The Global Climate Adaptation Partnership is a new company seeking to provide client-oriented solutions on climate change. We celebrated our first year in business, already with $1 million in project contracts, a flagship project with the African Development Bank and our first three-week training course in Cape Town. We have clients, partners and consultants across the world.

Tom Downing President of the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership shared his views about how his team uses DeskAway…

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
All of our projects involve a consortium of one sort or another. So it is essential to have a shared operating space that is flexible, attentive to team building and communications. We began using DeskAway a couple of years ago (when I was director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford) and added a GCAP site to the two other DeskAway sites we licence (one for SEI Oxford and one for a major EC consortium). DeskAway facilitates all members of the team to collaborate, at the right level and on time.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We looked around to see what was available. The SEI Foundation adopted its own intranet, but that was difficult to use for external projects. Internal file sharing is easy but requires off-site access and user restrictions are difficult. We looked at Basecamp, Zoho and others. We still keep our eyes open but haven’t found any solution that is a broad-based as DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
I found that the real learning curve was simply getting people enthusiastic about using a sophisticated project management tool, rather than dumping emails on a group mailing list. We come from mostly academic roots, so this has not been easy! However, once people start using it regularly, they don’t stop!

What features does your team use the most?
I find the task lists help structure a project in the ‘big picture’ sense, and then files can be uploaded accordingly. My role is usually to review someone else’s work, so I look at the file and either comment or upload an edited version, sending an email alert around if it is critical. This is fantastic, so much easier than track-changes emailed versions. I often send an issue out, in the nature of brainstorming something that is coming up that we’ve not yet got organized in the project.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway?
I find people still email! More and more though I rely on the email from within DeskAway.

How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
I’d say it increases quality more than anything. New members of a team (and there always are people coming in late in a project) can get up to speed quickly and not try to reinvent material that has been produced already. For us, quality and reputation precede profitability. Our clients know that we have adopted effective project management tools and this assures them that we will deliver according to the agreed work plans. Because it is easy to use, we don’t need as much in-house clerical staff and can work with project managers who are off-site. This improves the pool of people we can draw upon enormously, as well as enhanced life-work balance (as they say).

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
I endorse DeskAway to everyone who has tried to get to grips with tasks lists. It started a couple of years ago with just about everything we needed. And the team keeps improving the service. I’m impressed by their vision of team-work and the innovations in making this a service that grows with you. We’re still only tapping a fraction of the toolkit!

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

We didn’t plan this revamp. It just happened within the last 2 days and I think we have come up with a pretty cool layout. We noticed that the dashboard page had gotten too heavy (we were ambitiously trying to show too much data) and was loading slowing when there were a lot of data - +100 projects, +10,000 tasks and +200 users. If you don’t have a lot of data you probably never realized this. So, on Tuesday evening we decided to do a quick revamp of this page keeping in mind: Simplicity Faster loading Clutter-free UI Today, we took it live. The new Dashboard shows you recent activity within all your projects (categorized by projects), your overdue projects/ milestones, a large stat summary of your projects/users in the system, your top 5 projects that you often access and ways to contact us if you require any help. Check it out and let us know what you think. If you have any suggestions then do put it up on our GetSatisfaction page for others to see and vote. Enjoy!

We recently had a someone ask me how different DeskAway is from Microsoft SharePoint? They are big, known and very very deep-pocketed. We are small, lesser known and don’t have billions in the bank.

My answer has always been simple (and I smile when I type this every time):

Good question! It is in our approach - we are a small company building software for other small companies and teams. We are agile. We move fast. Besides, DeskAway is  much simpler and an easy to use solution. Customer service is personal and timely. Would you get that from a big company?

DeskAway is not about the software as much it is about the service and the overall experience that we can give our users - small businesses and teams. It is about our commitment for building something with care, nurturing it and growing it with the best customer feedback possible. Ultimately, people pay us for the ’service’ - that is something smaller companies like us are really good at.

A quick video showing how you can set the number days to view the past or upcoming activities on your Dashboard section from the “General Settings” page in your DeskAway account…

We love to release early and release often. It makes us and our users happy. But, we sometimes fall into the trap of doing some things so quickly that in hindsight it would have been better off not to release the feature at all. In the race to keep up, thinking about getting the new features out the door seems so tempting, but, if not planned properly, can compromise on the user experience of your overall product - not to mention having grumpy users that might leave!

There is absolutely no point in releasing a feature for the sake of a release and to maintain a track record - if it is not done yet!

Get it working nicely and let the new feature fit well with exiting features within your app. Creating a loose-ended feature that you will improve upon over time is no excuse for just throwing something online and then worrying about the user experience later.

It is ok if this development takes a bit more time. I am not saying you need to get it perfect, but you need to ‘manage’ the user experience part of it really well. Will the user use it and keep using it? Are you solving a real need for the feautre in your app? Is it building upon something that you don’t have currently? Will it help users save time? In the case of DeskAway, the question we often ask is if it will help people work smarter and collaborate effectively?

Recently, we were debating on how we would integrate the Google Docs functionality within a DeskAway project - it is extremely useful (we use Google Docs a lot) when you can access your Google Docs within your projects and even share comments with your team. Everything is so neatly organized. Logically, Google Docs would fit well within DeskAway’s Docs section. Should we have it separate (like another drop-down for gDocs) and run it parallel with our existing Docs functionality? This would definitely be easier to program in and we won’t have to worry about dabbling a lot within the current Docs code. In the name of ‘release fast, release often’, we mocked it up and realized that it is going to be a pain in the $%# for the user to not only navigate an additional menu item but he/she will have to go to 2 seperate pages to see Docs created within DeskAway and Docs created/attached via Google. Definitely not a practical solution when you think about ease of use and the overal workflow of a typical user. We scraped this idea and went ahead with re-engineering our code for the Docs section to also include Google Docs - a little more time consuming but worth it! When complete, this will present the user a one-page summary of all his/her docs - and the Google ones will be labeled with a nice Google Docs icon.

We could have released with the original idea and gotten feedback on how to improve - but we are here to not waste our user’s time. We rather give you something that is functional than something that seems functional but won’t add to the over experience of collaborating in a team.

So, stay tuned untile we release this new feature very soon