Synergy updates – highlights of the last 12 months
Here at Total Synergy, we roll out new product updates on a monthly basis — a faster product development cycle than any other product in this space!
Whether you’ve undertaken a 30-day free trial of Synergy before, or you’re new to Synergy and looking for an industry-specific solution to business and project management, catch up on the highlights of our product releases below. If you want to see everything we’ve done over the last 12 months, check out the Synergy updates page (and be warned, there’s a lot there!).
October 2020 — all-new Kanban for project task management
The October 2020 release was huge! We released our all-new Kanban board for task planning with your projects.
Over the last two years, we’ve built out our project management features to go from the zoomed-out, big picture view of project planning across time, to now a granular task-based view of who’s working on what, day-to-day.
While Kanban in itself is not a new concept (you’ve probably heard of Trello), Kanban tied to all the project detail you’ve come to know and love in Synergy unlocks enormous efficiencies in how you and your team deliver projects.
August 2020 — to-dos for project management
Our August 2020 release is all about helping you manage your project to-dos. To-dos let you begin to get a bit more granular about, well, what you have to do in your projects. To-dos let you track the smaller day-to-day activities that are so vital to the completion of a project but are often overlooked or forgotten.
May 2020 — SharePoint integration for document control — enabling remote work
In May, we introduced our fast-tracked app connection to SharePoint for document control. The SharePoint add-on for Synergy (also known as SharePoint for document control) was in our product development roadmap for later in the year, but we brought it forward and accelerated its development to solve Covid lockdown-related working challenges at the time.
This app connection is an integration between Synergy and SharePoint that’s designed to help improve collaboration with your project team and stay connected to your customers. As the name suggests, it’s also designed to improve document control — by collaborating on draft versions of project documents in SharePoint and using Synergy as your ‘filing cabinet’ to save your finalized project documents.
Add ons
Sharepoint add on for Synergy
April 2020 — weekly resourcing
Back in April, we were speeding headlong towards ever more granular project management. Back then, we introduced weekly resourcing to the Gantt planning board. This update enabled project managers to amend hours for resources one week at a time.
February 2020 — win/loss reporting
The win/loss panel in the dashboard allows directors, assistant administrators and system administrators to compare how many projects they’ve won side by side with what they’ve lost or proposed.
November 2019 — new task management
Almost a year ago, we started the journey towards more granular task management. In the November 2019 release we enabled project managers to add tasks in the project schedule screen of the planning board.
In November, we also made enhancements to project templates to help customers generate more accurate proposals, more frequently.
August 2019 — Unearned income
The new unearned income feature we released last year built on the functionality found in the project performance feature we released in June (see below). It helps our accounting-oriented friends track their liability — that is, any income invoiced before work has been done.
Unearned income is money you have received in advance of having earned it. Another way to look at it is the difference between what you’ve earned vs what you’ve invoiced.
This feature is most relevant to our many larger, more complex customers with revenue of over $10M who are required to comply with the accounting standard on revenue recognition known as IFRS 15.
June 2019 — earned value management (project performance)
Ok, so this goes a bit further back than 12 months, we get it. But our project performance feature is a bit of a star (pun intended), and we just can’t help ourselves!
The Synergy project performance feature helps you measure the health of your projects using the earned value management methodology (EVM).
The benefit is to quickly see your project health with a star rating, then drill-in it to see specific aspects and figure out what, specifically is going wrong (or so right). It’s all about knowing if you will deliver projects on time and if you will deliver them on budget.
Earned value management comes with easy to decipher graphs and scales for our more visually inclined customers; performance metrics and indexes for our more numbers and data inclined customers; and a 5-star rating for a fast way to visually identify those projects in distress and those that are the very picture of health.
