Most companies embark down a surprisingly unplanned and unstructured path when looking at project management software.
Sometimes the initiative starts from the top, sometimes it starts with Project Managers, and sometimes it starts with an IT department. However, it is surprising how often these searches begin without the other players knowing about the search, without evaluation criteria being established, without budgets being established – basically with no plan at all.
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Once upon a time, I read a story about a construction company that was charged in federal court with defrauding their client of more than $32 million and paying their workers less than required by law. It made me wonder how concerned companies and organizations are when they hire a construction company: how often do they look for “proof” of honesty and legal transactions before contract? After all, no one wants to discover fraud and illegal activity in the construction company that they have hired, often after a lengthy bidding process!
“Safe and Reliable” are two words frequently used when articulating the features and benefits of computer back-up systems. But just how safe is “Safe” and just how reliable is “Reliable”?
After installing a reasonably expensive automated back-up and recovery system on our network, we followed the installation instruction guide and did a complete back-up followed by a complete system restore.
The successful completion provided a sense of confidence that, should disaster strike, we were only minutes away from initiating a restore of the data and being back in business.
For years we were under the delusion that our automated back-up and recovery system was functioning correctly. After all, there were no device errors reported through the sys-admin tools. That, coupled with our continuous cycling and replacing of the backup tapes, strengthened our belief that our “Safe and Reliable” system would be there at a moment’s notice. NOT SO!
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Dennis recently blogged about how RFI’s are similar to blood cells, in part because of how important the proper, healthy circulation of information is to the life of every project.
Yet he and I also have threads going about the problems caused by disorganized data. It occurred to me that these two topics intersect. Yes, it is incredibly important that RFIs circulate freely and correctly. But it is just as important that you have clear, precise information about when that RFI circulated and to whom.
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The quote above came from a client recently. Why was he so happy? Because he had sent an enhancement request to Support and Support was able to tell him “we’ve already added that in our latest version.”
While we get many ideas from clients on how to improve our software (and I know that Development considers each suggestion), sometimes we come up with ideas ourselves in anticipation of our client’s needs. And by “we” I do mean everyone at Spitfire Management. As we teach the Spitfire Project Management System, as we answer questions about it and demo it and document it and implement it, we all think of ways that the system could work better. And we, ourselves, pass those ideas along to Development.
Sometimes those suggestions are not even major enhancements, but rather little tweaks that make it easier and faster for our clients to get work done. Because, really, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
What functionality do you look for in a project management system? What user-interface features make work easier for you? What makes you think, “Now, that would be cool!”? You never know; it may already be on our drawing board.
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