New Features Preview — Your Sneak Peek

Last week we promised to share some new features in the works, and at Touchplan, a promise is a promise! We’re excited to announce that major enhancements — including a mobile version of the web app and project-level dashboards — are officially under development, and a real-time crew size view has just been released.

Crew Size View

One of Touchplan’s most awaited new features, this allows users to get an accurate, real-time crew count by role at any time. Our latest release includes labor curves that update for users in real time right in their planning environment. This enables them to immediately see how plan changes affect staffing needs both in the plan and across the entire project.

Mobile Version of the Web App

For the past few years, we’ve all been thinking the same thing — Touchplan is great, but where’s the mobile version? Well, what started out as a dream (and several user requests) will soon be a reality. A mobile version of the web app is currently in development and we expect it to go live in beta this summer.

The mobile version will put each user’s project work right at their fingertips. Through a chronological list, each user can instantly see what they’ve committed to for the week. Tracking progress will also be a snap — update with a simple swipe of a finger or mark multiple tasks as complete at once. Additionally, to help keep everyone up-to-date on start times, a live progress outlook is available. This means team members can track the development of work that needs to be completed ahead of theirs, helping them know in advance whether they can expect to start their work on time.

Another focus of the mobile version is to make project data more easily accessible to users, anywhere and anytime. This helps everyone learn from valuable information logged in Touchplan in order to keep building better. Users will be able to see all of their project plans, and filter tasks by role, status or project. The ability to take photos while in the mobile version and attach them to tickets to access later as a group in the Touchplan web interface will also save teams valuable time.

Project Dashboards

Another exciting change is the redesign of Touchplan’s front-end project page as a visual display of key project performance data. This view will allow project teams to better track and measure data to recognize high-performing individuals, teams and processes to motivate everyone for further improvement.

The new project dashboards will be organized into different views including Phase Plans, Locations, Roles, and Members. The Phase Plan tab will offer the ability to quickly compare a baseline schedule to the current plan using a Gantt chart report. Users will also be able to rank phase plans using various metrics, filter phase plans by relevance, and even apply user-defined ordering. Tapping any one of the Gantt bars will open its associated phase plan.

The Locations tab will enable users to import a floor plan image and quickly specify boundaries corresponding to locations. Users will be able to see an animation of where teams are working on any given day based on the details in their plans and how they defined their locations, offering visual insight into teams’ progress through the jobsite.

The Roles tab will display a breakdown of tasks that are planned, promised and progressed by role. It also tracks how well teams are preparing ahead of meetings and trends in performance on PPC. Additionally, there will be a Compare Data feature that will let users rank order roles on a variety of metrics to recognize strong performers and incentivize improvement.

The Members tab will highlight team member engagement. How are people participating? What changes are they making in the plan? Who is currently logged in? Additionally, team members will automatically earn badges based on their usage and experience, which will help new users easily identify more experienced team members that they can approach for help and answers to questions.

Look for this new project dashboard to be released incrementally throughout the coming year.

Continuous Improvement

These new updates are the result of valuable feedback from our users as well as an ongoing internal focus on continuous improvement. We’re confident that these enhancements will make Touchplan even more useful to the 800+ projects around the world that already rely on it. We’re always eager to hear from our users, so if you have suggestions for other enhancements, get in touch!