Work…your way
While we believe that eManagr is very straightforward to use, this information should help you get through any points that you might find confusing.
Note that this is a work in progress. We will add screenshots for clarity as time permits, add information for new features as we release them, and otherwise evolve this to be as helpful as possible.
On the main page, eManagr has you identify yourself to sign in. Supply your user name and password, if you have one. If you don’t, then you’ll need to register for the service. Don’t worry. It’s free until you upgrade.
If you can’t recall your password, follow the “Forgot your password?” link beneath where you can log in on the left.
On that page, type the e-mail address that you registered with eManagr and click the “Submit” button. Provided you give us the right address, you will receive an e-mail to reset your password shortly. You may follow the instructions there or ignore the message, if you have remembered your password since you asked.
There is no harm to providing the wrong e-mail address, because we ignore any address we don’t recognize. There is also no harm in sending multiple requests. Finally, if you receive the message to update your password and do not remember asking, ignore the message; your password will never change unless you change it.
When you sign up for eManagr, you are asked to provide a profile. This information is the center of your identity in the system, including when people search for help on a project. So be careful and professional when providing the information.
Your name is your real name, what people actually call you. We mention in several places that the eManagr Terms of Service require that you give us a legal name. This is for your protection; if you don’t take your name, somebody else could.
Also, remember that listing yourself on eManagr may lead to employment. A pseudonym can make you look unreliable or land you in legal trouble.
Here, we ask you to tell prospective employers about yourself. Like a résumé, provide information of interest, but keep it short.
When people search for help on eManagr, they usually search for specific skills. This is your chance to be found, by listing what you can (and are willing to) do on a project.
The names of each skill can be whatever you like. However, be aware that people are searching. For maximum visibility, you probably want to be general enough so that the name is something that a project’s owner would consider. However, too general and the name is meaningless.
For example, if you are a scupltor, very few people will look for something as vague as an “artist.” Likewise, “Carving Italian Marble into Sumerian Mythological Figures” might be too specific.
In as many cases as we can think of, and adding more regularly, we try to supply you with possible skill names as you type them. If you see one you like, simply click on the name.
With each skill, we also ask you to rate yourself. Obviously, you can lie, but reputations spread quickly in every industry, so we highly recommend looking at yourself with an objective eye.
From one to five stars, think of your abilities in that field as falling into one of these categories:
To identify yourself to the eManagr system, we need each user to supply a user name for logging in. Just like your name, your user name is part of your identity. In fact, you can allow people to view your profile by giving them your user name. Profile pages take the form http://www.emanagr.com/users/YourUserName.
To use eManagr, you must provide us with a valid e-mail address. This address serves the following purposes:
Your account contains your identity and also has control over anything assigned to or owned by you. It is therefore critical that you keep your account secure. The first and biggest step to security is choosing a password that cannot be guessed. Some guidelines include:
For a simple example, we can start with the first sentence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Taking the first letter of each word and keeping the punctuation, we get:
Fsasyaofbfotc,ann,ciL,adttptamace.And if we change some of the As to similar-looking 4s and a C to an open bracket ([), we get:
Fsasy4ofbfotc,ann,[iL,4dttptam4ce.which no attacker is going to guess, but you can rebuild quickly, once you memorize the original sentence.
But don’t use that example, because anybody reading this page is going to try that next.
Finally, you must agree to our Terms of Service to use eManagr. We have kept them brief in hopes that you will really read them. We wish to maintain a polite and active community at eManagr and the terms are our way of doing so.
Think of your profile as Command Central. It tells you what you need to know to get things done. It tells other people about you.
Right at the top, your name and blurb about yourself are displayed to you and any visitors.
Next, you’ll see the five assignments that eManagr thinks you should work on soon. It bases this decision on:
This is the meat of how others will see you, and has several parts.
Other than your identity, the most important information about you for eManagr includes your workload and ability to estimate the work involved in tasks. If you have too much work ahead, project owners will realize that you are in demand but probably can’t help them. If your accuracy is poor, then they understand the risk involved in putting you on the schedule.
You should put effort into maintaining these numbers, for exactly these reasons. Pay careful attention to how much work you take on and how close your estimates reflect reality. Most project owners would rather hear that a project will take a long time and be pleasantly surprised than hear that a project will be “easy” and wait several weeks past the deadline.
The other part of your profile allows you to keep your contact information and skills up to date.
When viewing another user’s profile, this section allows you to review that user’s skills and invite the user to join one of your teams. To invite the user, select the team and click the button.
eManagr uses this space to provide you with easy access to each of your teams. This list links to each of them, and reminds you which you own.
If anybody used your profile to invite you to join a team, that information will be listed here. You have three options for each invitation, when you decide to answer it. You may:
Teams allow you to separate projects by who works on them. Creating a team is a lot like creating a simple user, so you can quickly fill out the required information.
Your team page is a lot like your profile page. It shows the name and description you provided at the top.
Here, eManagr lists each project belonging to the team. You can follow the link to see that project.
Following the links will show you the profile page of each user on the team, plus the status of invitations.
Once you have created your team, eManagr has more trust in you. So, creating a project is easier than creating a team: Give the project a name, and describe it. We do the rest of the work while you type.
As soon as eManagr shows you the project name you typed (below the Description box), you can add tasks on this page as if it were the Existing Project page.
The project page allows you to manage your project.
If the project must be complete by a certain date, notify eManagr here. When assembling the schedule for you, we will suggest low-priority tasks for abandonment to keep the project on schedule.
Each task in the project is listed here, along with the amount of time expected to remain until completion. Subtasks are indented for ease of reading.
Complex tasks can and should be broken up into smaller pieces. When you specify a subtask, eManagr will provide you with a form to add the information, a title, a description of the work required, and an estimate of the time it will take to complete the task. If the subtask isn’t needed, click the “Forget” icon to the right of the title in the form.
When you create a task, each of the three phases gets assigned to you automatically. If the work would be handled better by another member of your team, open the assignment panel to hand off to that user.
Here, you can also:
This form allows the project’s owner to schedule a period of voting for the project’s tasks.
Voting allows each user a say in the importance of most tasks in the project. The project owner gives each team member a number of votes, and the members, including the manager, may use whatever criteria they like to distribute those votes. Each vote increases a task’s importance on its user’s list of Top Assignments.
If you need additional manpower on your team and don’t have a user to contact directly, you can search for users by skill. As you type the name of the skill you need, the users with that skill (provided you haven’t previously blocked them or they you) will appear. You can follow the links to their profile page or invite them on the spot.
Don’t forget to hover over each name. The pop-up will tell you about the user’s relevant skills and other statistics.
eManagr is only as useful as its users. To improve your experience and to make sure you can work with your professional network, we highly recommend spreading the word about us. To avoid spam, we supply you with a sample message to quickly explain what eManagr is all about.
Please feel free to copy and paste this, make whatever changes you see fit, and send it to anybody who can benefit from our service or can help you benefit from us.
A basic account is free, and allows you to access all the functions and features that eManagr has to offer. However, we limit the number of teams you can own, the number of members in each team, the number of teams you can join, and otherwise limit your ability to run a large project.
We feel that the majority of people who just want to “test drive” or use us for a small project will never notice the limitations, and this is by design. However, if you find these limitations too difficult, we also offer paid service, called a Professional Account.
A Professional Account has no limits on teams, memberships, or bandwidth, and is priced low enough that anybody can spread their wings when they need to. There are also no contracts or obligations, so you can downgrade back to a Free Account without losing any of your work.