How does Polydone work?
Polydone is an online collaborative platform to manage your projects and resources (people).
After creating your account, you will create projects and inside projects you will create tasks.
Tasks have various elements to them, such as name, description, estimate time, deadline and tags.
These elements are useful to recognise tasks but also to search and filter your tasks.
One key element of Polydone is that you can estimate a task to take between 15 minutes and 1 day. By doing so, you break down big projects into smaller tasks that you can complete in a day or less. By placing these tasks on the calendar, you get a very good picture of when your project can be completed by.
Tasks sit in a board, called Kanban, with columns. Each column, from left to right, represents a step that your tasks need to go through in other to be completed. For example: "To Do", "In Progress", "Awaiting Approval", "Done". You can customise these columns. You can take tasks and drag them from column to column until all tasks are in the last column, then your project will be finished.
You can assign tasks to yourself or your team mates.
Since tasks have a status and estimate and are assigned to people, the Capacity page lets you see exactly what everyone is working on and when, how many hours of work they have assigned to them, how many hours are available and which projects are using more resources.
When task are moved to the last column, they are considered as completed and a Timesheet is created in real time.
Polydone also has some useful and clever features such as importing a long list of tasks from an Excel sheet, or integrating with Outlook Calendar so you can see your meetings and tasks side by side.
To further improve your productivity, you can save entire projects into a library of Templates which you can re-use for your next project, so you don't have to re-create all tasks from scratch and you make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
How do I start?
After creating and logging into your account, visit the Projects page, which will be empty.
Click "Create Project" and create your first project.
After creating your first project, click "Create Task" to create your first task.
Keep creating tasks for your project, assign them, give them an estimate.
Customize the columns of your project by creating new columns, reneming or deleting existing ones.
When it's time to start working on your first task, siply click and drag it to the next column.
Keep doing that until all tasks are in the last column, then your project will be finished.
From the Projects page you can see all your projects.
If you're working with a team, visit the Users page and invite your colleages, you can give them different permission levels.
By default each project is only visible to the person who created the project, so you'll need to click "Users" from within a project and add your colleages to the project. Then, you can assign tasks to them.
Use the Schedule page to place tasks on different days or simply add each task a deadline from within a project.
See how many hours and on which projects you and your colleages are working on from the Capacity page.
The Dashboard page will let you know about tasks you have scheduled for today and tasks that are late.
Why can I ony estimate a task up to 1 day?
Humans are very bad at estimating long tasks and because of poor estimation, projects are always late. However, we are very good at estimating tasks that take a few hours, up to 1 day. By breaking down big monolythic projects into small tasks that can be accomplished in a day or less and by placing these tasks on the calendar, you get a very accurate view of when the project is expected to be finished by.
Why can I not delete the first and last columns of a kanban?
The first column of the kanban in a project is where you place all tasks that have not started yet, the last column collects all tasks that are done. Polydone needs these 2 columns to determine the status and progress of your project. In between you can add/remove as many columns as you want for each project.
Can I import multiple tasks?
Yes, you can import tasks from an Excel sheet. Siply click "Create Task" and from the bottom-left corner, click "Import". Then select your spreadhseet and click Upload. Your spreadhseet must be in either ".xls" or ".xlsx" format. Make sure to first download a spreadhseet sample to see how you need to format the data.
Can I create subtasks/dependencies?
Yes, inside each task you can create a checklist of subtasks.
Users Permissions
From the Users page, you can invite, remove and manage your colleages. You can give them different permissions at the account level.
From within a project, though, you can add/remove colleages and give them permissions for that project only.
Can I copy/duplicate a project?
Yes but not directly. To duplicate a project, first save it as a Template from the project's "Settings" page. Then, when creating a new project, select the saved template from the dropdown menu.
Is there a Gantt chart?
No, Polydone is an Agile project management platform while Gantt charts belong to the Waterfall methodology.
Is Polydone available in other languages?
Sorry, at the moment Polydone is only available in English.