Chelmer is an end-to-end software, computing and communications equipment and technology services provider to the financial services community in New Zealand and internationally. The wide range of services offered to clients big and small means that Chelmer must carefully manage their activity to ensure that they provide customers with value for money and utilize their resources efficiently.
Chelmer has opted for ProjectPartner’s On Premise option – installing ProjectPartner on their own servers for delivery to users’ PCs over their WAN – and have enabled ProjectPartner’s advanced Microsoft Project Server integration features to harness the full potential of their systems. Chelmer is very much a ‘power user’ in the depth of information managed through ProjectPartner.
“There was no way to track projects’ profitability or resources’ productivity in our organization before we implemented this software,” says Andy Robertson, Director of Chelmer. “The ability to report on this information during and after our projects was a major driver for the organization to implement time recording.
“We often had some view of project effort – e.g. specific resources having been working on a specific project, supposedly full-time, for several months – and we knew what the project income was. But the same clients were logging incidents and support requirements, customer relationship activity, billing inquiries, etc… so it was impossible to get an overall picture of how much time was consumed by a client from end to end. This, of course, meant that services, and the client as a whole, were impossible to measure for profitability.”
A major reason why Chelmer chose ProjectPartner was that their management were mindful of the likely resistance to recording time and associated changes to work culture: “Key to mitigating this risk was to have a user interface that staff found intuitive to use and make the job of recording time quick and easy,” continues Mr Robertson. “Looking at other products on the market, ProjectPartner is the only one that presents an easy to understand and use ‘calendar’-style user interface.”
ProjectPartner’s browser-based architecture appealed, too. “We preferred a browser style interface. This is consistent with where we believe technology is going, and of course makes it easy to use and record time from anywhere. Our internal IT benefits because there are no client-side applications to install and upgrade – and, of course, pretty much any device can use a browser.”
Integration with Microsoft Project Server is a key area that Chelmer has been pursuing. “It’s fair to say that we still feel we have a way to go on what we are trying to achieve here, as there are a large number of working parts and a fair bit of cross over between all the applications that we are trying to integrate,” says Mr Robertson. “To get the visibility needed on all of the various activities (release management, project management, resource management and program management), the key basis is time. In this regard, ProjectPartner is our ‘center of truth’. But the same time data and some associated date records need to be shared with other systems providing additional reporting. Our goal is real-time data, available from multiple systems in common dashboards for reporting.”
Meeting and exceeding the requirements and expectations of customers such as Chelmer are important drivers for ProjectPartner’s ongoing development, particularly in the area of reporting. While dynamic query structures can be built in Microsoft Excel using ProjectPartner’s integrated Microsoft Web Query (.iqy) protocols, the dashboard and tabular reporting within ProjectPartner itself is constantly being improved. ProjectPartner.com continues to work with Chelmer to provide greater analysis and flexibility for the benefit of all customers.
On ProjectPartner’s effect on Chelmer’s day-to-day project management and time accountability, Mr Robertson says, “It’s had a massive impact on company process. This has been a great help [in ensuring] that all activity has gone through the correct process. I believe it helps set a tone for accountability and trying to encourage staff to understand the link between work and chargeable activity, and whether it’s ‘good work’ – i.e. does it meet the company’s aims and objectives.
“Having made the move to company-wide time recording a number of years ago, I could not now envisage trying to run a company without it,” Mr Robertson says. “It is so fundamental [to] our processes, our ability to charge time and materials for work, and to account for that; our ability to understand return on contracts and to understand where organizational time [non-chargeable work] goes.”
