Intervals Project Management

Intervals Review

Pros	Cons
High user interface customization	Lack of collaboration tools
Excellent and in depth reporting capabilities and easy to read graphs

Intervals is a highly customizable online project management system that is more than meets the eye; it contains many more features than first thought and in turn, proves to be a complete system that will handle almost any sort of project. At a glance, it provides substantial reporting support, intricate task creation, comprehensive help section, and a plethora of options for invoicing.

User Interface

The Interval’s user interface is fairly basic and not particularly aesthetically pleasing. Everything that you need is there on a single screen, which some alternatives lack; however, the bland look and color scheme of the user interface does not make it particularly appealing. Intervals partially makes up for this by offering a high degree of interface customizability. Namely, the logo can be changed, different themes selected, the ability to change the currency type and default hourly rates, and more.

Features

Tasks

Intervals provides significant support for tasks and defining requirements for each task. Project managers can create single tasks or many at a time, and even import tasks as delimited values, or from Basecamp (another popular online project management system). Users can view the tasks they are following if they wish to keep track of certain tasks that might not be assigned to them, view their overdue tasks, or view the tasks that are assigned to them or owned by them. All these options prove to be highly beneficial as users are able to keep track of all the tasks in the system, and while these features do not particularly stand out as extremely unique, they are still appropriate for most tasks and types of projects.

Adding a new task is very simple, and offers a variety of options, shown in the following screenshot.

Created tasks can then be grouped into milestones for better organization and management purposes.

Reports and Graphs

Intervals offers a pleasant reporting experience and offers a range of different reports, which include:

-          Mr. Pie Chart

-          Trends

-          Periscope

-          Project Activity

-          Summary

-          Break It Down

-          Crosschart

-          Outstanding Balances

-          Project Landscape

Additionally, filters can be applied on these reports for custom date ranges, and also reporting on only certain entities within a project, including:

-          Client

-          Milestone

-          Module

-          Task

-          Work type

-          Manager

-          People

-          Entire Project

If even all this wasn’t good enough, Intervals offers support to email these reports, save them as PNG, GIF, SVG and PDF, or even format the reports as landscape or portrait.  The below screenshots offer some insight into the fantastic reporting capabilities of Intervals.

Pie Chart

Trend Graph

Project Activity Graph

Scratchpad

The scratchpad is a very simple window that basically serves as a notepad to write ideas or any sort of notes that you may wish to store. It does not add them to any particular task, and is often used just as a personal reference, but can be used for anything – there are no rules with the scratchpad. While it is nothing groundbreaking, it is surprising that more online project management systems do not offer this, as it is extremely useful.

Intervals also contains everything else that project managers would require for effectively managing a project such as full invoice support, time tracking, milestone tracking, weekly and monthly overviews of tasks and projects, and more.

Performance

The speed of the system as a whole is slightly above average. While some alternatives offer near instant transitions and loading times, Intervals is definitely not as slow as some systems that take more than 3 seconds to transition between sections. Our tests showed an average of approximately 1.5 seconds between page wait times and system/function transitions.

Ease of Use

We tested adding a company, a project, tasks, and users and found it to be incredibly simple, mainly to do with the linear fashion in which those sections are designed. We had created all of those things in just a few minutes, and the end result – we were already up and running in almost no time at all. The Help and Support section can also be discussed here and we found it to be quite comprehensive as not only do they offer many videos and tutorials regarding use of the system, but also provide the ability to submit feature requests and bugs quite simply.

Overall

Upon first use, Intervals seems fairly simple and limited – the system’s depth was questionable. However, upon further investigation and usage, it became evident that the system is actually quite complex and has a lot to offer. It is definitely recommended for use as an online project management system, and hopefully further updates provide more functionality for collaboration between users, as for the moment, it is slightly lacking. Ultimately, it is a solid system and should definitely be considered. As always, don’t forget to consider all the alternatives, as while some systems clearly stand out from others, the functions and tools within may not directly apply to your managing principals and processes and may not apply to the types of projects and users that are part of these projects.