Visual work break-down, progress tracking and project management
YOTEY is a fresh approach to project management. Visually break down, organize and discuss complex technical work. Create an explicit translation of your system, product or design to work-as-structure, then communicate and collaborate effectively on any level of detail. Easily keep track of parallel topics and sub-projects without being overwhelmed. No-nonsense by engineers, for engineers.
Extend your design and context to projects, visually
The system, feature or improvement you are working on has structure and complexity which are difficult to articulate. In YOTEY, you express the architecture, logical or physical parts, components, modules, work packages, etc. as items with dependencies/relations and associated tasks. The resulting visual work break-down is the core of a project plan.
The missing dimension
Teams think, communicate and create according to the design and structure of a system. Extend this system thinking dimension to project management in the intuitive and productive way. Rely on the diagrammatic work break-down as a specialized blueprint of your daily work and progress.
Everyone aligned, at a glance
Map the ideas, risks, complexity (or simplicity!) of your system by managing modelling work. Easily communicate what needs to be done to engineers already familiar with the project or explain the landscape to newcomers. Make abstract matters more concrete for non-technical stakeholders by clear and convincing structure of work.
Non-stop design and development
Fuse technical design and project management naturally. Maintaining a structured work break-down gives you an additional perspective on your architecture or system. Gain valuable new insights about the design and the project by thinking about them as one whole. Make both aspects affect each other iteratively.
Define work and collaborate beyond issue tracking
Issue management is often too static or stakeholder-oriented. In YOTEY, tasks represent the actual fluent, creative and dynamic stream of technical steps owned by your engineering team. Small or large, detailed or approximate and vague for the moment, a work break-down and its tasks is a living daily document about your project. Choose your own level of detail and refine gradually.
The YOTEY method
Unlike more traditional project management tools, the focus of tasks is your concrete work break-down, rather than high-level problems, bugs, features or goals. The underlying philosophy is that issues and the process of arriving at solutions have distinct audiences, dynamics, needs and associated information. Work break-down is a derivative of one or more issues and so it is better to keep the two separate in their respective contexts. Together with the plan item diagram, tasks reflect design decisions and consequent engineering activities, eventually on a fine-grained level. YOTEY is like an IDE, editor or other design tool, only for projects. Team members frequently consult and manipulate tasks alongside and in sync with other engineering artifacts. The UI is deliberately minimalistic and non-overwhelming to encourage immediate adjustments based on new ideas and insights during brainstorm sessions, reviews or progress meetings.
Reduce overhead when switching between contexts
Your project is big, has many parallel parts, aspects and features. Usually all of this at once. In YOTEY, you work on separate plans, which are like sub-projects for a single goal, release, effort or package of work. Keep a clear high-level overview of a project on one hand, then resume in the detailed visual work break-down of any plan, with lower cognitive load. Of course, all of this is possible across multiple independent projects.
Three practical layers
All work in YOTEY is organized in the optimal three-layer hierarchy. Plans form the intermediate layer between long-running organization-wide projects and detailed (engineering) tasks, bridging the static of the former and the dynamic of the latter. Plans are units of work break-down.
Divide and conquer the bigger picture
Whenever there are goals or ideas, there are plans; in YOTEY this is explicit and first-class. Manage technical complexity by identifying "chunks" which are coherent and stand-alone enough for a work break-down. Share and discuss strategy with stake-holders using the roadmap-like structure, prioritize and manage budgets per plan and more. Plans are versatile as shared vocabulary, units of understanding, project management and technical work.
Background, status and roadmap
YOTEY is a product of 15 years of development experience in high-tech, multi-disciplinary environment with emphasis on software engineering. Based on observations and lessons about everyday needs and patterns in the intersection of engineering, project and knowledge management, it is meant to be practical, to-the-point and …different! Technical project management does not have to be bloated or distracting.
Current Beta release is a minimalistic snapshot of the core functionality: work break-down oriented project management. However, it is just a beginning and more features are constantly in development.