Float

Puntos a favor

Float's user interface and logic are inspirational. They have made the activity of coordinating multiple resources on multiple projects about as easy as it can be. They have paid a lot of attention to usability, efficient use of screen real estate and simple navigation. However the killer feature is the intuitive yet clever way that searching and data navigation work. All searching and filtering is done using a single search field, which offers indexed word search on pretty much everything including tags. There is also a well-worked out protocol for handling union and intersect searches.

Puntos en contra

The only real bugbear is that any user that can enter data into the system can define new values for any field. It isn't possible to centrally control lists such as task names, clients, job descriptions etc. This means that if you have more than one person using the system, very quickly you get different versions of the same thing being defined (e.g. job roles being slightly different) which makes it difficult to analyse across records. Not a dealbreaker, but I do think it should be possible to lock down lists of values. Also it would be good if you could zoom out the view a little more - if you're dealing with more than a dozen resources/projects.

Puntos a favor

The simplicity of Float was what sold it for us. As a company with around 90 very busy engineers and designers, entering workload data needed to take less than 5 minutes. With Float we can do this. Once all the data is in Float, managers can easily see who needs more work and who is overloaded. Support is also fantastic. The instant message service on the website always gets a fast response.

Puntos en contra

No major issues. If I had to nitpick, I had to create a workaround to allow all employees to be able to automatically see every project in the system sithout assigning it to them. To do this I had to make every user an admin. But this works fine.

Puntos a favor

Very easy to use and gives a very nice conceptual view of what employees have to do.

Puntos en contra

I really wish it would more calendar features.

Puntos a favor

There aren't may softwares that let you schedule a team in such an easy and organised way.
I think most softwares nowadays are too complex and make you spend more time organising tasks than actually working on them.
Float is so clear and simple you can actually use it to manage big projects without spending too much time on it.

Puntos en contra

It's getting better, but it would be very useful if we could:

- Right click on a pencil and be able to copy it over into a different person.
- Book more than one person on the same project (for example if two workers are on the same project because one of them is doing a training but you don't want to charge twice for that time).
- Lately when I try to schedule more than 1 project in one day on the same person I get a message saying I can't schedule anyone for more than 24 hours) even if I'm not exceeding the 8 normal working hours. It'd be great if that could be fixed.
- It'd be good if milestones were more visible.
- I think reports should be a bit less complicated and more visual.
- It'd be really helpful if you could group projects up in folders when you go to the Projects tab as at the moment we have like... 45 different projects going on and although we color code them it's difficult to organise all of them.
-I'd like to have more than only three types of view when looking at our schedules a part from 'Days, 'Weeks' and 'Months'.
It'd be great if you could 'Archive' users as well as projects. So when a worker it's not working at the company anymore and you don't want to pay for it on Float you can kind of 'Archive' him (so you are not able to book him on anything but still you can see him on the boards so you don't loose what it's been scheduled on him.)

Puntos a favor

The ease of use as a one stop shop, browser based to allow all the development team (and subsiduary but linked teams) to see important dates like dev complete, bug fix windows, cert windows and release dates.

The ability to quickly block out time for features and projects.
The ability to add notes and details to tasks.
Fully fleshed out holiday and time off structure.
Robust financial reports possible with very high degree of accuracy for budget per project, per quarter, per annum.

We used to get by with using Excel, we invested in Float and it has taken the companies' project planning to the next step. I would recommend Float for small to mid sized companies definitely, it is a great product boost and good way of reporting and seeing issues early.

Puntos en contra

it does not allow you to easily move a bunch of small tasks along in the timeline, that's my only main gripe, you can't band box select you have to shift select. Everything else is intuitive and easy.