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We are launching with our first such capability:
* The problem
People leading teams delivering tech projects often need to be able to provide an estimate of when the team will deliver a feature or release. Perhaps you've got a deadline to deliver an MVP for an upcoming trade show, or a commerce site to hit the Christmas season. Or you just want to maintain a roadmap. How do you tell feature X will be in Q1 and feature Y in Q3?
Current project management systems like Jira do not help. For an example, check out Jira's "Advanced" Roadmaps (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/roadmaps/adva...). If you tell it a projected release date, it will present that date back to you in a timeline view. But where did that date come from? Our research and experience shows that many PMs are laboriously exporting data into other systems like Excel and/or MS Project and calculating it themselves. This process takes approximately a person-day each time. And this is often done weekly!
* The solution
Fixed connects to a Jira project (and Trello and more to come) and calculates the projected delivery date of every component of your entire portfolio in seconds. And when your project status changes, you press a button, and it recalculates it.
This gives the delivery lead a superpower! You can:
- Know instantly if the project is going off track, - Maintain an accurate and up-to-date roadmap, - Be Agile and still hit a deadline (https://medium.com/@fixed_pm/you-can-be-agile-and-still-hit-...), - Easily include stakeholders in handling the effects of a change of scope.
* How it works
Fixed applies the logic of levelling across skills. It connects to your existing project and extracts the following:
- Which skills each resource has - Which skills each task requires - The best estimate of the effort for each task - Optionally, any task priorities or dependencies.
Given the above, Fixed will simulate the delivery of the plan while ensuring it is completed as soon as possible with no resources over-allocated. This is much like Google maps simulating a trip ahead to pick the optimum route and providing an estimate of when you will arrive.
Whenever the team makes progress, scope changes, estimates are refined, etc., at the click of a button, Fixed re-generates the updated timing (and cost).
We have a provisional patent covering this approach.
* About me
I have been a software developer for many years and have been CTO of several small and medium technology firms as well as the media division of a major telco. I've had successful exits from an ISP and a pioneering VC-backed company in the hotel internet space that I founded.
The creation of Fixed was prompted by my experience leading many teams delivering technology projects, as well as similar feedback from others in the field. We repeatedly encountered the same inadequacies in the available tools.
* How you can help:
If Fixed sounds like it would solve your problems, I'd love it if you could try it out and tell me what you think, whether it works for you or, if it doesn't, how we could improve it.
The free MVP is running at https://fixed.pm.
I'm also keen to hear your thoughts on our messaging. We are trying to keep it concise and compelling but we are finding this very challenging. Please give any feedback on how we can improve how we're positioning the product, as well as any ideas for getting our first 100 PM customers.
Thanks in advance for all your thoughts.
(Note: this is reposted as I got the process wrong the first time)