Countersoft, the team behind the Gemini ALM and bug tracking tool, is becoming Ekso. The company's products focus on IT help desk, bug tracking, test management, and general ALM functionality.
$10
Per User Per Month
Powernoodle
Score7.5 out of 10
N/A
Powernoodle is designed to help leaders make better quality decisions by quickly and effectively engaging the collective wisdom of stakeholders. The vendor aims to provide the most powerful, yet easy to use, Decision Engagement Platform. Cloud technology is fused with 50 years of cognitive, behavioral, and decision science to focus stakeholders, and minimize the biases, barriers and dysfunctions typical to most organizations that get in the way of making quality…
Gemini is well suited to help track issues and change requests, projects, bugs, time logs, etc. It is less appropriate for reporting needs or general office management needs.
Gemini offers flexible framework that allowed IT to build a workflow based process. IT change requests were divided into several buckets: New Change Requests group for business units to submit requests for enhancements and new project ideas, Pending Change Requests for approved projects that are waiting for IT resources, Application Development where we track active projects, Defect Tracking where bugs are tracked during testing and finally Release Management where requests for deployment are tracked.
Gemini allows to create custom fields and add them to View, Edit and Add screens. This flexible model allowed us to track additional information on the project such as IT Point of Contact, System Name, Team Name, Testing dates, etc.
Gemini has flexible email notification model that allows to keep business customers informed on the project progress. Whenever comment is added by project manager email alerts goes out anyone that is set to watch project progress.
Powernoodle has ignited deeper, more candid conversations among our team leaders. We've been able to see through these discussions that we haven't always told our story in the most compelling manner, and that we need to be clearer, more concise and less wordy. Since Powernoodle limits your contributions to a certain number of characters, it forces you to think hard about what you really want to say. This feature was particularly powerful for our organization, which has tended to verbosity.
Powernoodle allowed us to vet old and new ideas in a safe space, minimizing biases and groupthink. In many organizations there are some who speak more than others, and often their ideas get more attention. What Powernoodle does brilliantly is it allows, actually requires, each participant to write what they wish anonymously and without interruption. Each participant is equal in the sense that all input into Powernoodle is brief (limited number of characters) and the anonymity definitely prevents the usual bias toward those who speak the most.
Powernoodle increased critical thinking about our organization and forced us to re-examine why and how we do what we do. With Powernoodle, we were able to look at everyone's ideas, comment on them, decide if some should be merged, and ultimately vote on them. The Powernoodle process forced us to be clear, which meant we each needed to think critically about what has worked and what hasn't worked for us, and how we move forward with what has worked and with new ideas.
Gemini's development team continues to improve the product and provides a comprehensive roadmap of upcoming features that makes you want to upgrade as soon as a new version comes out.
While we are still in the beginning stages of taking action on the decisions we made using the Powernoodle process, I have no doubt that there will be a very positive ROI on our overall objectives.
