch enhancements to costing/profitability reports, access control and finally delivering the new contractor level gradually as we bring these new features to life. We're also planning on making all newly created Contractor level users free through the remainder of Q1 during our beta period - again, your feedback is super appreciated.

Desktop Timers

Engineering Due Mar 7th, Delivery Due March 13th.

We've also been working in the background on a range of Desktop improvements (to compliment our mobile apps) to make it easier to keep track of your work without having to run the risk of distraction by going back into your web browser.

Watch this space for more information.

Timesheet Enhancements

Engineering Due Mar 13th, Delivery Due March 20th.

Last quarter we updated our "Work Screen" with a note to let people know that we were aiming to retire this long-neglected screen - and we were inundated with responses, petitions and even a few good natured threats.

The good news is that we've heard you, and we're going to be ploughing a lot of work into improving the work screen to make sure our users don't have to leave anything behind when the current work screen sails off into the sunset.

Mobile Apps 2.1

Engineering Due Mar 20th, Delivery Due March 31st.

After a big push in the last month to bring our iOS and Android apps up to scratch, we're not resting on our laurels. Here's some sweet UI mock-ups to prove it!

In March we'll be working hard to increase the "on the road" utility of our apps. We'll be introducing the prized activity streams, making it easy to see what you last said to that client or track the latest work on that project wherever you are. You'll be able to unlock the power of the regular create activity screen, including scheduling meetings and sending invitations. We'll be adding expenses handling, and we'll also be making it easy to create tasks on the fly.

Improved Activity Streams

Engineering Due Apr 3rd, Delivery Due April 10th.

One of the other important improvement we're working on this quarter is the way we display/show activity feeds. When you open up a client, contact, sale, project, issue or other object in Accelo and want to see a list of the most recent things going on, we want to make it easier to see what's happening.

Other Improvements

In addition to these big pieces, we're also going to be assigning more resources to ongoing smaller improvements and bug fixes and small improvements through the course of the quarter. With our engineering team 150% bigger today than it was 12 months ago, we're excited about making faster, better and more broad progress in the quarters ahead!