After nearly a year in private Beta, I'm pleased to annouce the general availability of Harmony, by Ally Software.
Harmony is a new approach to managing complex projects and strategic initiatives that cross team, group, and company boundaries. Plus, it provides a central, bird's eye view for all company projects, with dashboard level status information.
Visit www.allysoftware.com and click "Download" to get access to Harmony. Once the download completes, you'll be asked to register you company - it's one page, and no credit card information required!
We hope you'll take the time to evaluate Harmony - we really believe it's a solution to making a lot of people's lives a little bit better. A few less meetings, not quite as much email, but better results.
And of course, we want to thank everyone that's been a part of the beta, and helped shape this product. We hope you'll stick with Harmony, and everyone who's will to give Harmony a tri
Features
Project Dashboard
The Project Dashboard is the heart and soul of Harmony, and the main tool for managers to significantly simplify their lives. The Dashboard elegantly surfaces company-wide project information with intelligent sorting based on project status. Managers can use this view to monitor their company's project execution, and Project Managers / Staff can use this view to make sure projects they depend on are running on schedule.
Resource Dashboard
Between the Harmony Beta and the public release, a whole new feature set was added called Resource Tracking. Harmony already helps you manage complex, long term schedules, but now you can add information about a project's resource requirements. For instance, a particular project might have a requirement for 3 software developers, 1 tester, and 1 project manager. Harmony let's you track this, and assign users manually or automatically. The resource dashboard is then a high level view of your company's utilization - who's assigned, who's on the bench, and who's over-committed.
Project Timeline
The project timeline is where you build the schedules and dependencies that drive the dashboards. Each track, or swim lane, on the project timeline is a seperate group, team, company, or individual with responsibilities toward completing the project. Within each track, the boxes represent phases, a push from a particular team to get work done, triangles represent milestones, and dashed lines are dependencies. For instance, Engineering might have a phase called "Develop Beta," and sales might have a phase that starts right when the "Develop Beta" phase ends called "Recruit Beta Users". At the end of a project, and final milestone might be the anchor that every other phase tracks backwards from.
Resource Timeline
The final piece of the puzzle is the Resource Timeline, a single view that show's you how individuals at your company, or in a specific group, are currently utilized or scheduled to be utilized. Think of the resource timeline as a pivot on the Project Timeline, where instead of showing phases, we surface the individuals assigned to those phases and summarize all their commitments in one screen.
Print | posted on Saturday, August 28, 2010 2:51 PM