InformationWeek

April 5, 1999

Team 98 Offers Customized View Of Tasks, Progress

Alexsys product lets users track issues and create reports

By Andy Feibus

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ypical project-management tools are worthless if you manage an interrupt-driven organization that has trouble keeping track of the outstanding tasks for each member of your team. You spend too much time updating time lines that are out-of-date the minute you print the reports. Worse, if you need to schedule repeated tasks but have a lot of iterations, the project-management data file quickly becomes stuffed, complicated, and nearly unreadable. A defect-tracking package may work well for a development team, but that's very specific, and a growing number of departments are expected to operate successfully in this interrupt-driven model.

Alexsys' Team 98.5.1 may be the solution to your problems, if its few limitations don't bother you. Team 98 lets your group track outstanding tasks and issues, track their progress, and create reports showing how a team is managing its workload. The program stores data either in a set of files or in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The SQL storage option is especially important for improving data security and for providing higher-speed database access for dial-up users.

The feature of Team 98 that you'll really like, though, is its customizability: If you don't like the way it displays or collects information, you can easily change the application to handle the information you need. You can also create your own views, reports, and charts from the data.

The primary data unit is the work request, the activity that one or more members of your team will per-form. You can display or report summary information about work requests by creating a "list," essentially a view of the data. A list is defined by the columns you want to display, the way the list will be sorted, and the work request records to be included as part of the list.

You can also define aggregate views, called crosstabs, which provide a numerical summary of one work request field when grouped against another--for example, the number of open work requests for each member of the team.

You can incorporate either the list or crosstab views into a report or a chart. Essentially, if you can define a view of the data, you can create a report or chart from it. Team 98 supports report customization, including extensive formatting such as headers and footers, lines, fonts, and justification. The program supports a number of charts, including bar and line graphs, pie charts, and area charts, all in either 2-D or 3-D. Reports and charts can be created to show individuals' workload, generate to-do lists, or even display the team's ability to complete work requests.

The main display window is the TeamView. It shows a set of tabs, under each of which is a particular list view of the current set of work requests. The initial set of tabs includes one for showing work requests assigned to the user, one for showing work requests on which the user is supposed to help, one for work that the user is supposed to check, one for all open work requests, and one for all work requests. You can create new tabs based on list views you define, for example, to show all open work requests that have a high priority.

One complaint about Team 98: You can easily access new list views from the desktop by creating a tab, but you can't easily access report, chart, and crosstab definitions that you create. Alexsys needs to figure out a way to present these views of the data without requiring the user to remember the location for a particular report, chart, or crosstab file.

Work requests not only support storing the basic information--customer name, contact information, status, product or project name, reference number, priority, etc.--but Team 98 also maintains notes, attached files, a complete change history, and links to related work requests. You can easily customize field names or required entries.

As many as 30 custom fields can be added to the work request record--10 text fields, four date fields, eight numeric fields, and eight checkbox fields--and up to 10 lookup tables can be defined to limit the values for text fields in the work request form.

Rules specify whether data entry into a field is required, conditional, or not required, depending on the value entered into one or more other fields. For example, changing a work request's status to "closed" can require that the information is entered into the resolution text field. There are also predefined rules for the fields of the default work request. You can easily change these rules or add new ones.

Team 98 has some security features. Users and their respective roles must be specified. There are four roles: guest, general user, team leader, and administrator. Each role specifies the operations a user can perform. Team 98 doesn't have the ability to inherit security information from existing network or operating system security schemes; every time you add a new person to the team, you must also define that user to Team 98's security registry.

Team 98 also has a Web-based work request entry form program called WebEntry that lets users enter new work requests over the Internet, but doesn't let them view any information in the database. This piece is useful, for example, to remote customers or users who can access your Web site to enter technical support requests. These requests could be entered using WebEntry, flowing directly into the Team 98 database as a new work request for assignment. This is only a one-way door for submitting requests; it's not designed to allow tracking them after the fact. But it's good for remote customers or users who want to submit a change request.

My last complaint about the product is its inability to import or export data with project-scheduling packages such as Microsoft Project 98. Project 98 provides better features for project planning, but Team 98 is easier to use for tracking task activity. Better ties between Team 98 and project-planning tools are necessary for Team 98 to help simplify a team leader's life.

On the whole, Team 98 is a thoroughly usable, easy-to-deploy product. It's very easy to learn, and its administration features, other than security, are more than adequate.

Andy Feibus is president of CustomBytes, an application development consulting firm in Atlanta. He can be reached at amf@mindspring.com.