23.7 will be released on Tuesday 3rd October 2023

Release 23.7 is here to supercharge your productivity, elevating your experience with the application and simplifying the management of your initiatives.

Every enhancement in this release has been thoughtfully crafted for the non-technical user. Our goal is to empower you to harness the full potential of Amplify.

 

Optimizing Resource Allocation with Effort Assignment

In our continuous quest to enhance your experience with Amplify, we're thrilled to introduce an exciting new feature: Effort Assignment. This addition is a must-have for all Amplify users striving to effectively manage their resources and achieve their goals. 

Assigning effort to individual resources allows you to:

• Streamline project planning by helping define clear expectations for task completion
• Capture data to inform resource allocation within and across projects in your portfolio
• Update effort allocation in real-time to ensure your project plans remain accurate and adaptable 

This feature is now available within our Schedule, Kanban and Task products areas. When creating or editing a task, you'll find a new option to allocate effort as a percentage of a resource's total availability. 

 

Enhancing Usability for Seamless Navigation

Our commitment to providing you with an effortless and intuitive experience led us to embark on a customer-centric journey to improve Amplify's usability. We've focused our efforts on refining key product areas, resulting in enhancements to the following sections: 

Global Navigation

Simplified top navigation bar:

• Subtle design update to icons
• Removed labels next to Home and Enterprise icons to streamline the navigation bar
• Converted search field to a button which gives the user more space to enter their search query
• Removed notifications bell icon and combined this with ‘My Account’ menu to better utilize menu

Updated structure of ‘My Account’ menu to include the following items:

• My Account
• My Dashboard (formally Personal Dashboard)
• Notifications
• Administration (dependant on permission level)
• Help
• Signout

Hierarchy pop-up usability updates:

• Updated styling to make it clear that a pop-up modal is being viewed (rather than a new page) so that users don’t hit ‘Back’ within their browser and navigate further back to an unintended page
• Added ‘collapse all’ button to collapse hierarchy items, in addition to the 'expand all' feature which already exists

Increased access to key information through side navigation bar:

• Amplify icon at the top of the navigation links to Homepage which is a familiar navigation pattern for the user
• Initiative properties is now a standalone menu item as this was previously buried under the initiative title

Improved orientation by providing on-page context:

• Updated breadcrumbs layout to be consistent across classic and program models
• Added page titles to provide users with context on where they are located within the application
• Moved initiative hamburger menu under initiative label/name as the sub-menu items (eg. Update baseline, Archive etc) relate to the initiative as a whole, rather than the specific page the user is located on which could cause confusion around their control

Properties

Removed redundancy of information for initiatives:

• Consolidated fields from 'Edit' page into Properties to remove duplicates and provide a single source of truth for all your initiative information

Project Brief

Increased flexibility to manage initiatives from Project Brief:

• Custom fields can now be added to the ‘Properties’ section which is common to all stages.
• Information icon now opens items within a sidesheet allowing the user to make quick updates without leaving project brief (exception being Benefits which will be updated in the next release).
• Benefit/Cost widget:
  • Removed the ability to be able to create a cost or benefit from widgets under stages which have already been approved
• Task/RAID widget:
  • Ability to select the number of items displayed per page within the widget under project brief configuration. Users now have the choice of displaying either:
    • 5 items
    • 10 items
    • 20 items
  • Display dates will be shown as (number) month (abbreviated to three letters), year (4 digit number). For example: 28 Oct, 2023. This removes the need for alternative date formatting based on region (eg. dd/mm/yyyy vs mm/dd/yyyy)
• Added new resource demand widget and sidesheet

Project Dashboard

Schedule widget clearly highlights delays:

• Removed ‘hourglass’ icon under Delay column and replaced this with the number of days delayed/ahead
• Baseline milestone will display in red if there is a delay to help surface helpful information under the tooltip. Also updated text colour to improve accessibility.

Process Dashboard

Improved scannability of initiative status/stage: 

• Created a landing page if process dashboard has been enabled without stage gate process so users have a clearer understanding of how to enable this feature
• Replaced ‘cog’ icon with a dropdown to highlight active state for the graph display
• All cards are now left aligned under stages and initiative state is indicated through either a gate pending icon or a complete icon
• Initiatives under each stage are now ordered by:
  • Gate status
    • Pending approval
    • Not in gate
    • Complete
  • Time spent in stage (Longest to Shortest)

Schedule

Grouped controls to reduce cognitive overload:

• Table controls 
  • Now located on the left-hand side of the table
• Filters & views 
  • ‘Features’ renamed to ‘Filters’
• Modify actions 
  • Moved 'Save' button to group it with 'New Task' button
  • Updated button text on Edit Task modal from ‘Save’ to ‘Update’ to make it clear that users still need to save changes to the schedule
  • ‘Unsaved changes’ message displayed to prevent users from navigating away from the page under the assumption that the schedule autosaves.
  • ‘Undo’ functionality is currently under investigation and will be updated as part of the next feature release if determined to be a viable improvement
  • Added tooltip to ‘Apply constraints’ button
• Import
• Export
• Fullscreen 
  • Icon now changes to an ‘x’ when in fullscreen mode

 

Default Permissions for New Amplify Users

Whether you're creating your Amplify users manually or generating them via SAML/SSO, this feature empowers you to spend less time administering and more time delivering business value. 

Amplify Administrators now have the ability to easily configure default access permissions for users so that​ your team are able to hit the ground running as soon as they login to the application.

See our knowledge base article to find out more.