Release Date: January 29, 2018

With Version 7, CrossLead expands the capabilities previous found in ‘Components’ and add enhanced collaboration tools to each distinct work stream. To better capture this broadening of scope, it has been renamed Projects. This allows for multiple users a single place to collaborate on their work – both with status updates and chat. Additionally, the linked tasks and meetings to a project are now easier to see and manage across your project.

Managing Tasks
Projects’ Activity Tracker shows a roll up of all tasks connected to the project. This allows for teammates to see what other work is underway. It also allows the project owner to see the outstanding tasks that need to be completed. This set of views allows for rapid decision making on bandwidth and changes in scope for both the project implementors and project managers.

Linkages
In V7, making linkages between Projects and Teams follows a new path. Now, project owners are responsible for connecting to one or multiple teams. Each team owner can then integrate the project into their Plan Overview. If that occurs, those working on the project can view the placement of the project among multiple teams in the Linkages tab.

Team
In Version 7, CrossLead makes Teams the central point for collaboration and updates on connected projects (components) and tasks. Additionally, Teams has an enhanced UI to view, create, and manage their plans. In Plan Overview, your team’s objectives, strategies and initiatives live on a single page with nested views for each layer. Manage what shows up on your Plan Overview, while still receiving all of the status updates from the projects that link to your team in the Teams Update tab.

Building your team’s plan
Plan Overview brings together multiple components – those owned by the team members and other supporters. This allows the team owner to organize their plan in way that makes most sense for their team. At the same time, they do not lose connectivity to components that they decide to not include.

In v7, Components/Projects are connected to directly to teams. In contrast, v6 required Components/Projects to be linked to one (or in some case many) other Components/Projects. This made the creation of a team plan slower for a team owner, discouraged dynamic linking across teams, and led to circular logic. V7 requires that each Components/Projects link to a Team, then a team owner decides if how to integrate it with their plan, or leave unlinked to their plan (but still linked to their team). If they decide to place it in their plan, owners can now create as many, or as few, layers as they so desire, along with their desired layer naming convention.

When a Components/Projects is viewed by itself, the Linkages tab shows how it is connected inside one or multiple team’s plan. This increased flexibility allows for less strategy doctrine enforcing and more connectivity along real lines of collaboration. Each team can devise their ideal plan, while giving the Component’s/Project’s owner insight into how their work fits into a larger plan.

Presentations and Updates
In CrossLead v7, the Teams Updates tab aggregates all of the updates from projects/components linked to your team. This gives team members a single place to view updates from their teammates as well as cross-functional supporters in one place.

This enables building presentations much faster, and without missing an update. Presentation builders can scan the all the linked Project’s status aggregated on the Team’s Updates tab. Here they can decide which updates to send to the Team’s presentation Updates for Review section.