No matter what kind of project you’re working on with your team, there will always be people who naturally fill various, more specialized roles. Wouldn’t it be nice to have project management software that caters to all of these roles at the same time? This is exactly what Z-Stream provides its users! Its many features adapt based on what role a user has in the company: supervisor, employee or client.
Before we talk about how Z-Stream can help supervisors, employees, and clients during development, let’s quickly revisit the project triangle.This diagram shows the four major restrictions that people developing a project face. These include:
- The time constraint: the amount of time that can be dedicated to finishing a project, including deadlines for different steps in the process.
- The cost constraint: the money that can be spent to finish the project.
- The scope constraint: the non-cash resources that can be allocated to the project.
- The quality constraint: the acceptance criteria that must be met for the finished project.
These constraints are intertwined so when one is impacted, the others will often also be affected. Z-Stream provides a single place to monitor each of these restrictions so you can avoid sacrificing one or the other in order to meet project deadlines.
We will take a look at how Z-Stream allows supervisors, employees, and clients to keep up to date on each of these aspects.
How Can Supervisors Use Z-Stream’s Features?
Supervisors are in charge of directing teams and overseeing projects. These leaders are often responsible for seeing the bigger picture and making sure each piece falls into the right place. Supervisors guide employees and ensure that everyone focuses on the right tasks, and must be able to handle and organize a massive amount of data to understand how their team is performing.
Thankfully, there are many ways that Z-Stream can help supervisors accomplish these goals. Z-Stream allows you to keep track of each task or epic at each stage of the development process and lets you ensure you are producing the best possible product. With Z-Stream, supervisors can keep a close eye on the scope, cost, time, and quality of a project.
Scope
The core of Z-Stream is Tasks, which are used to:
- Track prioritized, detailed tickets so that employees know what they are supposed to do next
- Estimate how much time should be dedicated to a task
- Log how much time has been dedicated to a task
- Manage your team
- Sort sets of tasks by epics, labels, or custom fields
- Find exactly the set of issues that is immediately relevant
You can also customize permissions so that you control who can access certain data. This allows you to decide exactly who can work on or alter tasks, workflows, roadmaps, or testing data within a particular project.
Time Management
Z-Stream offers multiple visualizations and statistics for each project, allowing supervisors to see the big picture and understand the amount of work being done on each part of a product. This ensures that supervisors can make a plan that suits a particular project’s needs.
There are four features that are key for controlling and managing your project: Roadmap, Products, Iterations, and Releases. These features enable supervisors to achieve their end goals and exceed their client’s expectations by structuring their development process,keeping track of how much time is spent on each part of the development, and making intelligent estimates about future goals.
Cost
As a supervisor, it is extremely important to keep track of your budget. This includes spending related to the project’s infrastructure, as well as the time employees are spending on the project, which is often a large portion of the budget.
To understand and track how your team members are spending their precious time, Z-Stream has built-in Timesheets. Z-Stream allows you to keep track of what your team members have accomplished and what still needs to be finished. You will also be able to see exactly how much of the workload is assigned to each team member to help you distribute work appropriately between them. This will give you a good estimate of how much money will need to be dedicated to employees to complete a project, as well as a detailed snapshot of how time has been spent so far. Z-Stream’s timesheets feature also lets you monitor employees to see if an excessive amount of time is spent on a task.
Release Notes will allow you to quickly put together reports that you can automatically send to clients or employees. This feature keeps all of your important data in one place, making it easy to organize and distribute large amounts of information about the status of your project.
Quality Assurance
As a supervisor, you are ultimately responsible for releasing a great product, so you need to have insight into your team’s quality assurance process. The good news is that Z-Stream comes equipped with a powerful quality assurance suite, making it the perfect all-in-one package.
Z-Stream’s QA feature lets you test the quality of your product in depth and gauge its overall status in seconds with comprehensive visualizations of both automated and manual testing progress. You can link tests to individual tasks, comment on them, and write preconditions, expected results, and actual results for each test case. You or your QA-oriented teammates can sign off on each step of the way with the peace of mind that your release will advance your product while maintaining stability and reliability. You can label test cases according to the automation status of the test (manual, needs automation, automated) and instantly identify which tests are for new features and which tests relate to functionality that was implemented in a previous release. Z-Stream’s QA tools let you quickly and efficiently organize and report your testing efforts to see how your product is functioning in just a glance.
How Does Z-Stream Help Employees?
Z-Stream supports every role on your team so you can complete your project with maximal transparency, all organized in one place. Z-Stream was specifically designed to offer different benefits to many team members across multiple roles. You can even create custom permissions profiles to allow access to specified functionality and data only to certain employees. Your team no longer has to sort through irrelevant information in order to get to what they need. At the same time, your data is protected from being edited, deleted, or even read by those who don’t need it.
Among all project participants, employees are often most actively involved in delivering on development goals as they actually carry out assignments set by supervisors, organize important information, and keep sight of various project details that create the big picture. Thus, when it comes to project management, employees require software that would cater for a number of purposes.
Z-Stream allows your whole team to organize, understand, and complete projects faster than ever before.
Tasks
Z-Stream allows employees to keep track of tasks that are relevant to them and log the time spent completing these tasks. Employees can also update a task’s status. For example, after a developer on your team deploys a fix to your development server, everyone else on your team can see the change in Z-Stream and act accordingly to coordinate the release.
Sprints
Sprints make it easy to coordinate your team around tangible goals that are time-oriented to deliver value to your clients incrementally. Plan draft sprints with the help of metrics and filters and balance your team’s workload on a powerful and intuitive agile board so every team member can see at a glance what they should work on next. Once you’ve executed on your plans you can view your completed sprints whenever you need.
Timesheets
Z-Stream lets employees keep track of the amount of time they have devoted to specific tasks and projects even if they are working on several different things at once. This ability to monitor working hours will prevent employees from having to frantically try to complete or log work at the end of the week. Team members can document exactly how much time they spent on each task, which helps ensure they are properly compensated for each project or task they worked on, as well as to understand the throughput of each team member.
Dashboard
Personal customizable dashboards help employees keep an eye on their activities and get quick access to key information regarding their projects. With just a few clicks, they can review tasks, work logs, sprints, etc. This convenient feature allows employees to monitor each step they need to take in the development process.
What Do Z-Stream’s Features Offer Clients?
It is important to note that Z-Stream is not only useful for supervisors and employees, but for clients as well. A client may be a group of people or an individual person, but either way, their interests lie with the final product. This group of people could include investors who have contributed money to the project or the people who will use the product when it is completed. It is crucial that clients are able to monitor a project’s development, so they can make informed decisions that suit their needs, as well as give the product team feedback and suggestions.
Scope
Z-Stream’s Task feature allows clients to monitor the scope of a project. It lets clients see what tasks have been completed and what still needs to be done., giving clients access to key information, like status, priority, and attached files, while preventing them from changing values for deleting tasks that your team needs.
Time
Scheduling tends to be a consistent problem throughout project development. That being said, the Roadmap, Release and Sprint features let clients monitor the schedule. As a client, you can see different timelines relating to the project, including deadlines. These features allow you to see what the plan is for different tasks and stages in the project and how and when they will be completed. This gives clients a better idea of what is done and how much time is left until they can use the finished product. This will give clients the ability to adjust their plans based on projected outcomes as well as the actual progress made.
Cost
There are many factors that affect a project’s budget. Clients can use a few different features within Z-Stream to help them monitor cost. Timesheet allows clients to view reports that document the time spent on different tasks and projects. Release Notes offers an even more complete documentation of project information, including the status of tasks and descriptions of changes. These features let clients make more informed choices and monitor progress to adjust costs, stay up-to-date with the product team in prioritizing different tasks.
Conclusion
Z-Stream makes it easy and convenient for everyone involved in a project to stay informed and communicate better. No matter what your role in a project’s development, Z-Stream makes it easier than ever to achieve your goals and create an outstanding product. There is no need to use several different software suites and frantically try to sort through tons of information in different windows. Z-Stream is the unified product and team management home for everyone on your team. Try Z-Stream now for free!
