I like to cook my own dinners. Often these dinners require some amount of chopping—of garlic, peppers, olives, tomatoes, parsley, etc. I’m so used to the chopping that I used to not think much about it, until I saw a nifty kitchen gadget called the Kitchen King Pro Manual Food Processor. For some reason, the hand crank appealed to me: I would still be prepping my food (deserving of thanks for my “hard work”), but it would be easier. So I bought one.

Eager to try it out, I used it to chop garlic… and discovered that I’d rather keep mincing by hand to get smaller pieces. Then on a different night, I used it to chop a red bell pepper. Yes, the pepper got chopped into small pieces when I turned the handle…but first I had to cut the pepper into a few pieces anyway to fit it into the bowl and later I had more to wash than just a knife, so I didn’t think it was worth it.

I put my new gadget aside until the day I decided to make falafel. My recipe required the chopping/mashing of chickpeas, parsley, red bell pepper and olives. So I threw all those ingredients into the bowl and spun my handle a few times and voila, it was all chopped up in seconds! I was suddenly very happy to have the right tool around, for it had shaved quite some time from my cooking. I looked at my food processor in a new light and with appreciation.

I wonder if that is how some of our clients feel when they start using our Spitfire Project Management System. At first, they try some small task and maybe are not impressed— they have to learn the new way and it really doesn’t save all that much time and so, they wonder, is it really worth it? And of course, a new implementation requires a fair amount of setup. There are decisions to make, data to input, templates to create, roles and rules to configure. And some may think, “this is a lot of work for something we were doing just fine.”

Until they have that day. The day when they need to do something or gather some information and suddenly it is done in a fraction of the time it used to take. And then they think, “Oh, wow. I guess this is the reason we got this new system!”

For example, one of our clients started using Spitfire to enter Pay Request information. Processing these payments via our interface might not have seemed easier than processing them “the old way.” But once a month, someone at this company needs to gather all the payment information and use it to fill in the Schedule of Values for billing. When it came time to do this using Spitfire, the task that had always taken hours to do and had been fraught with potential mistakes now took a couple of clicks and was 100% accurate. Our client said, “wow, that was easy!”

When dealing with a new tool, new process or new software, it it best to put off your opinion about how much it helps until you have really used it to its full potential. After all, no one has ever bought a car in order to have a cozy place to talk and then thought, “my sofa at home is more comfortable for conversations; this was a waste.” Likewise, when getting used to a new system, it is best to look at the big picture and take advantage of the system’s many strengths.

To explore the strengths of the Spitfire Project Management System, contact us for your free demo.