Download the Free DoView Legacy App

“Sometimes elegance and simplicity define use”

— Gartner Cool Vender Award for our legacy DoView app

The DoView Legacy App will be available here soon

Quick Overview

This page will have a link to the DoView Legacy App. At the moment, it includes four very short videos on features of the DoView Legacy App. A written description of some key DoView features and details of what the Gartner Research report on DoView said about the app when the DoView App was awarded the much sought-after Gartner Cool Vendor status.

Short help videos for DoView legacy app

Overview of what DoView app is for (2 min).

Making clones in DoView app (1.5 min).

How to format a box in DoView app (2 min).

Making a drill-down page in DoView app (2 min).

DoView’s features

DoView legacy app (Windows)—formerly a paid app, now provided free for use for DoView Planning—is designed for undertaking DoView Planning and includes features that speed up your outcomes and planning workflow. You can do most DoView Planning in PowerPoint or Google Slides (using a PowerPoint version of a DoView diagram built with our AI DoView Drawing Prompt). However, at the moment, DoView app’s unique features are particularly useful doing DoView Visual Alignment at scale. This is where you visually align your activities/projects with priority outcomes.

The key features of the DoView app are the following:

  • Presentation mode is similar to editing mode. In the DoView app, presentation and editing modes look and feel almost identical. This is based on a strategy psychology concept that when building a strategy/outcomes diagram, users should feel that the model being constructed in whatever app is being used is being extracted seamlessly from the mental models in the heads of the people building the model. Those building such a model also need to feel comfortable amending it in any way at any point. A distinctly different, highly technical editing mode can discourage this by ‘breaking’ participants’ sense that the diagram is evolving in the course of the ongoing dialogue amongst those developing it.

  • Supports dividing the diagram into drill-downable subpages. The DoView app has features that encourage the user to split a DoView diagram into a series of drill-downable subpages rather than just having one large, unwieldy model. The DoView subpages size is optimized for portability across paper, tablets, computers and when data projected. Compared to very large single-page models, the moderate size of the subpages in modular DoView diagrams results in a low cognitive load, making them much easier for users to quickly understand.

  • Represents links between boxes in multiple ways. Given that it is easier for users to understand a multipage strategy/outcomes rather than a larger single-page diagram, the issue of how to show links between boxes within multipage diagrams needs to be dealt with. The method used in typical drawing software, of simply representing a link as a drawn line, fails when you want to depict a link between two boxes on separate pages in a multipage model. To deal with this, the DoView legacy app stores the relationships between boxes in its database, which means that it can then represent links in multiple ways—as either drawn lines or as symbols showing that there is a link between boxes on different pages. The app also allows users to use a right mouse click to see a list of the boxes that are linked to any box that they have highlighted.

  • Clones of elements. DoView allows boxes and other elements to be cloned. This means that if you change the name of one of these elements in one place, the change is reflected in other places where its clone may appear. In addition, being able to clone boxes within the DoView diagram is useful when you develop a multipage model and want the same element to appear on different subpages and you want to be able to edit them just once, and the changes will appear in every instance of the element in the diagram.

  • Designed for practical visualization. The DoView app is designed for practical real-time visualization during meetings. This facilitates the use of DoView diagrams as shared thinking tools that people can work with in real-time during meetings.

  • Files can be saved as XML. DoView app files can be saved in their native format or in XML (a generic format for moving files between different apps). This allows the possibility of DoView models being moved back and forth between apps or platforms as long as each of the apps or platforms can read and/or save in XML format.

  • DoView files edited by different people can be merged. The DoView app can merge files. This means that different people can work on parts of a DoView file that can then be merged back into another version of the file and the changes that have been made can be incorporated into that other version

Gartner Research Report on DoView Cool Vendor Award

The DoView app was recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor. This is a distinction given to only a handful of companies worldwide each year. This award highlights software that stands out as innovative, impactful, and forward-looking, giving the app strong independent credibility from one of the world’s most respected technology analysts. They gave the award in the Enterprise Portfolio Management category. This is the category concerned with apps and platforms that assist with aspects of organizational planning and ensuring that there is alignment between what an organization is trying to achieve and the projects that it is using to try to get there.

When Gartner awarded DoView Cool Vendor status, they praised the app as an easy-to-use and conceptually innovative tool that helps people think about planning with an outcomes focus. They also noted that while the approach remains powerful, the technology reflects an earlier generation. This is why the DoView app is now being made freely available, so as many people as possible can use it to explore the use of DoView Planning in all settings. Some quotes from the report are below.

‘Sometimes, simplicity and availability define elegance. DoView's innovating technology focuses on outcomes, which it does by defining the set of building blocks of all outcomes and showing how these relate to each other. Enterprisewide tools have existed for years to solve this problem and have suffered from both poor adoption and limited market penetration. DoView solves this problem by approaching the problem from the bottom up instead of the top down. It does so by inexpensively putting the solution in the hands of the person who needs it the most - the project manager (PM). Do View allows the PM to prepare a linked analysis (benefit or results chain) with a single piece of software . . .’

‘DoView should be of interest to IT and business leaders looking for cost-effective ways to execute project strategies and get improved outcomes. In theory, project managers are trained to think in terms of work breakdown structure, and decomposing and linking outcomes should be the most natural activity in the world. The truth is, however, that the Gantt chart focus of enterprisewide Project Portfolio Management tools has shifted from a natural orientation toward work breakdown structure to focus on tasks.

DoView offers an affordable way to start shifting the culture away from tasks to outcomes, and can serve as a way for IT to better communicate the work that is being done by agile teams.’