Templates for project managers - introduction

August 2013, Kilgray headquarters, Gyula. On a sweltering hot day, the Kilgray team is trying to work out the feature list for what would become memoQ 2014. After lunch, I take a walk through the quiet residential streets around the office with Florian, our head of development, and István, Kilgray’s CEO. The topic of discussion is project templates. We’ve barely had time to think about the issue at hand, but we know one thing: we feel for the PMs.
 
We have a partner program called  Growing Together. We’ve asked our Growing Together partners for feedback on the ways they use memoQ. We’ve received a lot of it, including a few long videos which explained in full detail how they set up projects (many thanks again to all our partners who went to great lengths providing such detailed feedback). Watching these videos was a revelation – one thing that struck was how much a PM needs to do to prepare a project before handing it off to translators and reviewers.

As we were walking around the leafy streets of Gyula, one goal started to take shape: we want to reduce the number of clicks a project manager needs to execute before she can launch the project. We came up with the more or less arbitrary number of 80%. It seemed that any feature that reduces the amount of work on a given task by four fifths would very likely be welcome by our users.

Then we started thinking, first small. Let’s do it for local projects first (you can always publish a local project on a server), get some feedback, and only then extend templates to online projects, one or two versions down the road. But what do you do with features that don’t make sense in a local project but do make sense when you publish it… and from this point it all started growing; we added online templates, task automation, and templates suddenly became a huge design and development effort. It might not be apparent (we hope it isn’t), but the local and online template parts were designed by two different people, so there was quite a bit of coordination involved, too. Then we added project lockdown (which we ended up calling Autopilot mode) for online projects created from templates, which necessitated further deep changes in the online project user interface.

There were also, inevitably, some ideas that ended up on the cutting floor. We wanted to add a very simple way of creating a local project for freelancers, with a default TM and TB stored in a default template, but couldn’t work out all the details in time for development; this was cut from the released version. We haven’t given up on the idea, though, so stay tuned for the next release of memoQ – we are fully intent on giving you some fresh surprises. (You can, though, already create a project by right-clicking on a translatable document, selecting “Send to” and then “memoQ”. memoQ will create a project and you can start translating straight away, although at this point you need to add a TM manually if you want to reuse your translations in the future. If you forget, memoQ won’t punish you, though: there is always LiveDocs.)

In the next few posts, we’ll explain in detail how you can use templates to your advantage. We know that many of you already do – so do tell us: did templates achieve our goal of cutting down on the number of clicks? Did you save 80%, or maybe just 30%? If the latter, what would help you get to 80? We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

In the next post, published on Friday July 4th, we'll look at template creation.