The true-life origin of Chirp lies in the desire of our CEO to have perfect software to help keep his own executive team and directors running at peak effeciency and effectiveness. Chirp excels at this.

As an executive, you have a unique ability to “unstick” your staff. You can make the tough decisions about priority or requirements changes to get things moving again — as long as you know something is stuck.

Chirp gives you ways to quickly see how to do this, via:

• Dashboard views. The task table shows trouble spots at a glance. You, or your team members can set a red, yellow, or green indicator on each task for a quick visual alert that a task may be in trouble. Select the task, and quickly see the “Issues and blockers” that are holding back progress. Due dates and estimated completion dates are right up front where you can quickly see what is on track, and what isn't. Drill down by project, by team member, or using custom views with collections of tasks you choose.
• Post-mortem reviews. Chirp users update tasks by creating dated status entries. This recorded history lets you review the individual entries for various important tasks after (or even during) a project, and see whether there are problems that frequently show up with given processes or individuals.

Here's how Chirp is better than what you might be using now:

• Excel spreadsheets. Many have tried Excel for managing. But this usually fails. Why?
1. One copy, multiple authors; no results. With Excel, one copy of a spreadsheet has all project info. Either one person is keeping everything up to date (which is a drain on that person's productive time) or the file must be passed around among all team members to keep it up to date. And if you're using email to mail the file around, one team member who doesn't complete it and send it on keeps everybody from updating it. Bad news.
   
   With Chirp, each person can enter updates independently, and all information is synchronized so everyone is up-to-date, always.
2. No structure, no best practice benefits. Excel is easy to customize, but it makes you do all the customization. You must create your own templates, your own forms, and fumble your way to finding out even the most basic of methods that work (marginally).
• Email. Email has succeeded too well. We spend large amounts of time simply sending emails to each other. The trouble is that email is a great way to communicate, but a bad way to keep track of information. Even with fancy searching and indexing, or with “threaded” email histories, email does not provide even the most simple organization and management information. Email: we're drowning in its success.