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!

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
————-

Price driven SaaS customers these days need to understand that SaaS software pricing does have real overheads behind it. The Simplicity of a SaaS business to a customer is a facade that actually hides the complexity of systems, material and resources needed to create a simple front end user experience… To explain further…

The shift to SaaS: Interestingly enough, in the old days (5-10yrs+ ago) the customer side (web and application development) of business would be a complex procedure for a one-off project, with sites often built by a business with a simple resource/skill base (designer+developer) and they’d charge heaps.
 
ie: Customer (Complexity) + Web Business (Simplicity)
= Revenue (High, one-off fees)
= Fast income, non scalable/sustainable model
 
Nowadays, we offer the clients a simpler tool and user/sales experience. However, as we have to charge less through market pricing shifts, the real money is made on margin and scale. Automation and infrastructure solves these, however comes with a cost of behind the scenes complexity and technology costs.
 
So the equation now looks like this:
 
ie: Customer (Simplicity) + Web Business (Complexity behind)
= Revenue (Slow, recurring fees)
= Slow income, scalable/sustainable model

To show this in a real world example, find out below what goes into our SaaS based project management software company’s latest V6 ProWorkflow software release!

Disclaimer: Firstly, I should just point out that I’m the CEO of ProWorkflow.com (ProActive Software ) and do understand that all software companies manage software releases differently. This is simply an example of how ProActive Software handles releases.

We’ve been working away on a new version 6.0 release of our flagship product www.proworkflow.com. This isn’t just a few updates, it’s a fairly solid new release with over 100 updates and pieces of functionality added. The main focus is on improving usability, speed and customer ROI. One of the mistakes we made was telling the user base there was a new release on the way! Now every day we get “When’s it coming? Is it late? Can you include this and that? or another common comment… “Why is it taking so long? It’s only an update?”

It was these type of comments that prompted me to write this post so I could show people the amount of work that goes into a release :-) The following is a glimpse into ’some’ of the thinking and effort needing consideration just to “Roll out V6?.

Customer Feedback

Throughout the year, customer feedback relating to functionality and usability is collected through various means. Emails, forms, calls, testimonials, sales calls etc. We file away the comments of interest in a document, categorized by the sections in the ProWorkflow application. When we do a minor release, we pick a few items of the list.

For a major release we pick the top 50-100 requests that are frequently requested. There are many hundreds of requests that either get dismissed or scheduled to a later release. We make sure no requests are contradictory and that they make sense to add to the core application. We aim to add generic features where possible.

Planning the Functionality

What goes in V6.0, 6.1, 6.1 etc? We always prioritise urgent needs of the masses first, then other needs, throw in a few ‘nice to haves’ and try to hold back on minor functionality for smaller updates later. Major releases (ie: V3, V4, V5 etc)  are ‘database releases’ so we add any new tables to the database needed in this release rather than the smaller regular updates.

When we have the desired list, developers give us estimated times per task and these are entered into our personal version of www.proworkflow.com to manage the project. Our core product ProWorkflow is web based project management software, so we may as well use it for ourselves! Also, this way we’re testing the solution at the same time as we’re working in it! Cunning way to test usability too…

Planning Development Time frames

We take a development list, which has been itemised and times assigned. When this has been put into ProWorkflow, the developers start working through it all. The most important aspect of keeping to the development timeframe is keeping tight communication with the developers. Every day or two we talk with the developers, see what’s been completed and look forward to the deadline to make sure there’s enough resource and hours to meet it.

In this industry, it’s always difficult to meet deadlines as unexpected complexities can arise when working on a complex application, however, through tight communication with developers and daily checking of the development plan we’re able to keep on track. The direct and real time visibility of progress through ProWorkflow makes this easy.

Development

When working on the ProWorkflow application, we prefer to use small tight teams. We do not want large teams of developers working over the top of each other causing errors or programming with different methodologies. Our lead developer and CTO Alan Barlow is the guru behind the ProWorkflow code base. Alan determines what he’ll work on personally and what others do (staff or contractors).

Testing

As we use the ProWorkflow solution for our own internal projects, the team are always testing in a live environment. In addition we have a small group of heavy usage customers that enjoy being early adopter test monkeys. Between the select group of 10 customers there are approximately 100+ users. These users create a combined few hundred projects and few thousand tasks and time records a week. So if there are any issues or bugs, we’ll know about them pretty fast. One of the great perks and opportunities with SAAS (Software as a Service) is that issues spotted can be easily and quickly fixed, applied to a live account, and then rolled over other accounts in a maintenance update. No need to notify the user, just apply the patch. Often we apply a patch live that fixes an issue a customer has never seen or improves a feature’s usability. It’s seamless ongoing development!

Pricing

With every major release (typically annually), the solutions’ pricing is reviewed For the past 3 years we’ve kept pricing as is – we’re currently reviewing pricing again pre V6. As much as we want to keep the pricing affordable, we also have to keep in mind that businesses don’t run on good intentions. In addition the tool provides great ROI to the companies using it so should have a relative value. So… the factors we consider when pricing ProWorkflow are:

• Value/ROI to the customer
• Technical Infrastructure (Servers, networks, comms etc)
• Support Infrastructure
• Research, development and ongoing development
• Scalability/Sustainability
• Competitor pricing and feature sets 

Support

When the V6 upgrade is released, there will be some new functionality. Even though this will be documented in the Knowledgebase, we’ll still receive calls and emails about the upgrade at a higher rate than normal. This puts extra pressure on support staff so we need to be prepared with quick answers and help docs.

Website Content Changes

The ProWorkflow website has a fair number of pages needing updating when the V6 product is launched. The following will need to be updated: Features, benefits, FAQ’s, packages, overview, all screen shots, version numbers, upgrade pages etc…

Update Knowledgebase (Online help guide)

A huge job, but an important one. There are 100+ tweaks to the ProWorkflow product. When you consider that 1 tweak may be referenced in 5-10 places in the knowledgebase, you start to understand that it’s a sizeable task. The knowledgebase is a strategic asset as the better it’s written, the less email and phone support we’ll receive. Self help means quicker support for the customer and less support infrastructure required at our end.

White papers

We have a couple of white papers  that give a brief overview of the solution. These will need to be read through and modified as needed.

Trial Account Master Code

When companies sign up for a Free trial account, the system sets this up from a master code package. This code package needs updating with the latest V6 code. The demo system then needs re-testing.

Subscription Account Master Code

When companies sign up for a Subscription account, the system sets this up from a master code package. This code package needs updating with the latest V6 code also. We have quite a few servers so the master code will need to be updated across all the servers.

Upgrade Packages & Downloads

In addition to Subscription accounts, the ProWorkflow software is also available as a code download to install on a local server. The master packages will need to be updated and the upgrade packages will need to include a new script to add the new V6 tables to the database when installed.

Update All Billing Systems

Depending on pricing or product options, the billing system may need to be tweaked. This would affect the Signup form, payment pages and account and billing pages in the Client Area.

Upgrade Current Subscription Accounts

When a new major upgrade is ready to deploy, we do this in a phased rollout over the customer base. The reason is simple – if there are any bugs we’ve missed, we’ll pick them up early, fix them and roll out further. In addition, we do the phased rollout to stop any new release from having a heavy support load over the initial week. The beauty of a SAAS model is that we can update customer accounts quickly. The downside is that if you rollout an error quickly you can easily affect a large number of customers. So planning a phased upgrade rollout is definitely the safe way to go.

Marketing

• Newsletters
  A few newsletters will be emailed out to the mailing list talking about the V6 release and new functionality.
• Press Releases
  We’ll write a handful of releases about the new product. These will be sent or syndicated to both local and global news sources. 

Project Management

Someone has to manage all this! Easy, We use our own www.proworkflow.com solution for our project management of new releases. See a screen shot (below) showing the huge project task list and timeline. There’s about 100+ tasks on the V6 development alone, and keep in mind this can increase if any of the new update code affects other parts of the application.  So effective project management is a key part of getting a release out…

Here’s the ProWorkflow Project screenshot for the V6 release  ;-)

Technorati Tags: Project management Software,Software,Rollout,SaaS

———————————————–
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 editor:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project, Management Software specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com

I wanted to post this as it’s not often that software companies are transparent. This was written without our knowledge from a long time user and I believe it’s an accurate review. We receive similar comments daily.

Here’s the review: http://www.iterating.com/products/ProWorkflow/
Click below to read the review…

—————————

ProWorkflow rocks for small business project managers.

I have used ProWorkflow for several years now so I have seen it progress over a good period of time. The developers are very focused on the project, extremely competent and I felt very secure having some of my most sensitive data on their hosted system.

The functionality behind the project management is quite extensive, with multi-users, easy to use access controls, and the reporting is excellent. If you’re a small business with lots of subcontractors and clients that like to see project progress, this one is worth every penny as hosted solution, bar-none.

Where they lack some is in integration with existing systems. For example, if you use QuickBooks, it’s marginally integrated at this time which can be hassle. Conversely if you don’t use QuickBooks, the system has a good invoicing module that is a huge time saver if you have subs/employees entering billable time on projects. It completely seems plausible to me that it is just a matter of time before they grow enough to take some of these concerns on.

Usability is excellent but there are some frustrating aspects I have to knock a few notches off. An example of this is inability to set hourly costs by specific users or projects. This is probably more due to the fact that I use subcontractors more so than salaried employees, so to me this is very important that I track what I quoted, what it costs, and what our margins are. That part is not address with ProWorkflow, but like the integration issues, they know this very well and it’s probably just a matter of time.

On architecture and quality, I can only say that source is fully available for purchase and is entirely customisable. So if your organization is large enough to manage modifications, then this is a great code based, evident by some of the heavy hitters that have licensed the product from them. They will customize the system for you if you can afford it, but the hosted solution for small business is mainly been my interest and where I have come to know it. This would make integration with existing systems somewhat a none issue, if you have the in-house expertise to do this.

Support has always been very responsive, often times Julian himself (director of ProWorkflow) making the call. No idea how he finds time to do that, manage the development, and continuously explore web technology interests (he has a blog). The man must be a genius is all I can say about that. I have submitted many feature requests in the past, and while I can’t say I’ve had every feature request fulfilled on the hosted product, what they have implemented, they have implemented very thoughtfully and with the biggest bang for the buck for sure.

Performance & scalability, whatever tricks they do make this look simple, has been a non-issue since the beginning. They seem very conservative not to overload their servers with too many customers. They’re always brisk, and I can’t remember them ever being down for any extended period of time. Like I said, they rock this hands down and was one of the main reasons I signed up with them years ago, after trying many other systems that were fine feature-wise, but just bogged down with slow user response experienced.

Clearly, Julian and his team have a winner on their hands; I just hope they’re no early exit strategy, as I very much like to see them continue to grow with their sense of focus for the product.

The results are obvious; they have a great product, made by a very lean group of guys with some serious knowledge on managing project management enterprise tools.

Once they get some integration features in place to facilitate invoicing through other systems (they do have an invoicing module that’s pretty good), they’ll have hit this out of the park.

I would hands down recommend this product/service to any small business looking for a web-based solution that’s within reasonable monthly expense and has just about all the bells and whistles you could ask for. And depending on the requirements needed, I would likely recommend it’s code-base to a mid-sized firm with in-house resources that could take this and run with it.

——————————
About the editor:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project, Task & Time Management specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com

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—————— MORE INFO ———————

Movember (the month formally known as November) is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year. At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache and along the way raise as much money and awareness about male health issues, in particular prostate cancer as possible. Movember culminates at the end of the month at the gala partés. These glamorous and groomed events will see Tom Selleck and Borat look-a-likes battle it out for their chance to take home the prestigious Man of Movember title.

————————-

- I quite like the facial fuzz – grows on ya (literally)!

Julian Stone, CEO – www.proworkflow.com

——————————
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project, Task & Time Management specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com

How does the CEO of a New Zealand-based creative design agency become a provider of project management software? Ask Julian Stone, director of ProActive Software Ltd. Stone created a project management tool for his Palm Pilot five years ago and shortly thereafter began marketing it internationally. But it’s tough for a small firm to build credibility, cater to would-be customers and find its niche in a universe dominated by much larger stars.

Julian Stone was frustrated. His creative design firm was growing, taking on new projects continuously and he didn’t have a way to keep track his work. Stone, a New Zealand native based in Christchurch, brought his creativity to the problem and wound up creating a project-, task- and time-management system for his Palm Pilot.

Stone’s solution worked so well that his team started asking if they could use it, too. He enlisted the help of a software developer friend, Alan Barlow, to expand the solution and put it on the Internet where it could be shared. When it worked for Stone’s team, friends and colleagues started asking if they could purchase it for their companies.

And thus, Stone’s small business was born. Barlow became co-director of ProActive Software, the company he and Stone founded to commercialize ProWorkflow, his project management software tool. Within the company’s first month of operation, they had 50 small business customers, most of them with no more than 20 employees. Currently, their customer base is concentrated at 70 percent in the United States, 12 percent in Australia, 7 percent in New Zealand and 5 percent in the U.K. The rest of his customers are distributed worldwide.

“We are a classic garage start-up operating from the country, with a large global user-base, and are now landing large multi-national clients,” says Sam Law, one of Stone’s sales support staff. “We had no funding investment and only used sweat equity. We are scaling up steadily with annual revenue doubling every six months.”

Stone’s main priority in developing the product was usability. Before they made the decision to put his homegrown solution on the market, he and Barlow crawled user forums at established project management software Websites. What they found across the board, Stone says, were large numbers of unhappy customers who complain that products are unworkable or operate on unsustainable business models.

They decided to emphasize simplicity and the big picture in designing and marketing ProWorkflow. “We aim to make things as easy for the customer as possible, so we’re always looking for ways we can simplify the application, usability, hosted service and billing. It’s all about automating and simplifying processes,” Stone says.

But getting a foot in the door was not easy for a small upstart based outside of North America. “We had no apparent credibility from the customers’ perspectives, so we had to think smart and make sure we had prepared quick answers for any questions they may ask,” he recalls. “You pause and you lose credibility.”

Stone also strove to make his Website particularly slick, with plenty of downloadable sales material. “Instead of looking like a small company that was growing, we had to appear as a solid, mature company even before we were,” he says.

The firm immediately put customers and potential customers into their product development loop through regular telephone calls, e-mails and feedback interviews, Stone says: “We asked what they needed and built it generically. Then we’d sell for a bit, gather more customer feedback and roll out another release. With each release, the product gets more industry-compatible and can offer greater benefits to customers.”

Although the product has appealed mostly to smaller clients, Stone capitalized on larger customers when he attracted a few. “We create customized solutions that perfectly meet their needs. These can range from minor tweaks to large full-scale product rebuilds. As a result, they become long-term satisfied customers,” he says.

As a startup, his personal credibility and his firm’s reliability were the biggest hurdles to be overcome when looking to attract new customers. “We had to prove our credibility to the decision makers. We’d provide all information necessary to do this and now that we have many case studies, it’s much easier,” Stone says.

Another hurdle was price. ProActive overcame the objections of price-driven customers by creating what Stone calls a “lost earnings calculator.” It allowed customers to plug in some numbers and see exactly how much inefficiency was hurting their companies’ bottom lines. His product was presented as a solution to that money drain.

A final major hurdle was deciding how to deploy the software. “Customers have typically been used to complex IT solution rollouts and had preconceived ideas about the dramas involved with deploying new software,” Stone says. “We developed an SAAS (Software As A Service) approach, so customers could simply use or rent the service on our servers based in Freemont, Ca., without worrying about complex deployment.”

Good planning and a firm eye on the big picture of his customers’ needs has helped keep Stone grounded. Although he does detailed planning, he keeps his time frames short – typically no more than six months out. Having short planning cycles makes his goals more achievable and allows the firm to change direction quickly if needed, he says.

ProActive has two offices, the headquarters in Christchurch and a satellite office in Auckland, N.Z. “We are a virtual team and have workers and contractors globally,” Stone says. Technology has made coordination fairly easy. Since the company’s founding in 2002, he counts only 10 in-person days spent with Alan. Mobile phones, MSN, Skype, email and video conferencing have filled in the gaps smoothly, he says.

Because his team is international and virtual, he’s made sure his product addresses those situations. “This tool allows businesses to take advantage of collaboration and globalization trends. The world is moving towards a global community and businesses need to be able to collaborate on projects, not just locally anymore, but across time zones and country borders,” he says.

Stone has recently scaled up his product, so it will be more applicable at the enterprise level, and begun marketing it to companies with 50 to 1,000 users. Because he’d concentrated on selling to small firms in the early years, he says, he believes the company missed opportunities for larger sales. Stone offers some advice on his blog about selling to markets of various sizes.

Meanwhile, he’s proud that a firm with an “accidental” birth has come this far and overcome so many startup hurdles. “Although we are a known solution in the industry now, it wasn’t always this way. Quite often nowadays our leads are referral-based, so there is immediate credibility,” he says.

Technorati Tags: Project Management , Entrepreneur , Julian Stone , Alan Barlow , Web Solution

——————————
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, Task & Time Management specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com

Share this post :

How does the CEO of a New Zealand-based creative design agency become a provider of project management software? Ask Julian Stone, director of ProActive Software Ltd. Stone created a project management tool for his Palm Pilot five years ago and shortly thereafter began marketing it internationally. But it’s tough for a small firm to build credibility, cater to would-be customers and find its niche in a universe dominated by much larger stars.

Julian Stone was frustrated. His creative design firm was growing, taking on new projects continuously and he didn’t have a way to keep track his work. Stone, a New Zealand native based in Christchurch, brought his creativity to the problem and wound up creating a project-, task- and time-management system for his Palm Pilot.

Stone’s solution worked so well that his team started asking if they could use it, too. He enlisted the help of a software developer friend, Alan Barlow, to expand the solution and put it on the Internet where it could be shared. When it worked for Stone’s team, friends and colleagues started asking if they could purchase it for their companies.

And thus, Stone’s small business was born. Barlow became co-director of ProActive Software, the company he and Stone founded to commercialize ProWorkflow, his project management software tool. Within the company’s first month of operation, they had 50 small business customers, most of them with no more than 20 employees. Currently, their customer base is concentrated at 70 percent in the United States, 12 percent in Australia, 7 percent in New Zealand and 5 percent in the U.K. The rest of his customers are distributed worldwide.

“We are a classic garage start-up operating from the country, with a large global user-base, and are now landing large multi-national clients,” says Sam Law, one of Stone’s sales support staff. “We had no funding investment and only used sweat equity. We are scaling up steadily with annual revenue doubling every six months.”

Stone’s main priority in developing the product was usability. Before they made the decision to put his homegrown solution on the market, he and Barlow crawled user forums at established project management software Websites. What they found across the board, Stone says, were large numbers of unhappy customers who complain that products are unworkable or operate on unsustainable business models.

They decided to emphasize simplicity and the big picture in designing and marketing ProWorkflow. “We aim to make things as easy for the customer as possible, so we’re always looking for ways we can simplify the application, usability, hosted service and billing. It’s all about automating and simplifying processes,” Stone says.

But getting a foot in the door was not easy for a small upstart based outside of North America. “We had no apparent credibility from the customers’ perspectives, so we had to think smart and make sure we had prepared quick answers for any questions they may ask,” he recalls. “You pause and you lose credibility.”

Stone also strove to make his Website particularly slick, with plenty of downloadable sales material. “Instead of looking like a small company that was growing, we had to appear as a solid, mature company even before we were,” he says.

The firm immediately put customers and potential customers into their product development loop through regular telephone calls, e-mails and feedback interviews, Stone says: “We asked what they needed and built it generically. Then we’d sell for a bit, gather more customer feedback and roll out another release. With each release, the product gets more industry-compatible and can offer greater benefits to customers.”

Although the product has appealed mostly to smaller clients, Stone capitalized on larger customers when he attracted a few. “We create customized solutions that perfectly meet their needs. These can range from minor tweaks to large full-scale product rebuilds. As a result, they become long-term satisfied customers,” he says.

As a startup, his personal credibility and his firm’s reliability were the biggest hurdles to be overcome when looking to attract new customers. “We had to prove our credibility to the decision makers. We’d provide all information necessary to do this and now that we have many case studies, it’s much easier,” Stone says.

Another hurdle was price. ProActive overcame the objections of price-driven customers by creating what Stone calls a “lost earnings calculator.” It allowed customers to plug in some numbers and see exactly how much inefficiency was hurting their companies’ bottom lines. His product was presented as a solution to that money drain.

A final major hurdle was deciding how to deploy the software. “Customers have typically been used to complex IT solution rollouts and had preconceived ideas about the dramas involved with deploying new software,” Stone says. “We developed an SAAS (Software As A Service) approach, so customers could simply use or rent the service on our servers based in Freemont, Ca., without worrying about complex deployment.”

Good planning and a firm eye on the big picture of his customers’ needs has helped keep Stone grounded. Although he does detailed planning, he keeps his time frames short – typically no more than six months out. Having short planning cycles makes his goals more achievable and allows the firm to change direction quickly if needed, he says.

ProActive has two offices, the headquarters in Christchurch and a satellite office in Auckland, N.Z. “We are a virtual team and have workers and contractors globally,” Stone says. Technology has made coordination fairly easy. Since the company’s founding in 2002, he counts only 10 in-person days spent with Alan. Mobile phones, MSN, Skype, email and video conferencing have filled in the gaps smoothly, he says.

Because his team is international and virtual, he’s made sure his product addresses those situations. “This tool allows businesses to take advantage of collaboration and globalization trends. The world is moving towards a global community and businesses need to be able to collaborate on projects, not just locally anymore, but across time zones and country borders,” he says.

Stone has recently scaled up his product, so it will be more applicable at the enterprise level, and begun marketing it to companies with 50 to 1,000 users. Because he’d concentrated on selling to small firms in the early years, he says, he believes the company missed opportunities for larger sales. Stone offers some advice on his blog about selling to markets of various sizes.

Meanwhile, he’s proud that a firm with an “accidental” birth has come this far and overcome so many startup hurdles. “Although we are a known solution in the industry now, it wasn’t always this way. Quite often nowadays our leads are referral-based, so there is immediate credibility,” he says.

Technorati Tags: Project Management , Entrepreneur , Julian Stone , Alan Barlow , Web Solution

——————————
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, Task & Time Management specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com

Share this post :