One of my favorite things happened this week. Clients who have been live on the Spitfire Project Management System for over three years contacted us because their company’s business needs are changing and they want to utilize more of the features and functionality in our system. In their particular case, they had been operating mostly as Construction Management (CM) and this year have begun taking some jobs that put them into the role of General Contractor (GC).
Author Archives: Stan York
Enough Features: Is It Easy Too?
Help for Newbies – Just in case
As recently as my last blog post, I repeated that we at Spitfire like to talk about the features and functionality of our Spitfire Project Management System. Every once in awhile though, someone says we talk about our features too much! Or at least about too many of the system’s capabilities at one time.
Oh, we get the basic fact that our infrastructure isn’t what sells the system. That’s why we don’t often emphasize the cloud, or single instance storage, or the fact that we have over 700 configurable fields in the web application’s user interface. Even so, for some folks, once you’ve proven a certain level of functionality, they become saturated.
For such folks, it becomes much more about the user experience–and a large part of that is the impressions they get. How easy is this system to use? So just as we pay attention to our users in order to know the features they need most, we also listen and pay very close attention to how people get their job done so that we can make that job easier with each version of our project management system.
User experience is subjective, but some of the things we try to keep tabs on include Continue reading
TweetIncluded Free: Runs in the Cloud
We saw one of those signs while out shopping this weekend: “We’ll beat the competitor’s price or its FREE!”. So we enjoyed a good chuckle, because who is going to give anything away for free? But they got to use the word “FREE”, and I guess that’s all that matters. Along the same vein, today’s spam included one with the subject “Harness the Speed and Security of the Cloud”. Another chuckle for me…but I don’t think that was the goal of the sender.
The Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing admits that the popularity of the term “can be attributed to its use in marketing”. We recognize that emphasizing being a “cloud solution” can be marketing hype and so we don’t talk about “the cloud” as often as we talk about our features.
At Spitfire we are all about the functionality of our Spitfire Project Management System. A very significant portion of that functionality was created as a direct result of listening to our users. We are proud of both that functionality and the technological foundation that has allowed us to build an amazing feature set in our software. So, we talk about our features. A lot.
We don’t want to stop focusing on those features–and we promise we never will–but that same technological foundation that supports all those features was also designed to scale really, really well. Therefore, I’m taking a moment today to emphasize that, yes, of course, the Spitfire Project Management System runs “in the cloud”, and that is equally true whether you think that means Software as a Service (SaaS) or software that scales incredibly well and runs on redundant virtual servers not tied to any local footprint. Continue reading
TweetInfrastructure and Happiness
Oh boy. I have to admit to being perturbed this morning. See, I’m a bit of road cyclist. I’ve traveled over 600 miles so far this season and there I was this morning on one of my favorite country roads and don’t you know that between last Friday morning and now they have torn up the road to prepare for resurfacing. ARG! And I should have expected it, because a week or two ago they were working on another of my routes. Having grown up in the big city, there is a large part of me that thinks these roads really didn’t need resurfacing for years yet. But, left alone, roads deteriorate. Or in the case of my particular path, increasing population density has made old specifications no longer adequate. No matter the rationale, I’m forced to deal with a ruined ride and disruption for weeks to come. These rides are supposed to reduce stress – but I found myself quite unhappy today.
Useful Information
I decided to give into temptation and pick up on Dennis’ thread Beyond the Data. See, it appeals to the geek in me: I love data and playing with it, even though I know I am not in the same league as Stephen Wolfram.
But, I also like to think of myself as having a pragmatic side. All that data is only of value if it helps us produce better results. Or make good decisions faster.
So I spent a few minutes and thought of a concrete example of how the data behind a project management system can help people act smarter in construction project management.
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