Below is a blog post from one of our customers who wrote this post on their own blog. We were so proud to receive this type of feedback that we just had to re-post it here in the engine room.

Top Notch Customer Service Is Teamwork Project Manager’s Killer App

About 6 months ago, Phases migrated our project management systems from Basecamp to Teamwork Project Manager – 2 web-based products that take the place of a desktop app like Microsoft Project. Now, I don’t usually take the time out to write a blog about a product/service that we use, but over the past few months I have been so impressed with Teamwork that I just had to take some time and let everyone know about this fantastic company!

Why We Moved

To put it simply, I felt as if the studio had outgrown Basecamp. There was no easy way to archive files once they were uploaded to the site, scheduling across projects was time consuming; we always found ourselves needing a feature that was not there, and updates were far and few between.

So we began to search for an alternative.

We demoed a few products, and Teamwork seemed to have most of the features we were looking for—not all, but most. The biggie was the ability to download files in batches. So we migrated our Basecamp data (yup, they offer a direct import from your Basecamp account!) to the new system and updated our clients.

Almost instant feedback response

After a few months I found an annoyance in the scheduling options, so I thought I would try out the feedback option. To my utmost surprise I had a response from one of the developers the same day. My request was a bit complex, but guess what? They have it scheduled for implementation!

Over the next several months I noticed a few little things that would make my daily chores much easier, so I used the feedback form again. And to my delight, I got the same speedy response from the guys at Teamwork with just one difference: some of my suggestions / requests had been implemented within just a day or two of my request! I felt like a kid in the candy store when I was using the new options that I had requested.

We’re from the Internet. We’re here to help you.

Today’s internet offers almost countless products and companies that are supposed to make our work-lives easier and more convenient. And while this is often true, because we no longer have to leave our desks, go down to the store and talk to other human beings in person, we end up missing the personal touch of a store front business.

Teamwork’s ability to supply the missing link of personalized client service is what sets their brand experience apart from other Web-based companies and what has made me into a brand evangelist. Kudos to Sam, Dan and everyone at Teamwork for the phenomenal customer service and fantastic product.

Here are just a few Teamwork Project Manager features that rocked our world:

• Notebooks: a way to easily share content with your team.
• Bulk file downloads: just check off the files you want and click the download button. Yup. That’s it.
• Risk Register: record and manage everything that might put a hiccup in your schedule.
• Resources: compile a list of resources (websites, google documents, anything and everything) that others on your team might need.
• File associations with messages: This one was fantastic to discover.  You can attach any file to a message after it has been uploaded, or upload a new file to the message.
• Task scheduling: (recommended by yours truly!) Reschedule an entire task list by “pushing” back the dates and maintaining time frame between each task.
• Calendar: Quickly view all activities across projects, and even schedule items independent of a project.

Check out the full list of project management tools the service offers for yourself, and don’t forget to look over the roadmap for future enhancements.

Quote from the video: Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Social media is now becoming an important part of Project Management. I have been wanting to write a post about this. Then I came across this blog post today and found that it covered pretty much what I was thinking, and it's better written than I would have achieved so I thought I would share it with you.

It's a short piece written by Michal Wachstock and it's well worth a read.

An extract from the post:
Three business environment changes that have impacted our need and desire to go social.

Economic challenges – the recent economic downturn is forcing companies to invest their resources on high value projects. ROI is now more critical than ever before and while budgets have shrunk, requirements haven’t

Manpower- in tighter economic times, people are being asked to do more in less time. Project Managers are being asked to deliver more, in less time, on a shorter budget, and with fewer resources

New business models – According to some studies, at least 43% of CIOs who are looking to increase their resources are looking to hire offshore resources and bring on 3rd party partners onto their projects.

Link to the full blog post

The task timer is a great feature. It allows you to start a timer on any task you are currently working on and then record the time accumulated either billable or non-billable.

The current implementation was good but we knew we could do better. Some people had issues if the computer was hibernated and their session had expired so I re-wrote it today to fix those issues.

While I was re-writing the new timer, I took the opportunity to add a new feature a few people asked for and I found myself looking for on occasion....the ability to start a timer that wasn't specifically tied to a task. This is important because sometimes you might get a phone call to work on something or want to time some content writing and creating a task is just not viable.

The new timer button is found on the left of the Time tab in each project.

Once this is started, the familiar task timer bar shows at the end of the screen but it will now display the name of the project you are working on in place of the task name.

Hope this update helps you! It has been locked in and will be available on the next release to the live servers. When you see the button, you know it's live!

Dan.

Just a quick email to update you all on some important but subtle tweaks to the app.

• File Filtering - You can now filter files by person
• File Sorting - You can now sort files by Date, Name and Size. We'll be expanding this to other attributes and also adding in Ascending/Descending order
• Tasks Simplified - We're constantly working on making our User Interface simpler and easier yet remain powerful. Today we added in a neat trick to hide the complexity. Tell me in the comments if you spotted it ;-)
• Message Printing - Another useful update allows the Printing and Downloading as PDF of a message. We even include any images attached!
• Task Notification Emails : We had a slight bug-a-rooney in the task notification emails. This is fixed and doesn't say Anyone is responsible if multiple people are responsible.
• API Updates : Lots of niggly things fixed in the API and more data returned.
• Feedback Link : We get lots of Feedback & Suggestions, not all of it is intended for us ;-) We don't need more so we've removed the Feedback link for users outside the owner company.
• Message Categories : We've improved the aesthetics and functionality of the category widget. Biggest change is you can now add a category without creating a message.
• File Upload : Poured hours upon hours into an OSX Flash bug on small files (less than 23k). I have grey hair now but at least small files are uploading on Mac OSX.
• Projects : On the Archived Projects section we've added a much faster way of setting a project Active again.
• Payments : Credit Card payments are a go! No more Paypal required (unless you want to use it)

Right, happy Teamworking and if you have requested a feature and we have yet to get to it, don't worry, it's on the radar!

Dan.

Hello Teamworkers,

Just a quick post to let you know that I'm in the process of setting up our new Facebook page for TWPM. Please make sure you stop by and become a friend or fan or what ever it is called at the moment.

It will be great to finally put some faces to the names, as we feel like we know some of you rally well but just the emails we receive, but it would be cool to also see the pretty faces of our users as well :-)

I'm also hoping it will be a great way for us all to get to know each other a bit more and it could also be a very interesting place for people to suggest new ideas and then get feedback from other users of TWPM on these ideas instead of just receiving our feedback via the feedback system within TWPM.

This may also lead to the wisdom of the crowd and between us all may well come up with some even better and more amazing features to add in the system.

So come on over and say hello, at our new Facebook page www.facebook.com/TeamworkPM

It's been 2 years coming - we reached the point where Paypal no longer makes sense as the only way to pay us. So for the last week I have been locked away adding support for monthly or annual payments directly from your credit card... and I'm delighted to report that it went live just last night.

From Rick:

That would be perfect! Just let me know what I Need to do. Thanks Rick.

Peter,

    Wow awesome. It worked perfect.  I checked my account and it shows as processing. Thank you very much. Anything on that Iphone app. Rick

Following on in our, How To video guide, I thought I would add a video on how to create a project Announcement. It's often a feature that when I'm giving demo's of the App that people have never spotted before and once I point it out to them it becomes one of those features that they love.

It's a very handy feature to have in a project, as it's a great way to add a note to the project that is easy to find and something that you see every time you click into that project so it can serve as a great reminder on a project, such as, "Make sure you log all time as billable when working on this project".

The other great thing with this feature is that any web address which is put into the announcement automatically becomes a hyper link. So if you are working on a project that requires you to login to another website or system you have a fast and very handy way to get to it each time.

The video below shows you how to quickly add in a project announcement.

Another short video in our How To section. Todays video is showing you, "How to archive a project" as well as how to move an archived project back to an active project so you can work on it