Clubhouse Becomes Shortcut to Transform Software Project Management

Shortcut, formerly known as Clubhouse Software, today announced that its project management software for software development teams has been expanded to include additional workflow capabilities.

CEO Kurt Schrader said team-to-workflow functionality is being added to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and will make it easier to share workflows across software development teams in a more standardized way.

Organizations can standardize workflows across multiple teams while still giving each team the ability to customize workflows for their own unique processes. As work gets created and assigned, it automatically moves into a workflow without having to manually update processes.

Shortcut is designed to make it simpler for development teams to collaborate in a way that maintains transparency with other teams working on projects that are part of the same larger initiative, said Schrader. It allows product managers, engineers and designers to plan, track and measure their work without friction as the organization continues to grow in size, he added.

For example, Shortcut will surface what teams need to focus on as priorities and timetables change within a specific project in addition to allowing users to define sprints using start and end dates, and the tool then sends reminders so the team can reserve time to focus on specific projects.

Shortcut will also integrate with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms via application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable the development of custom workflows that include, for example, integration with real-time conversations occurring via the Slack collaboration service.

Most of the project management software DevOps teams employ today is too complex and intimidating for the average business executive. Rather than forcing business users to learn how to master these applications, a case can be made for a more intuitive set of project management tools for both software development teams and the product managers they ultimately serve.

As more organizations realize how dependent they are on software to drive business processes, many of them are reviewing the tools they currently rely on to manage software development. The goal is to not only reduce friction and enable more transparency across teams but also to provide stakeholders outside of the development team with more visibility into the status of any given project.

At the same time, organizations are simultaneously launching more software development projects that have many dependencies. Many of those initiatives are based on microservices that are being built in isolation from one another before being aggregated to create an application. The dependencies between those microservices require organizations to make sure they are developed and deployed in a way that doesn’t leave one software development team waiting on another to finish a project before they can complete their work.

Schrader said that humans, as a species, are bad at organization. Project management applications should make it simpler for companies to understand how projects are not only organized but also all the dependencies that exist between them.

Regardless of how software development projects are managed the need for greater visibility is obvious to all. Less clear is the best way to go about achieving that given all the communications channels available.