Suggestions for Managing Larger Companies

[Zebulan]

Software Inc. is great in and of itself. What I am proposing are changes to help with managing a large company because I found it personally cumbersome to do so.

• My largest gripe was the quantity and size of the projects on the right-hand side bar. Even with the U.I. options set to the smallest they can get (Which apparently is the default setting) and projects in "small mode," you can only fit about 18ish (?) projects on the right. What's the possibility of "grouping" them based on team or work type? Also, what's the possibility of "merging" some? For instance, support tickets - I don't really care how many tickets of which project are opening up, I cannot influence the number, so why not just have a general support queue that all tickets go in? (I realise this then prohibits one team working on Support A and another team working on Support B, but that leads into my next point...) Another point would be to 'star' items, to always be at the top, especially since changing a development drops it to the bottom...
  
  
• Multiple teams working on the same project. This idea comes from observations of support tickets. They come in after hours, which is expected, but no one to work them until the next day. It's not unheard of for a company to have 24/7 support - so allowing multiple teams to work the same project would allow this, and open the door for other ideas, by scheduling different teams throughout the day. (Yes, you could click and assign a project to another team as the day progresses, but as I mentioned, large company. I do not want to spend ten minutes every five minutes pausing the game and reassigning everything...)
  
  
• Speaking of spending ten minutes doing something, the 'Auto Accept and Close' is a brilliant addition when looking to do merit increases... except, I don't want to accept their recommendation. I didn't get to be a profit hungry mogul by giving my employees the world. I am wasting time dragging the bar to the left, and accepting the minimum raise possible. Any chance there could be a different option than 'Auto Accept and Close'? Perhaps 'Auto Accept at ____% increase and Close' where we can change the percentage of increase from the employees base wage?
  
  
• Employees that retire... these are hard to see. First off, there's only a very tiny little 'i' icon that lights up red, and noticing that is difficult. I appreciate the notice that an employee is retiring, but let's look at after an employee retires... I know nothing about them! The notice pops up, top left, saying John Smith retired... and I don't know what they did for my company, because I don't take an interest in my employees and memorize their skills. Can there be a previous employee roster somewhere so we can see who we fired/lost to recruit like skills for replacements? Even better, be able to rehire them from this screen if they didn't retire. Maybe I just don't have the cash for them anymore and I need to do a temporary lay-off.
  
  
• Back to the U.I., can it retain size and position between sessions?
  
  
• Finally, Deals. I love this new game feature! They really helped keep my company afloat at the beginning stages. However managing them as a larger corporation was time consuming. Not only did Deals add to the nightmare in my first point (Too many projects!), but reviewing, assigning and accepting them gave me a headache too. How about some policies that we can set to Auto-Accept (Automation?) and Assign to a team all Deals for a specific work type, based on that teams current work load? I had a dedicated Marketing team and Support team, so I was always accepting this type of work to keep them busy. Also I had so many servers that Hosting was a Deal I never declined.

[Vyndictus]

I highly agree with the multiple teams on one project. Maybe it was on purpose but I would love to have the ability for a team to have a day shift and night shift of working on a project.

[cfranks007]

++ for #4 .. :)

[KrizzlyBear]

I recommend checking out this, he logs what he is adding in future updates: https://trello.com/b/9I286Mhu/software-inc

[Lazosa]

+1

[Zebulan]

Originally posted by Jordan | Krizex:

I recommend checking out this, he logs what he is adding in future updates: https://trello.com/b/9I286Mhu/software-inc

This is perfect, actually. I wasn't aware there was a Trello available, but there's actually some cool ideas in here that I *wanted* to suggest, but felt it wasn't in the scope of "managing a large company."

For instance, "Doormats." Every second Thursday we have a company come replace the floor mats with new ones and they wash the existing ones. It costs us a couple hundred a month but it's worth it for cutting down on filth.

I do see "Work Shifts" as an idea, but it seems to be multiple teams in a room and less multiple teams on a project... I cannot find any of the other suggestions I had made.

Still, this is a valuable resouce and I've bookmarked it. Cheers!

[Coredumping]

Hi, thank you for your input!

The next update has a filter for workitems to the right, so you can hide categories of work you are not interested in. That might alleviate the problem a bit. Having a team filter might also be a good idea, I added it to my todo list. I'm planning to add the possibility to drag the work items around, so you can order them however you want.

Multiple teams per project is high on my list, I'm currently putting it off, since it will break all older save games and I want there to be some buffer from the last save breaking update, so people have a chance to migrate.

Added having a wage slider for the accept all option to my todo list.

Clicking the "i" icon will bring up information about the employees team and years of service, but I can appreciate the fact, that there is no other clear information about retirements. I don't even think it tells you how much they received in pension anywhere. I'll try to brainstorm a proper way to handle all this information in a unified way. Maybe expanding on the "Upcoming events" list, making every item have more details and add the ability to see past events?

Retaining size and position has been implemented for the next update,

I'm still only half-way done with deals, there's still a lot about it that can change, so I'll take a closer look at it once it's done.

[Zebulan]

Originally posted by Coredumping:

Hi, thank you for your input!

Hi, Coredumping! I'm glad to read your feedback on my suggestions.
I just double-checked the Trello, and you're absolutely right - multiple teams is definitely on the list. There's a lot of cards, so do forgive me for overlooking.

One thing I wish to clarify is the upcoming information 'i'. My concerns are less 'There's a retirement upcoming' and more 'Someone just retired, I have no data about who they were and what they did for me.' You know what I mean?

Cheers!

[Coredumping]

Not your fault, I just added it from the brainstorming section, I've been neglecting as of late, but I'm back to updating it again.

I completely agree. I think having a complete and more detailed log would help a lot.