How do I add someone to my project?

Simply assign them a task; Chirp will automatically take care of adding this person to your project team. Unlike other solutions that make you perform complex project setup, assign team members, etc., Chirp automatically handles team membership growth for you.

How will first-time assignees know about the task?

When you assign a task to someone who isn't (yet) a Chirp user, we'll send your assignee an email telling them about the assignment. It will have a link where they can go download their own copy of Chirp and use it and keep you up to date. (If they're already a Chirp user, the task will simply show up in their copy of Chirp next time they use it.)

How do I structure my tasks & projects?

This is a key question to answer when you are first starting to use Chirp in your team. This varies depending on your type of work, and you must find the right answer for you. As you are creating your firsts tasks and projects, consider two things: who you want to share project information with, and how tasks are related.

• When you asssign a task to a user in a project, you grant them access to all project information. If you don't want to share information about an entire project, create a separate project containing assignments only to the people to whom you want to grant project information access.
• But when you create many projects, it becomes harder to decide in which project a new task belongs. So don't create too many projects.

How granular should tasks be?

Like the question above, this is another key answer you need to discover yourself. In general, break down activity areas into tasks that are detailed enough to allow you to track them as discrete activities, but not into so many separate detailed tasks that the sheer number becomes burdensome to track. For some businesses, where Chirp is being used for workflow tracking, tasks might be something that can be completed within a single day. For others, a task might represent an activity that will take a few days to complete. Here's some questions you might ask yourself when creating tasks:

• “Is this the type of thing where I want the Assignee to manage the schedule of interim steps on their own, without me having to worry about those details?” If so, that's a good, single task.
• “Will the timing of the completion of the sub-parts of this task be important to track separately? Or, do I only care that this overall thing gets done on time?” If interim elements don't merit separate tracking, you've found the right level for a single task.
• “Am I micromanaging this too much? Or, should I let the person who is doing this work just do it, and hold them accountable for the result?” Don't go overboard with Chirp; let people do their job, but keep you up to date with it using Chirp's progress comments and issues and blockers fields in the status entries.

One thing for sure: If you have created so many tasks that it takes the assignees more than a few minutes a day to keep their Chirp status up-to-date, you've created too many tasks. The time required to update Chirp should be less than 2% of the time spent doing a task.

How do I get everybody doing the same thing with this?

The Chirp teams that have the most success with Chirp are those that take the following steps:

• Mapping Chirp to your activities. Have one or two committedpeople use Chirp for a week to learn how to structure your tasks and projects and find out what level of task granularity is right for your team.
• Nominate a Chirp go-to person. If one person can be an early central point of information on these two items, it will help get your team using Chirp in a consistent way.
• Have a “Let's get started with Chirp” meeting. After you know how Chirp maps to your business, get everyone in a conference room for 15 minutes (with their network-connected laptops if possible), and put Chirp up on an overhead projector. Assign a couple of tasks to people to show this process. Then, as assignees receive tasks, show how they're accepted, and updated. Finish with a short discussion of the task/project structure and task-granularity you have found will work for you.
• Highlight early Chirp successes in your team. The best way to get people using Chirp is to make the benefits visible to everyone who has to use it. A carrot is better than a stick.
• Use a stick if needed. Often times, managers simply need to get firm in their request for team members to use Chirp. This is just life; different people respond to process changes differently. Occasionally, you need to be firm. Which leads to our next question....

What's the most difficult part about making Chirp usage successful?

Getting team members into the habit of keeping Chirp current with their task / project status.

Managers will frequently hear “Would you rather have me doing the work, or wasting time writing about it?” This excuse often comes from people who aren't naturally inclined to communicate with team members. (And these individuals are often the ones who trip up the scheule with problems — and are precisely the ones you want to be entering status reports regularly.)

This excuse isn't exclusive to Chirp: Customers of products from other genres like as sales force management systems (such as those offered by SalesForce.com or SugarCRM.com) hear the same worker excuses about not putting data into those systems, too.

It is nearly as important to be aware of how things are going overall as it is to do the work. Communications is part of the work.

Chirp is designed to be fast-to-use, effective in communicating simple status to a team, and data-entry won't be a barrier to communication if people will simply make it a habit to use it.