Announcing the Blueprint June 2010 Release

The June 2010 update is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! In this release, we’ve made it easier than ever to focus in on the parts of your processes and your business that matter the most to you. We’ve added the ability to follow any object in Blueprint, whether it is an entire project or process, an individual input or output, or role associated with a particular activity.

Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:

• Follow Me: Unfortunately, our responsibilities usually don’t fall neatly within the bounds of a single process. If you’re the owner of a critical IT system, how do you know what are all the processes that depend on you? How do you know when they change? Similarly, if you’re in a role that often has cross functional responsibilities, how do you know when there’s a process change that requires your attention?

  The solution: follow the items that you’re responsible for or interested in inside Blueprint.

  Let’s take a look at how it works:
  

  

  You can follow nearly anything in Blueprint — an entire project, process, activity, or individual piece of data such as a role, input, output, system, or problem — simply by clicking the star next to your desired item. Once you’ve followed something, you’ll receive updates in your news feed every time the item is used in a new process, removed from a process, or updated.

  We’ve also taken this opportunity to make the What’s New feed on the home page both more focused and more detailed. You can now choose to narrow down your list of updates to only your followed items, which can help keep your attention centered on what’s most valuable to you. Additionally, we’ve added Recent Changes links to the entries in the feed; these allow you to drill in and see the nitty gritty details behind each transaction.

  The redesigned home page and ability to follow items in Blueprint has already greatly raised the level of visibility of process changes for us internally on the team here at IBM. Please try it out and let us know what you think!

• Redesigned Project Page: The project details page has also gotten some great changes for this release. Based upon your feedback, we’ve streamlined the page, removing parts that weren’t valuable and surfacing other information that was. As a result, you’ll notice that we’ve traded the old project maturity status bar for a new changes section. The changes section instantly shows you what’s happening across your entire project and even gives you the ability to drill down and see the complete details of each modification. Whether you’re running a process improvement effort or just want to see what your coworkers are doing, the new project page is a simple and quick way to get a handle on what’s happening on your team.

As always, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — including reliability and formatting improvements to the process documentation editor and a cleaner theme for generated PowerPoint presentations. Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.