PROJECTminder migration
Stephen George & Partners
Migration
SGP have been IRIS PROJECTminder clients since April 2004 when the management team had been relying on a bespoke database system to help them to manage the business. As the practice grew and diversified, the Filemaker database no longer delivered the required level of information that the managers required. After evaluating several options on the market, the decision was made to implement TIMEminder for Architects. However, with a 63% increase in the number of staff logging time, the need for a more flexible resource planning tool became apparent. Following on from a morning work shop with one of the PROJECTminder sales team, the decision was made to migrate to PROJECTminder as quickly as possible.
What they said...
“Moving 2,535 projects and 146 users to another system is potentially a complex process. However, the team at IRIS PROJECTminder managed the whole data migration process. IRIS PROJECTminder also recommended a training plan to support the transition to PROJECTminder, which we followed and proved to be a very worthwhile investment.”
The improvements
The whole process has gone very well. PROJECTminder offers many significant improvements over TIMEminder - the feedback on the timesheet entry process alone has been extremely positive from the staff. An example of this is that finding a project is so much easier when you need to log time and the weekly rather than daily timesheet entry has reduced the errors and improved the promptness and accuracy of time sheet completion. Visually the design has really been thought through and it is intuitive and easy to understand and is also significantly faster to use. For the whole team, PROJECTminder allows you to stay logged in - this means you can work on a project or timesheet and no longer have to worry about getting logged out after 45 minutes. All of this has helped bring our staff along with us and there has been nothing but positive endorsement to the change.
We now have our dedicated IRIS PROJECTminder account manager to work with throughout the process – Charles is very helpful, supportive and is very responsive. When Charles has been away the rest of the team have been more than capable of dealing with any issues or queries - just as promptly.
One huge benefit for us is that we can now import our own historical information into PROJECTminder as and when it suits us. We have loaded in invoice information going back 6 years - it was very quick and easy to do and means we now have a total picture of all of our ongoing projects.
We have standardised a template for our projects that includes milestones, invoice rules and work stages. This has made comparing projects much easier. For directors they can put together a new project in a few minutes and see how this will impact the fee income and resource requirements of the practice. It is then handed over to the project manager to run the job, day to day.
Fee forecasting has been significantly improved. It used to be on numerous spreadsheets. Now the team simply adjust their project programmes and PROJECTminder re-forecasts the fees and resources. We can now manage by exception rather than using our valuable management time to get the data up to date.
The team at IRIS PROJECTminder have clearly listened to the feedback from their clients, as so many of the niggles we had with TIMEminder have been addressed. It is such a change to work with a software company that is responsive and clearly understands the challenges and issues faced by their clients – and does something about it! There is little doubt that the relatively small increase in the monthly subscription for PROJECTminder is vastly outweighed by the additional benefits we are now experiencing.
