For those who didn’t make it (and for anyone who wants a refresher) I’ve re-recorded my presentation as a 15 minute web demo. I’ve also included a link to the slide deck and Tim’s speech below:

• 15 minute web version of the Pailz Beta launch presentation
• Slide deck from the Pailz Beta Launch
• Tim’s Pailz vision speech

For all of you who agreed to start a trial within your team over the next couple of weeks, I’m really looking forward to hearing how it goes. Don’t wait for me to call you, just pick up the phone with any queries or questions you have.

Cheers and thank you again

Tim and Toby

We’ve released a couple of small changes today (0.12.0.5) as we tidy things up for you all and focus on simplicity!

Here are the changes:

1. Warning note if you try to use Pailz without Google Chrome or Firefox. It’s not that the other browsers won’t work, it’s just that we’ve not fully tested on all browsers yet.

2. Added an “invite colleague” box on every page. Pailz makes most sense when you use it with someone else – after all, you need someone to send tasks to!

3. Your personal pail is displayed using your real name instead of email address.

See you tonight

Cheers

Toby and Tim

The key change you’ll see is that the two tabs at the top are now: “My Pail” and “Pailz” – My Pail is for when you are in “heads down” mode and are getting on with your tasks. “Pailz” is for when you are in heads up mode, either looking for new work to do, or identifying new work for others to do.

As with any software in active development there are a few “known issues” which we are working on. In no particular order these are:
- viewing a colleague’s task list times out fairly often
- Due Date and Refer task functionality is not plumbed in yet
- TaskRank votes are not being stored

But, there’s nothing stopping you from:
- creating your organization’s pails
- inviting colleagues
- running a meeting and circulating the actions
- assigning tasks to each other

In fact the building blocks are there for you to run a trial and bring Pailz into your team and you can start improving your working processes today.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the party tomorrow night.

Toby

1. New profile pictures from Gravatar

We’ve adopted “Gravatar” – Globally Recognised Avatars – as our profile picture repository.

Gravatar is a system used across many web applications to look after a profile picture for you. If you’ve already got a Gravatar image set up then Pailz will automatically pick it up. If not you can pop over to http://www.gravatar.com to set one up.

2. Making the ad-hoc process a bit clearer.

We’ve changed the “Ok let’s do it” button to say “Mark as ready” instead. This is hopefully a bit clearer. The point of this button is that you only click it when you no longer need any further input from your colleagues to complete a task, you are ready for action!

At the same time we’ve made a few changes to other button text, again to make it clear exactly what you are doing when you click on the button. For example we have changed “Commit to this” to “Commit to task”, “Done!” has become “Mark done” and “Approve!” has become “Sign off”.

3. Knowing who a task is from does matter

When you’re looking through your task list, we’ve added the facility to see who a task is from. That means you can quickly see those tasks given to you by clients, your boss, your colleagues or even your children. Which one you actually do though is still up to you…

We hope you like these small changes that make Pailz a little bit easier to use. As ever tell us your feedback in the Pailz User Forum.

Happy Christmas

Toby and Tim

First, lets look at the problem of team building in the modern workplace.  Teams traditionally go through a process of “forming – storming – norming and performing”. Each time you add or subtract people from the team, this process restarts. Good team cultures get to the “performing” stage fast, while others can never pass the storming stage.

In many projects, the team is composed of a multi-disciplinary mix of stakeholders from more than one department and organisation. This group of people must get together to deliver results. They must get to the performing stage quickly to deliver the project required.

These “fast teams” typically exhibit strong communication skills – checking, rechecking and reviewing each aspect of the project to ensure quality and match to requirements. This high communication approach, while effective at creating quality in a short space of time, comes at a cost: many managers can get caught into a communication overload where emails and text messages threaten to overwhelm them. In these periods, it is all too easy to drop the ball.

This is where Pailz comes in. Pailz helps teams by putting tasks into a central task management system. Groups of coworkers can pick up tasks from shared repositories called “pails”.  Every task goes through a process flow, a chain, which is both repeatable and auditable. This prepares the way for improving your team processes for future work, whenever you find delays or problems today.

Pailz has the facility to map many different team process in one system. This is known as a “BPM” or Business Process Management system. Right now, Pailz supports two team processes:

• Ad-hoc tasks – giving ourselves or our coworkers a task and then tracking the task through readiness, completion until sign off.
• Meeting actions – tracking a group of tasks, such as those arising from a meeting, through circulation to all attendees to sign off of the completed tasks

We’ve chosen these two processes to get started with because they are the building blocks of any team task management system. From here users will be able to see Pailz grow with them by integrating with other systems and mapping other processes within the tool. Future processes might include Budget Approvals, Fulfilling a customer request from order to cash or even simply Holiday booking.

Great teams use Pailz because no task gets dropped, work is shared and visible to all and it all happens fast and online. Start using Pailz today!

Last time I told you we were announcing the private beta so thanks to all of you who have been putting Pailz through its paces. So it is probably inevitable that this month we have been playing catch up a little – removing the cobwebs from the dark corners of the app and taking out the rubbish – and yet we still have some exciting developments to report too. So without further delay let me who you around the latest update to the beta.

Pailz is first and foremost about working together, being able to capture things that need to be done and to get them to the person most able to do them at the time they are needed.  This release allows you to:

• Login with your existing Google (Gmail) address at http://my.pailz.com. Note that you will need to grant Pailz access to your account (only to authenticate you we won’t have access to any of your data) ;
• Read and agree the Pailz terms of service ;
• View your (satisfyingly empty!) TODO list ;
• Add a task for yourself ;
• Create a Pail to share tasks with friends and colleagues ;
• Add shared tasks to the pail ;
• Invite a colleague to join you as a Pailz user ;
• Invite that colleague to subscribing to your new pail ;
• Complete tasks in your personal pail or a shared one ;
• Approve tasks you created but done by your colleagues.

Hold on a sec! I have to invite a friend to work with Pailz, create my Pail then again invite my friend to collaborate on that Pail? Yes, that is a personal bugbear of ours too, we’re working on it, but we figured you’d give us a little leeway as we work through the beta. Why not try it out now? And tell us what bugs you at our feedback center.

All well and good but tasks are like London buses, they always come along in groups of 3 or 4! We’d noticed that and next time we’ll be explaining how you can capture related tasks such as minute actions.

The Pail Team

So what have we been up to in this release? First and foremost we have been working on fixing bugs, especially the things that you’ve been telling us make it hard to use Pailz. Love the way all those games like Farmville help you know what to do next? Watch out for the built-in training we’ll be bringing you soon.

Behind the scenes we’ve also been making sure the right work appears at the top of your TODO list. There are lots of signals and sources that we use to get this right and plenty more we are yet to add but something you should see right now is the automatic management of priorities and due dates on your tasks. Together with the votes from your colleagues and aging of tasks you should start to see the important stuff rise to the top.

Of course we’re not done and in particular we know things are not as fast as they should be yet. Let us know what else is bugging you over here.

The Pailz Team

We are very pleased to announce that our twice a month release schedule continues apace.

Highlights from the mid-July release are a major overhaul to the page for managing a single task including ability to add comments as you work on it and a much improved look.

Thanks for all of you who have kindly provided usability testing and other feedback, we are hard at work crunching those improvements. Please keep the suggestions coming in at: pailz feedback or drop one of us a mail if you’d like to participate too.

And so on to the 1 August release

Tim and Toby

The Pailz team is working hard this month to get the Friends and Family alpha version ready to try. We hope to show you how you can track meeting actions created with MinuteNow.com and create a priority task list using Pailz.com

Sign up to join the beta at http://www.pailz.com

In the meantime, have a great month

Tim and Toby