This week we continue with design and development of the next version, and we’ve also started on a minor update for the current version.

However, a few opportunities have come up to simplify the next version by potentially removing features. Well, not so much removing features, rather removing redundancies that exist within the software.

So, we have a few questions that we wanted to throw out there to the customer base so that we can make better decisions about these key changes. We’re really looking for an economy of movement/function in this version.

So here are seven quick questions, you can reply via the comments here, or by emailing info@copperproject.com

1. How does your company use Files? Do you view the files tab in clients? Do you view it in Projects? Do you only upload files that relate to tasks?
2. How does your company use Contacts? Are you using the related contact feature in the task commentary?
3. Would you prefer the Project and Task % complete to be automatically based on hours Estimated vs Logged, or continue as a subjective % estimation on each update?
4. How many resources would you typically have on a task? and what’s your max resources on any task?
5. Do you have a single charge rate, charge rate for each client, charge rate for each role, charge rate for each user, or charge rate for each project?
6. Describe your ultimate report, think laterally, what would you most like to know about your business?
7. In general, what is the most time consuming thing you do with Copper? Don’t solve the problem with ‘it would be nice if’, rather, just tell us in words what you spend the most time doing.

Please shoot through your thoughts via email or by commenting on this post, it all helps. Version 4.0 is shaping up to be an amazing piece of software, we know you’re going to love it. And yes, if you’re keen on contributing or want an amazing discount there are still spots available in the Inner Circle.

Until next week.

– Ben Prendergast

Ok, last time I talked about our overarching requirements for the next version of Copper, here they are recapped:

1. We’re going to reduce pages/clicks by 40%
2. It needs to be something that I personally will use every single day
3. We’re going to add 100% of the features in our specification document

Simple, right? However where do you start? From the end, of course. We usually have a running document which outlines all of the features that customers want. It’s usually 20 pages in length, and the idea is that we work on adding the most popular features, within the context of our philosophy of building beautifully simple efficiency systems for creative teams.

The problem with this kind of specification process is that Customer A is often unaware that what they think is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to their business is actually at odds with what Customer B is saying is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to theirs. If I had a dollar for every time someone said we’d be ‘barking mad’ not to add feature ‘xyz’, I’d have around $12,803. Not much, but still a hefty amount of accused insanity.

So, internally I like to think about ‘Feature Fractals’. A feature fractal is this: Customer A/B/C all talk about a required function using different terminology, and in some cases even different requirements. While most developers would set about adding 10-15 new features, we like to use our experience and distill these requirements into a single feature that will suit the 80% majority.

In our v4.0 spec, we have around 10 phases of development, and roughly 168 new features planned, most of these based on this feature fractal thinking, based on 20 pages, six years of emails, survey responses, conversations, meetings, and gut instinct. There’s a lot in here, yet check out Requirement 1 above!

So far we have around 20% of this next build funded, so if you think your organization might be interested in coming on board to sponsor this latest development, we still have plenty of spots left and they represent amazing value, click here for more information.

For now though here are three untitled screens.

We’re probably 3 weeks on from when these are taken, but you can see that even before we start coding there is some serious consideration around the product. Next week I might provide a little more of a look at the early screens and/or spec, but the in-depth stuff I’ll be keeping for the inner circle.

Feel free to comment, cheer us on, or just tell us we’re mad not to add feature ‘xyz’ ($12,803 isn’t enough to retire on).

– Ben Prendergast

I always get really excited when we kick off development of a new version. It begins after years of customer feedback, and even though we regularly add minor features, a major development like v4.0 means we get to add all of the goodies that we (and our customers) have always wanted.

Of course this is easier said than done!

I need to ensure that the new product doesn’t disadvantage anyone, it needs to be more efficient than its predecessor, yet we want to continue leading the pack with great new features. So for me the process is like a 6-month game of chess. Every small move has repercussions, there are risks, happy accidents, and opportunities.

I’m also a songwriter, and this process is so similar, starting with a theme/idea/rationale, or even a set of principles, and driving your obsession to create a new form. So, this time around I thought I’d share the process with you all. while I won’t be divulging too much I hope you find the journey as fascinating as I know I will. Let’s begin!

The process for me has become refined over the years. It used to be that we’d add one big feature (e.g. Our flash-based dynamic gantt chart, a web-based PM first), and I’d plant myself in a local cafe (e.g. My current fav, A Minor Place, on Albion St, Brunswick, if you’re ever in town!) with a 20-page wish-list document from customers, seven latte’s, and choose five features that would make the most impact for our customers within our limited budget.

Five years on the process is a little more refined (as is Copper these days), however, despite the available technology it still starts with a table full of printouts, three principles and a spec document.

The three very simple principles for Version 4.0 are:

1. We’re going to reduce pages/clicks by 40%
2. It needs to be something that I personally will use every single day
3. We’re going to add 100% of the features in our specification document

These might seem like relatively simple goals, but they’re anything but! Reducing pages/clicks by 40% (point 1) whilst adding over 165 features (point 3)?! Thanks to the Inner Circle program (which is filling fast, click here if you want to secure a spot) all three principles are certainly achievable. We’re about a month on since those above shots were taken.

Next week, I’ll post back with a sneak-peek at the spec doc, maybe a screen or two, and talk about how the mock layouts work hand in hand with the spec doc to arrive a development-ready brief. As always thanks for your continued support!

– Ben Prendergast

Last week we launched our second annual Enterprise Inner Circle program, aimed at bringing on pre-order customers in order to fund the development of the Copper 4.0 product. We had some great responses, and now having completed our v4.0 specification (including 165 improvements) we need a certain number of participants in order to get started.

The magic number is 30-40. “Hey, that’s two numbers Ben”, I hear you say. “Well spotted old pal”, I retort, “thats because we like to stay zen with our development, and you know this!”. But certainly 30 is the target, and 40 will result in the ultimate awesomeness for Copper.

Here is the offer:

You purchase a Copper Enterprise license ($2999) and receive:

1. A complementary hosted v3.5 Enterprise account (normally $199/mth) during development (or current server license).
2. Unlimited users, Unlimited projects. Boom!
3. Involvement in our v4.0 development (ready to kick off this month)
4. A guaranteed feature inclusion (you ’sponsor’ a feature from our spec)
5. The v4.0 Enterprise version when it is released (Est 4-6 months)
6. Two years of free updates and support
7. Inclusion in our East/West coast gatherings (June 2008)
8. One Inner Circle participant will receive an iPhone/iPod Touch. ($500 Value)

As mentioned above, we have a clear cut specification for v4.0, that closely mirrors the key changes requested over the last 3 years, and is going to take Copper another 5 steps forward in terms of efficiency/project visibility.

This offer represents a great opportunity, in fact you could add a zero to the price and still not approach the approximate value here, but ultimately you need to ask yourself; What price the love of a good software?

If you’d like to be part of the next Copper chapter, please click here to get in touch for more details about the offer or click here to purchase an Enterprise license and secure your spot in the circle.

– Ben Prendergast

It’s on again, we’re looking for a group of customers or prospective customers to come on board as an Inner Circle partner.

The way it works is this: We accept a group of customers into our development process for the next version in exchange for a pre-order of that version. We divulge our specification for the next version, and these partners can become involved in the development process, effectively sponsoring a specific feature (ensuring its inclusion in the next version). Each partner receives a hosted version of the beta product, the final version for server installation, and receives two years of free updates.

If you have a feature that you simply must see in Copper 4.0, have a customization budget, or if you have been looking at purchasing or upgrading the Enterprise version anyway, this represents a great deal.

Additionally, this time around we are building industry-specific features or streams. So, on top of the Enterprise 4.0 version, these customers also have the opportunity to assist us in designing great new solutions to specific challenges they face in their vertical.

The nominated industries/streams are:
Advertising & Design
Architecture
Event & Artist Management
Film & TV
Patient Care
Product & Fashion
Worship
Legal
Real Estate

So if you’re additionally interested in being part of the industry-specific streams, click here to let me know

– Ben Prendergast

Just kidding, it’s still a little preachy, but read on if you’d like to know more about how we’re steering our little ship toward the big seas and how we’d like you on board (paddling, or bailing water, or as ballast. OK, enough with that metaphor).

We’ve been through some significant changes in the last three months, we’ve restructured our team, systemized parts of our business that required too much administration effort, introduced some new partners to the business to improve our marketing and PR efforts, and have otherwise spent the better part of this quarter getting ready for the next round of developments.

Namely, Copper version 4.0. Wow. Version 4.0. It sounds so mature doesn’t it? And it’s only taken us six years to get to this point! Biting wit aside, I truly believe that this next version will be something special, especially as it will require a greater collaborative effort between us, our partners, and you the customers/supporters/cheersquad. However, I can tell you the 4.0 specification is in place, and to borrow an Anglo-Australian colloquialism, it’s a ripper! It will be the best Project Management Software tool available, period.

But I thought I’d share with you our manifesto, a half decade in the making, so here it is:

We’ve spent years working on building the best product we possibly can, years refining our marketing and sales model, casting the nets each month (you thought I was done with the nautical angle right?) and connecting with those who best suit our product. We’ve got our support systems to where we want them, we proudly have one of the best response rates and solution rates in the business. We have our development methodology down cold, we ask our customers what they want, and filter this through a philosophy to arrive at both great features and a compelling product. The question remains: Where to from here?

Well, we believe we can be the best in the world at building efficiency products for creative teams. After years of refining this idea, I recently read Good to Great by Jim Collins and I had an “A-Ha!” (not the band) moment. You know the kind of moment? Anyway, it crystallized my thinking of the previous six years. If you haven’t read the above book and you’re in business, make it the next book you read.

In order to build a great company, the kind of company that matters, you need to synthesize three things:

1. Be passionate about what you do
2. Be the best in the world at something
3. Discover your economic engine.

It’s called the Hedgehog principle, and in your corporate heart you become fanatical about doing one thing really really well. Suffice to say, we were well on the way to this principle anyway, we’d just never put a name or model to it.

We continue to be amazed at the organizations enquiring and purchasing Copper. From multi-national Film & TV organizations, leading Ad Agencies, technology product marketers, medical & legal teams, the list is long and broad, but there is a common focus. All of these teams want to be the best in the world at what they do.

What is Element passionate about? We’re passionate about helping those that make a difference be more efficient at it! In other words, any leading team that is out to make their environment better. No matter if it’s Apple, WWF, Greenpeace, Wilco (the band), Nissan. No matter if it’s product development, solving world hunger, shaping a cultural response, selling a family their dream home, cancer research, educating the population, or touring the world connecting with those that need a lttle soul therapy. We want to help creative teams take the myriad information and shape their response more efficiently than ever, do what they were born to do, and ultimately reduce their administrative footprint.

We’ve worked with/in/around creative teams for years, and are passionate about what it means to push new boundaries. We know we’re not uber-Geeks creating a new search engine algorythm or the next web 2.0 phenomenon, but we ARE a company that understands, values, and is committed to producing a software that helps creative professionals make a difference.

Can we do it without making a profit ourselves? No! Which leads me to the economic engine. This is the one metric that great companies instinctively know as the most important metric for maintaining that passion, being the best in the world, and continuing the evolution. I won’t go into our metric, but it involves our Advertising and Development budget (or lack thereof!).

So combining these thoughts, we’re again inviting you to become involved in our next Copper development. We have an Inner Circle program that we are offering, as well as an industry-specific stream that will allow us to further refine Copper toward these verticals. It’s a great program that is effectively a customer-sponsored feature-fest that everyone benefits from. It’s what you do when you want to be great, want to maintain and drive the vision, but you don’t have Valley funding.

If you’d like to get involved see the next post, or click here to get in touch.

– Ben Prendergast

Apologies in advance for the long winded rant, but heres an update for the first quarter of 2008!

This year has already started strongly for us, we’ve been steadily working on new minor features and bug fixes, and the latest version is our best to date. I just wanted to post here and let you all know that we’re looking to move ahead with a few special initiatives this year, in order to further bolster our customer base and continue to be a step ahead of the competition, and if you can be involved that would be great.

We’re underway with the specification of the new Copper version (Likely to be our 4.0 release), and quite surprisingly the spec doc is down to only two pages. Admittedly this is two pages of bullet-point features (not the War and Peace specs you might expect) however normally we’d have 20 or so pages of requests/spec for each new version. This tells me the product and our philosophy for ultra simple project management is maturing nicely.

We’re also going to be introducing a new ‘Inner Circle’ program, whereby we call on customers who’ve expressed interest in industry-specific versions of Copper to pre-order a license and become involved in that development process. This model of customer-investors has worked really well for us in the past, and is responsible for some of the best features in the Corporate and Enterprise products we currently offer. This time around we have 5-6 industries or verticals that we’re keen to build custom Copper Enterprise products. At this stage these include: Product Development, Film/TV/Music Production, Worship, Architecture, Design, and Event Management.

In exchange for the pre-purchase of a license (POA) we work with the Inner Circle to specify and build out new features. Its a share the wealth type deal that works really well. If you have a desire to participate on this level please email me at ben@copperproject.com

That’s all for now, but thanks again for all your support, 2008 is the year we really push Copper out into the stratosphere.

– Ben Prendergast

We just launched the new version of our Project Management Software, Copper 2008.

The origins behind this latest version can be dated back five or six years ago when we first started looking at building a web-based collaboration tool for a (now defunct) design studio. Back then, as now, we wanted a simple tool that did 20% of what the other tools like MS Project did, but did it in a fashion that was inclusive, intuitive, and helpful. That we were a design studio capable of building a nice interface was a handy piece of luck, given our latest interface is perhaps still a key differentiator to other products on the market.At that time I had really keen ideas on what a good collaboration tool would do, but budgetary and time constraints meant that our early versions were always light on with features. Our first license sold in November 2002, for $99. Now, our flagship Enterprise version starts at $2999 and is world-class as evidenced by its amazing customer-base.

Over the years however our ‘customer requests’ list has slowly been eclipsed by our ‘offered features’ list, and we’ve come to build a product that people rely on daily to run their consultancies, just as we do. I’m sure (as our early ’soft launch’ figures would suggest) that some of you will come to discover this tool thinking it was a spring chicken, offered by a fledgling silicone valley company interested only in the opportunity for that next round of funding!

However I’m proud to say we’ve been profitable and self-funded since that very first license sale, and to this day the CEO reviews every single piece of feedback offered. In short, I’m proud of our customer base, and proud of our little team’s effort in bringing this new version to fruition.

For the first time in six years I can truly say that we’re offering a product with unique features not found in any other software tool. For example the latest version offers a ‘business defrag’ a function by which you can review and manage your entire resource pool workload, creating the same kind of incremental efficiencies for your business as Norton did with your hard drive 20 years ago.

Add this to the formidable set of features that gel together beautifully and you’ll forgive me doting on my little six year old as I send it out into the world, they grow up so fast!

For more info or a demo visit http://www.copperproject.com

Here is the launch email with pics etc

– Ben Prendergast

Well I’m feeling a little guilty here, I’ve been hard at work keeping new features flowing but clearly you’re needing some love in your inbox, so here it is.The last few months have been among our strongest on record (thanks to you), and I’d like to thank all who have come on board or continued to show their support!

We’ve been busy building the structures for new features, and have a couple of new products in development that are really going to boil some of your potatoes.
But on to the news!

30 DAY TRIALS A simple request, you wanted more time to review our editions, so we’re now offering full 30 day trials on all our products. Tell your friends one month of efficiency is on us! Sign up here. http://www.copperproject.com/demo.php

NEW ENTERPRISE EDITION REPORTS, RESOURCING The word was past down from our last survey, “build us a report writer!”. So we did. Our new reports module is now in beta, and you can now produce reports relating to clients or projects, or relating to particular resources. You can save these reports for reprodution, export them to CSV, or have them run periodically and be emailed right to your inbox. We’ve also made some changes to resource management widget, and you can now quickly allocate a resource without having to specify the hours they will work on a task These features are now available to our Enterprise customers now so get in touch and we’ll send you the update.

NEW REFERRAL PROGRAM Do you know someone that could use Copper in their business? If so, we’re offering no questions asked referals. If you refer someone to the Copper product and if they purchase either a server license or sign up for a hosted account, you’ll receive a 20% commission (server-license) or once off $25/$50/$100 bonus (Hosted account). No strings.

ELEMENT ON THE RADIO Australian customers might be a fan of the Byte Into IT show on Melbourne’s RRR, as was/is CEO Ben Prendergast, heard here paying his respects to the doyens of the Australian IT media, replete with unabashed self-promotion. http://media.libsyn.com/media/rrrfm/Byte-Into-It-20070509.mp3

– Ben Prendergast

It’s here. Our premium project management product, Copper Enterprise 2007, designed specifically for those requiring more sophisticated functionality than our popular Corporate edition.

We’ve included a raft of brand new features, and hundreds of refinements, to allow you to collaborate more efficiently than ever.We’ve continued with our simple philosophy; to create the most elegant yet flexible project management system available for commercial teams. No overbloated functionality. No ugly interfaces. Just a beautiful tool that ensures your team just gets things done.

The new version is available now in two options. $2999 (100 users, with 12 months free updates) or for $299/month fully hosted.

Here are six key new features in 2007!

1.New, more efficient, wide-screen Interface. After reviewing the results of our yearly survey, we’ve produced a new interface that offers even greater efficiencies over the Corporate edition. We’ve increased the width of all pages, introduced a new compact navigation/breadcrumbs/action bar, and have added quicker data entry features throughout.

2. New Enterprise Timeline and Related Projects. Sub-projects, phases, super-tasks, sub-tasks! Whatever you call them, we’ve added a new feature called Related Projects to handle them. This new feature accompanies our new Enterprise timeline. Now you can display a timeline for a client’s entire project portfolio, or simply link interrellated projects giving further visibility and control over how projects and resources interrelate

3. New Resource Management.Another groundbreaking change to Copper is its new resource allocation feature. With it you can see at a glance what a resource is doing over the coming period, and allocate work as required, providing finite control over project and task alllocation for resources. View a users calendar we see which tasks and projects are starting and finishing for that period, view a users hours logged in the new timeline (including a comparison to what was committed). This new feature provides new visibility for resource and project efficiency, allowing you to quickly review and refine a project timeline.

4. New Import/Export features.Throughout Copper we’ve also added new import and export features. You can export a project to an MS Project XML File, import your contacts with vcard support, and export your entire database for external analysis. For Mac users, you can now sync your entire Springboard for convenient task tracking.

5. New Administration features.We’ve added new adminstration features such as LDAP integration, database backup, label editor, a refined permissions interface, and more. With these features you can further tailor Copper to suit your needs.

6. Futureproofing. Free of Charge Perhaps the best feature! All Enterprise customers receive 12 months of free updates and email/phone support. We’ve already started on our first update, with new Report options, extra integration options, and new accounting features in development. But we need your input to continue the inspired work, so there has never been a better time to come aboard!

– Ben Prendergast