As an organization grows, it is very important to communicate and share its culture with new employees. Startups in particular often experience very rapid growth and need to make sure they keep their core values intact. To do this, you must keep the following questions in mind:

1. Who are we?
2. What are we doing here?
3. Why do we do it better than anyone else?
4. What makes us special?
5. What do we value?

Make sure that all current employees know the answers and that there is a mechanism in place to educate new employees. Whether it is a meeting with a member of the executive team or a discussion with the local team members, be sure to discuss your culture openly and with the seriousness that it deserves.

from Under Pressure And On Time, a classic on developing great teams and world-class software

People keep asking me about starting their own businesses. They have an idea, see its potential, but don’t know how to get started.

It takes four skills to be successful in business. Every successful entrepreneur has them, and I have personally applied them in my own businesses with great success. Nobody taught them to me when I started out 12 years ago. But I am going to show them to you. Today, I am going to reveal these four essential skills for business success. And I am even going to share practical actions you can take to master these skills.

This video was pending in the Second Anniversary series, and I am glad I finally completed it! Do let me know how you like it!

Click on the video still below to watch the video, download the transcript and participate in the conversation!

4 Essential Skills For Entrepreneurial Success - Video

Background

PlannerX allows rearranging / reordering items. Either using Tab / Shift / Indent / Unindent or via Drag & Drop. Everything works just perfect when you are creating a new plan. But when you worked with items in an existing plan, things started to break. Reordering to-do lists and to-do items was not much of a problem, since Basecamp APIs support that. But if you reordered milestones, that won’t stick since Basecamp always sorts them by due date again. Yet, the biggest issue is promoting or demoting an existing item.

Cause

When you convert a milestone into a to-do list or to-do item, we can create a new item for it. But what should we do with the milestone? We could just delete the milestone. But what if that milestone had comments? And attachments with those comments? If we deleted the milestone, comments would be deleted as well. And that would be bad.

Enter Zombies!

Zombies are defunct items (milestones or to-do items) that are still there in the system only because they have some comment. Their original item was moved around in a planning session with PlannerX. And since there are no Basecamp API to attach comments with another item, we had to keep old items hanging in with their comments. We mark them as [zombie], complete them and also add a new comment explaining their zombie status.

Can I remove zombies?

If you no longer need the comments / attachments associated with a zombie item, you can delete it. Deleting normal / zombie to-do items with time entries on them does not delete time entries though.

Is there no better way?

We thought a lot before coming to this solution. If you have a better solution, do let us know. We are all ready to improve.

I don’t like the word [zombie]!

We thought a lot about this too. We considered defunct, archived, removed, zombie and a few others. But felt zombie was the closest to our situation. Have another suggestion? Feel free to comment!

I still have problems.

We tested our code with many test cases. It should work well in most cases – though it may take slightly longer to save since we have to check for comments on almost every item. If you face any other issues, do report them with as many details as possible. We will try and fix them at the earliest!

What next?

Keep planning with PlannerX and let us know your feedback! Thank you!

SCRUM is an excellent agile project management methodology. Our Reports module for activeCollab (and our own project / product development methods) are heavily inspired from SCRUM.

Here’s a quick video that will teach you core concepts of SCRUM in just 8 minutes! It’s a must watch!

Video courtesy Axosoft.

Do you use SCRUM? Are you a Reports module customer? How do you use it?