Enjoy!

Managing project scope creep…

Can’t make them all happy!…

Love your work!…

Too Many Chefs Spoil the Broth…

What do you do when your project management portfolio turns ugly?

Some people have a different understanding of "efficiency".

Love this…

and one last one…

There’s no single solution that fits everyone, but it’s great to see a company do a proper indepth evaluation of some available tools and even better to see where we sit with ours (ProWorkflow).

We did think it was a well balanced report so have a read and see what you think. Feel welcome to try a free ProWorkflow trial account!

—-

Project Management and Time Tracking

Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers.  I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.

Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:

• Web based application
  Our dev’s use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps
• Support for 5 users
  Because, yanno, we need five people to record time
• Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
  We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well
• Feature list and pricing prominent
  Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots,  or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research
• Must have a free trial evaluation
  Yanno, so I could evaluate them
• Professional and sharp web site
  Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this

After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:

Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:

• Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
• Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Low price:  we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly:  rating *3 – (price per month/10)
• Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions

So, using this data, here were my findings:

It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall project management software on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful.

Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:

• Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
• Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
• ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.

If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.

—-

Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

I do realise that not everyone hangs on everything I have to say, but for those out these who leap out of bed in the morning just to hear my thoughts on things, here’s your very own “Julian101 iPhone app!”

Keep me in your pocket! Show me to your friends (and followers)! And let me keep you updated with my latest ramblings! I’ll be sharing thoughts on business, design, creativity and to be honest, whatever comes to mind!

Download Now!

Awesome! After about 6 months hard work and testing, the ProWorkflow native iPhone app is now live and available in the iPhone App Store!

I’m really proud of our ProWorkflow team and the dev team at Curious Media. Curious Media are PWF customers that developed the app in conjunction with the PWF guys. They all put in solid effort to plan, design, develop, test and document this app.

The iPhone app will add some awesome value to our user base and extend the ProWorkflow application’s use past the desktop to anywhere people are connected! This is a first release so we’ll be looking for feedback to develop the solution further.

Although there was significant cost to develop, we have decided to make this app free so it’s easy to download and deploy for all ProWorkflow users and their staff.

Richard has added an iPhone App section to our Help Center to help users get the iPhone app up and running.

Make sure you spread the word! Tell your workmates, friends, colleagues, business contacts, clients, contractors and anyone you can think of!

Download Now!

Article: http://tinyurl.com/yg8ujyd

The economic stimulus assistance injected into major industrial countries to counter the effects of a global recession shone a spotlight on the need to rebuild their infrastructures, reports CRM Buyer.

The need to manage such public works investments efficiently has generated a huge potential market for project management software and related services. Even without the stimulus packages, worldwide spending on such projects is truly eye-popping, making the market for PM systems similarly astounding.

"Current estimates are that $12 trillion per year is spent on fixed capital projects worldwide, representing 20% of global product," J LeRoy Ward, executive vice-president of ESI International, told CRM Buyer.

Many software and SaaS co’s are concerned about competition, but not us. We’ve always believed there’s enough market size for project management software globally to allow for many strong players in the marketplace all with different aproaches.

We’ll continue to improve our world class project management software, http://www.ProWorkflow.com and keep delivering great value to our users! Over time we should get our fair slice of the pie!

From day one, we set out  to build a global business founded on our low inertia business model.  We’ve never just been NZ focussed, it is as easy to reach Los Angeles, London or Levin so why not?

We’ve worked hard to setup automation for trials, sales, support, billing, licensing, client account maintenance and support; leaving our staff free to really talk to customers.  The model has run in profit from day one and the organic growth has allowed us to invest revenue back into the business to support top class infrastructure to support our SaaS application.

“Remember that in SaaS, the app is to SaaS what the hamburger is to MacDonalds – people forget that. The app is a small part. To go global the BUSINESS MODEL and INFRASTRUCTURE and SYSTEMS need to scale… The actual application is the least of your worries. Automation and infrastructure leave people to do what they do best, interact with people to solve problems.”

Supplementing our top team, the backend system called “ProCodeManager, which has seen nearly as much development as ProWorkflow is the ‘Engine’ behind the business and provides us with information on every bit of activity in the business, including dashboards for all user activity, follow up, account management, and financial performance.  PCM also highlights issues, ie: mail backing up, server errors etc. So it helps keep us all  on the ball!

The company has no debt, no cash needs beyond sustainable growth, market salaries, corporate governance, no need for funding, sufficient cash in bank to consider dividends, a 7 figure revenue and a growing happy user base.  We can see the growth and customers tell us PWF really helps in their business – a great place to be,  The PWF solution is essentially  ‘recession-friendly’ as it allows customers to  focus on efficiencies. Saving money in hard times is a handy substitute for revenue growth. Furthermore big business is breaking into small businesses in the USA (and all over), creating a much larger market of SME’s (our target market).

As about 75% of our revenue is charged in USD from offshore customers and the US Dollar has finally returned to a realistic cross rate that has been a shot in the arm for us, we really would like to see the New Zealand government taking more note in policy of our wild currency fluctuations.  It would help us plan better.

In our view the key metric for business is revenue per employee, we are driving for a target of US350k per person, at this level we are relatively immune to what the world does in terms of economic activity.  We are exposed to some risk through broadband connectivity so the better and faster our connections to the world the better for us.

Expenses are relatively fixed and we should be able to drive about 300-500k of revenue per staff member.

With hard work and determined effort  we have made page 1 on Google for the term “Project Management Software” and are now finding an increasing number of referral based sales as we’ve been around a few years now. We’ve been aligning our marketing spend to our product releases and the tidiness of PCM and will tweak it more as our organic growth increases.

We released Xero and QuickBooks integration last year, a Time Tracking Widget in Q3 08 and have just finished the ProWorkflow API.  We have a growing number of developers lining up to get into the API, either to integrate with their intranets or to build cool apps! We plan to build an app library for the ProWorkflow solution this year.

The ProWorkflow affiliate program is about to be launched late Feb and our plan is to drive this hard. We want to reward those who refer sales to us.

As our biggest user base is in the US, and the US has been dropping around 500,000 jobs each month, we have of course noticed some slowdown over recent months.  But once customers move past the shock of revenue falls, efficiency soon gets on the radar – so growth, for us, is back.  For us 2009 is about pushing out to new customers, keeping on keeping on with our efforts to supply good products, build on top class infrastructure from a low inertia operation.

So yes, we are in great shape. Slim, trim and rocking!  We will continue to work hard to support our customers and help then find efficiencies – a real substitute for revenue growth until the global economy bounces back

And my advice on company survival does not change in hard times or at any time.   Grow sales faster than costs, automate process, focus people on the stuff only people can do, have a real value (savings or revenue growth) proposition for your customers, if you can, be international from New Zealand.

Remember, if you have to SELL a product, you’re doing something wrong. Instead, you should be FACILITATING a purchase. Think about that for a bit…

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
————-

Feel welcome to add more comments to this post!!
It’d love to here other people’s thoughts!

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
————-

We’ve recently been working on a QuickBooks (http://quickbooks.intuit.com) integration to do virtually the same function. Whilst QuickBooks is a great application and has high adoption, I have to be honest and say the integration wasn’t that easy. It’s taken about 2 months and we’re nearly there but keep encountering small, odd complexities. It should be ready very soon though.

Going back to XERO though, this is a whole different game. I personally signed up and have been going thorough the solution. It’s looking very promising and QuickBooks should be watching their backs – XERO are doing a nice job of reinventing accounting. There are pro’s and cons to a web based approach, just like there are to a client side app, but personally I prefer web based and portable.

On the API front though, it took weeks to suss out QuickBooks, but our developer had integration with XERO sorted within a few hours with data moving back and forth. He told us it was a piece of cake. So I wanted to say a big thumbs up to the dev team at XERO for the really easy API – It’s much appreciated!  Here’s a comment from our developer:

“Working with the XERO Network API was a great experience because of its simplicity in the integration compared to some other Accounting packages around.

I am very impressed with the guys at XERO on how they have created their Network API that allows partners to integrate smoothly without any problems. It basically requires a simple line of code to transfer to and from XERO. Out of all my experience in integration with outside applications, XERO is one of my favourites!

Great Stuff!!” – Vishal (Senior Developer)

————-

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com
————-

I’ve copied the full-page graphic of the ad and placed it below, I’ve also noted the increase in account stats from the time we got the data for the magazine ad to now. It’s kind of an odd thing to put ever changing stats in a print ad – but we thought it was an interesting piece of content to ad to lend further product credibility.

Managed Through ProWorkflow

Note: Current numbers as at 23rd July 2008

Interesting to see the gain? It’s great validation for the team that people are definitely using the ProWorkflow tool for their project management. Oh well! Back to work, just thought this worth sharing…

————-

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com
————-

Here’s the article:
http://infonews.co.nz/news.cfm?l=1&t=127&id=19828

However, on a more serious note, the article is on the money where it says:

“Investing in job tracking and invoicing software is one way of minimising the effects of an economic downturn”

and this…

“As it becomes increasingly likely that New Zealand will experience an economic dip, business owners are, naturally, looking to reduce overheads’, said Keith Mackenzie, managing director of Software Associates. ‘Choosing the right job management software can help business owners pinpoint exactly which areas of their business are bringing in a profit and which areas are proving less successful. For example, by tracking employee time, business owners may learn that certain jobs are consuming more billable time than others.”

This simple fact is that the world economy is a little tough right now. Many companies I talk to are struggling to find profitability amidst high overheads, rising costs, harder sales and a generally more price driven economy.

I totally agree with Keith that investment in productivity software is a necessary spend that can help businesses trim service costs and help highlight areas for improvement. ProActive Software Ltd (developers of www.proworkflow.com) has been in the job and project management software game now for about 5 years and in that time, we’ve talked to thousands of businesses.

There is one common thread of conversation coming through.
“How can we be more efficient, find problems, and save costs & time”.

Going into an economic downturn, ALL businesses should be asking this. Visit the ProWorkflow website to find out more…

Republishing Note: 
Anyone is welcome to republish this article as free online content, provided that the paragraph below is included in the full form as shown.
————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com
————-