When managing initiatives, things can take on a life of their own. We’ve all experienced it first hand, countless times: all the emails, status reports, meetings, task lists… they get out of control and pretty soon things start getting lost in the shuffle.
Members of the team are working simultaneously on multiple phases, tasks and other initiatives. As a team member, a manager, or an interested party, it’s important to get focused summaries of what’s going on. Getting a data dump of everything doesn’t help, but getting a snapshot of what you’re interested in is extremely valuable. This is what we focused on in our April release.
Introducing the Daily Digest
Our Daily Digest, a snapshot of what’s happened over the last 24 hours, is a great way to stay informed. The Digest highlights 4 key pieces of information to keep you and your team productive:
- Overdue Items: We all have long To-Do lists, and sometimes things get missed. Shibumi now reminds you of any overdue items you have. This includes both items you own and sponsor.
- Due Today: This is a very focused list of work items that are due today. We also include a count of items that are due over the coming week to keep you on top of your assignments.
- New Status Updates: Status updates are often the primary way to communicate initiative progress. Instead of waiting for a weekly status report to get rolled up, see daily status changes from your team and potentially alter your plan in real-time to stay on track.
- New Discussions/Replies: Effective collaboration is critical to success. It is often hard to follow the sea of email communication throughout the day. The digest allows you to see a quick snapshot of key discussions and link to detail on ones that are important to you.
New Snapshot Reports
Our work plan and dashboards are great ways to organize, manage and track initiatives. Now with a single click you can generate a tabular report from both work plans and dashboards. This gives you all the information for each item in a easy to read formatted view.
- Print: Easily print out a beautifully formatted version, ready to distribute to executives, stakeholders, etc.
- Download as CSV: Need to add some additional formatting, custom charts, graphs or analysis? Download and open in Excel for complete flexibility.
We’ve been using both these features internally for the last week, and can’t imagine how we ever lived without them. Take a look for yourself and let us know what you think.