Release Notes - 2021. 06. 14.
During the last weeks, we countinued to focus our efforts on closing the feature-gap between legacy Horizon Planner and the new, web-based one, while also delivering usability and infrastructure improvements that bring us closer to our goal of reaching production readiness towards the end of 2021.
New user-facing features include a cloud file storage, the inclusion of capability groups into the planning process, workflow improvements through dialog upgrades, and much more.
Major features
File storage
All companies need to store and organize various documents relating to their business. Horizon Planner, as a project management software, is not ignorant of this need and provides a way to manage documents within the application. An integrated file storage has many benefits over standalone solutions such as shared drives. The most impactful difference is that the user can associate the file directly to the business entity it belongs to. This makes it easy and intuitive to organize documents properly, enforces a good storage structure and makes it very easy to find the relevant documents quickly.
File storage for business entities has long been a key feature of legacy Horizon Planner and implementing it in the new system has been our primary target for this release. Instead of simply porting the feature from the old system, we redesigned it from scratch, focusing on flexibility even more. In this release, we’ve added file attachment support to projects, activities, and resources, but this new solution allows us to add this file storage functionality to basically anything, even assignments or holidays.
Capability groups coming to life
It shows the planned importance of capability groups - arbitrary named collections of capabilities - that they were one of the very first features we implemented, along with capabilities and resources. Similarly to those entities, capability groups are managed on Resources view, but up until this point they were sort of a forgotten feature for users, because no other features were built around them.
This situation starts to change with this release: from now on, you will be able to use capability groups - together with capabilities - to specify complex requirements for roles. As a very basic use-case, let’s say you have an “Electrician” and a “Foreman” capability, and you would like to add a “Lead Electrician” role to a couple of activities that require assigned employees to have both of these capabilities. Instead of always manually selecting both capabilities when you create the role and then setting the “Lead Electrician” name, you can now simply create a “Lead Electrician” capability group and use it during role creation to automatically create a role with the desired requirements and name.
To further utilize and strengthen the relationship between capabilities, capability groups, and roles, we also tweaked the role creator dialog a bit. Previously you had to first enter the name of the role, then select its requirements. By reversing the order of these actions, we are able to auto-suggest role names based on the selected capabilities and capability groups, saving a lot of (typically) unnecessary typing and clicking for the user.
Workflow improvements
As more and more essential features get ready, we can gradually put more effort into usability and workflow improvements. This release brings a simple, yet significant update in this regard: alternative submit/continuation actions in dialogs.
All our dialogs are single-purpose, meaning they are designed to allow the user to achieve only one - preferably atomic, or at least simple - task at a time. The advantage of this design is it reduces the overall cognitive burden of complex tasks, avoids confusion, and enables the user to always have a clear idea of the results of her actions. The downside is that more complex tasks tend to require more clicks, introducing a bit of friction into the workflow.
As an example, let’s say you would like to create a new activity with a few roles and assignments. With a very specialized multi-purpose dialog, you could potentially enter all this data into a very complex form, submit it, and hope that you interpreted the form correctly and the expected result will be created. With single-purpose dialogs, you first need to create the activity, then add all the roles, and finally all assignments one by one, potentially opening and submitting 5-10 dialogs in the process.
As mentioned, our solution for removing this additional friction is alternative submit actions in dialogs. You will notice that almost all our “creator” dialogs now have a split Submit button. Simply submitting a dialog will work just like it used to, but by clicking the little downward pointing triangle on the right side of Submit buttons, you will be presented with alternative actions, all leading you directly to possible natural continuations of your current action like a wizard, no extra clicking required.
Going back to the previous example, the activity creator dialog can now be submitted using the “Submit & Add Roles” action, taking you immediately to the role creator dialog for the created activity. The role creator dialog provides a “Submit & Add More” action to let you continue adding further roles to the activity, and when all roles are ready, the “Submit & Plan Assignments” action leads to the assignment planner dialog, where you can make the initial assignments for all the roles you have just created.
Time window-based filter on Timeline view
Filtering improvements - especially on Timeline view - have become a recurring topic in recent releases and we can see this trend continuing for a while. It is no coincidence, a rich filtering system is essential for workflow efficiency, allowing users to focus on what is presently important instead of getting lost in the sea of irrelevant data.
Until now, the Gantt chart had text and tag filtering capabilities for projects and activities. In this release we extended these options with a time window filter: when you select a time window in the filter dialog, the Gantt chart will be filtered to show only those activities that have assignments in the specified time period.
Note that the time window filter works in combination with the rest of the filtering options, meaning that projects and activities must satisfy all filter criteria implicitly or explicitly to be visible. See the previous release notes for a description of the exact filtering logic.
Assignment overview report
The Assignment overview report gives information about the ongoing assignments. With default settings it provides three different lists of assignments. The first shows all assignments starting today; the second list shows the assignments that end today; and the last one shows the assignments that are ongoing (but neither start nor end today). It could be a good habit for a planner to start the day by creating an Assignment overview report and check whether every activity is progressing as planned or identify the areas that need more attention.
Of course there are customization options in this report as well. Users can select the Organization to generate the report for; it is possible to select a specific date or time window to get the overview for; and there is a tag filter that is applied to the Activity of the assignments.
Minor features
- Contact info and next of kin editors offer auto-completion for typical labels.
- We have reimplemented our color picker: now it opens in a callout and the current selection and the reset option are much more obvious.
- The list of required capabilities now appear in tooltip wherever roles are displayed.
- As usual, we’ve done quite a bit of styling and layout upgrades, mostly focusing on dialogs and better horizontal and vertical alignment of components for a more refined look.