I wanted to take this opportunity to write a short post
about what we're doing at Line Industries to help us deliver our projects. The Line Industrialists are a busy bunch and despite us being a small team of six (excluding
Baloo) we have lots of active projects at any one time, some of these are large-scale projects others updates to existing websites. Staying on top of everything is essential and we all need an overview of what tasks need to be done and when they are due. Over the years we've tried various software packages to help us manage our work,
Basecamp,
Fogbugz,
Microsoft's Project to name a few and whilst these are all great in their own right we're very picky and none of them quite matched our requirements. Fogbugz was perfect for software development, like our PubliSite CMS, where we produced release after release but it didn't suit the agency side. Basecamp was great for collaboration but we found we lost track of things in the to-do lists.
In April last year we decided to build our own software, we gave the project a suitably functional sounding name of Webtility. Naturally Webtility is web-based and we access it through a browser, in brief it allows us to do the following:
Add clients and create projects for those clients This allows us to quickly bring up all data for an individual client, for example active projects, time spent over a certain period or incomplete tasks. For the projects we can add milestones and budget lines, so we can see where we are at any given time.
Add tasks to the projects We create tasks for every aspect of the project. A task might be an individual bug or something broader like "initial designs". By breaking the project into tasks we can keep track of everything.
Assign the tasks and ask everyone to estimate then schedule them Everybody gets assigned their own tasks and it becomes their responsibility to estimate and schedule them. When we login to Webtility we can see which tasks we're assigned and order them by the date their due. Webtiltiy will highlight tasks that are under-scheduled or over estimate allowing us to make adjustments.
View the tasks in a calendar along with project milestones The calendar view was something that was missing from some of the other software we've tried, we find it gives us each a visual plan of the week ahead showing the tasks we've scheduled and milestones for all our projects.
Record time against the tasks Keeping a time sheet sounds boring and we obviously have to do it when working at an hourly rate but for fixed price jobs keeping a record of time spent for individual tasks helps us improve future estimates.
View update to the minute time and budget reports for any part of a project This is great we can see whether we're on schedule, within budget and report back to our clients.
Generate customised reports We love graphs and Webtility is allowing us to produce all sorts of customised reports which are helping us improve our workflow.
At the moment we're able to export data to Excel for communicating with clients but we plan to open up a client view for allowing our clients to login, feedback on projects and keep up to date with progress, schedule and budget.
We're finding that Webtiltiy is helping us to improve our estimates and to be more accurate when quoting for a project in terms of cost and time. As a company we're able to deliver projects more efficiently, let us know if you've noticed any difference.