MyProjectTracker – The Blog

I won a copy (thanks Andy Beal) of “The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch (which was nice) and it is a great read for anyone interested in growing their business through referrals. One section starts with the sentence “People don’t talk about boring companies..”. He’s right, they don’t!

This is a challenge that I have faced since setting up MyProjectTracker. For months, it was all about features and capabilities. The 15 second pitch included the words project management (and yes, I could see peoples eyes glaze over!). In other words spoken like an IT person selling to an IT person, not as a marketer or sales person to a business owner.
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We thought long and hard about going for an open beta test on MyProjectTracker. On the plus side we felt we’d get honest feedback from people who did not know us i.e. not the friends and family brigade. On the negative side, we were putting the product out there and leaving ourselves open to criticism.

We elected to go for it and opened up the product so anyone could sign up to and have a look around. We felt the benefits of open and honest feedback far outweighed the risk of exposing ourselves to potential criticisms.

We pushed the product for exactly one week directly to companies and via the usual social media channels. We decided to ease off once we had about 125 users signing up. We had a target of 20% of those people to actually go beyond the look around and actually get themselves setup and using the product in anger.

We hit our target in less than a fortnight – delighted. We got our sign-ups and our 20% of active users – a mix of businesses from single person consultancies to our largest, a company with 30+ employees. A good cross-section we felt.

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This morning, I was reading a post on Bloggertone that reminded me of our own journey to get where we are at the moment.

When Eoin and I presented the concepts for MyProjectTracker to our friends in Contrast, we had already written down to an implementation level i.e. dictating (almost), how we wanted the product to be built. We had gone the direct route to come up with an answer for how the product should be put together based on our own experiences up to that point. Oh, and to ensure it was deployed as fast as possible (in our eyes).

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“You are scheduled to come in for filming for Dragons Den during the first week in January”

Our call to arms that made the Dragons Den application suddenly very real. We were lucky though. We found out in early November so we had time to prepare.

But where to start?

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Hello Everyone.

We felt it was about time we shared a bit of an update with you to let you know what’s going on in MyProjectTracker world.

Where to begin… hmm!

Well, the beta testing is going well and we have had a great response from the folks who are “using it in anger” – of which there are a fair number. As expected, we have hit a few bumps in the road that we are working through at the moment, but thankfully nothing awkward – just a bit time consuming.

We are looking at our marketing site again. The message coming back is that it is brilliant in design but to subtle in its approach. We need it to be more like a shop than it is at the moment so we’re working hard to see what we can come up with. We’ll probably pop a couple of ideas up on Facebook at some point to see what you reckon – we’d love your opinions.

We were on the Irish version of Dragons Den the other day. Grateful for great editing. It was a fun experience and we’ll put up a post about it in due course.

What else. Ah yes, the road-map for the next while is effectively finished.  We have some exciting things in the pipeline and once we have our ball-park dates for when we are going to pop them into the product, we’ll let you know. If your using the product, let us know your thoughts for possible inclusion too!

We’re enjoying the blogging as well.  Hopefully you are as well. We tend to write a little about a lot of different things that come into our minds – but this means it’s from the heart and not contrived (we hope!). It also means we don’t run out of things to write about!

Commercial launch is approaching, but we need to iron out the bits and bobs first. We’ll keep you posted.

That’s about it. Looking for any information, sure let us know at info@myprojecttracker.com.

Best Regards

The MyProjectTracker Team.

Photo : Our own project on MyProjectTracker

Business, and small businesses especially, are at the mercy of their banking providers. And no – it doesn’t seem to matter who you are banking with in this day and age or what country you are in, except maybe China!

Since the recession hit us towards the end of 2008, the ability to get financing appears to be virtually impossible unless you have a proven revenue stream, have been banking with them since the dark ages and are willing to put your children up as collateral.

This picture was drawn by my eldest son and relates to his teacher (who is actually a very nice lady!) but I felt exactly like this while trying to get the initial funding to build MyProjectTracker. My bank was giving me the whole “its the internet and too risky” excuse – in all reality, I just think these people are operating in the 20th not the 21st century. Where do they think most business is going to be conducted from? (deep breath, deep breath…)

Even leading lights in their area of expertise find it difficult to achieve cash-flow or other funding. Successful in their own right along with a proven business model the ability to borrow has been curtailed to a ludicrous degree. Ok – so the recession was borne out of irresponsible lending practices, but we seem to have gone from one extreme to the other where any degree of risk is seemingly too much.

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We were contacted one afternoon by Des from Contrast to make the decision on the payment solution for MyProjectTracker. Payment Server Provider or Payment Bureau.

Myself and Barney sat down one afternoon to trash out the pro’s and con’s of using a Payment Server Provider (RealEx) or a Payment Bureau (PayPal). To be honest, Barney favoured PayPal and I favoured RealEx.

A well formulated guide that helped us make sense of the online payment choices was www.webpayments.ie. This should really be the first port of call for anyone creating a website that will be required to take payments.

Here is a summary based on our discussion that day and our discussion of this topic with others who have setup website that require payment:

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We have all had one of those lightbulb moments which we think will translate into a viable business. The challenge is to have the drive, passion and determination to turn that idea into a reality.

Before an entrepeneur pours all of his or her energy into converting that idea, the most fundamental question that needs to be asked is “Is this a real business?” i.e. is there a market for my product?

The key to determining whether the idea is a viable business proposition is Research, with a capital “R”. How many businesses do we all know which sounded like a great idea, but failed before they were off the ground. The chicken came before the egg.

When we conceived the MyProjectTracker concept, we almost (but not quite) fell into that trap. Having worked in the murky world of IT, we were convinced that we had seen the light and that our idea for a straightfoward, online, hosted project management tool was unique. We had the product designed and quoted for before even thinking about checking had it been done before.

Then we spoke to some friends who mentioned a couple of well known hosted project management solutions and asked whether we could realistically take them on as competitors.

We realised the folly of our ways and put a screaming halt on the product design for a time while we went about doing some proper market and customer research.

The joy of being an e-business is that all of our competition is online i.e. we can see what they are up to without needing to ask customers (though of course we did), trying a bit of industrial espionage or any other trick. Google provided all that we needed to know about what they were up to – the good stuff and the bad.

We were happy with what we saw primarily because it supported our original view that the product had enough of a unique offering that it was possible to penetrate the market.

So if you have a lightbulb that won’t go out, do your research – if there is a market for it, take the jump and give it a go. It’s one of the most rewarding experiences you can have in business, to see your idea come to fruition and on the market!

Good luck!

I thought it would be good to share the origins of the MyProjectTracker product with you. I have read many tales of start-up and journey and some have helped to educate me a little! Hopefully this little piece of prose will do the same for you and if not, well I hope you enjoy the read anyway!

So here’s the story!

In days gone by, a really frustrated professional services delivery manager was continually asking the question of his team “So how are we doing guys?”

You know, the basics of how much have we spent, where are we against budget, are we going to be on time with this bit of work? Easy enough questions but…

This was met with the muttered curses of already over-stretched project managers and their teams and a considerable amount of paper shuffling and keyboard clicking. If the delivery manager was lucky, he got an answer on the same day, but if he needed exact details on budget and activities it would take a-lot longer!

Sigh! And then he’d notice a reduction in project activity from the PM sometime on a Wednesday afternoon /Thursday morning.

“Why?” he’d ask.

“‘Cause I’ve started working on the management report for Friday for you” was the reply, and not without a degree of barely contained frustration.

Not the fault of the project manager, who could say at a theoretical level straightaway how things were going, but the fault of the systems in place to “help” answer these questions.

Madness, thought the delivery manager. How much time was being lost doing reports that were looked at once a week for maybe 5 mins per project? Hours and hours is the answer.  He did the sums once and it was very scary. 8 project managers * 6 hours (48 hours/week or 6 man days!).

How much more focus could have been given to projects and customers if reporting had been easier?

There has to be a better way thought the delivery manager. However, nothing ever changed and eventually the service delivery manager went off to do other things. But the little bee in the bonnet never really went away about trying to sort out the frustrations felt.

So then the delivery manager asked (a.k.a. doing market research) some people in business  what they found difficult in project delivery and they looked at him as if he had two heads.

“Sorry!” said the delivery manager, “I mean when you are doing stuff for your customers like an architectural drawing or building a house or planning an event or.. can you easily answer the question of “How am I doing?””

Some said “yes “and showed the manager the emails, word documents and spreadsheets involved and others were more honest and said that they could get an answer but it wouldn’t be easy.

Not everyone of course had this problem. The guys doing one thing at a time were ok, but those whose businesses were working on more than one thing at a time had a problem even when they were just one man shows.

Ah, so the problem existed outside of the IT world as well. Well then, something definitely had to be done thought the delivery manager.

So he had a chat with a guy who had worked with him in the past and a month later the initial concepts for MyProjectTracker.com were conceived. Thankfully, the guy also had some contacts in a rather excellent web application development company who took on the concept, understood exactly what was being looked for from the off-set and built the vision – along with putting in some cool stuff that hadn’t even been thought about.

Between all, they created something that any business can use to get an answer to that simplest of questions without any fuss or bother!

“How are my projects doing?”

Hopefully you and your business will find this too!

Hi all,

Beta day, and for those signed up, a look into the new approach to business project management!

It’s taken some really hard work and not a small amount of drive and passion on behalf of the team to get to this point and this story will be told in future posts.

So what’s the plan for now?

We have had a huge number of requests to be part of the Beta process, which is great, and we would like to say a big thankyou for signing up.

We are going to introduce people over the next couple of weeks so don’t panic if you’ve signed up and not received the code just yet. Once we are happy with the way things are going, then we plan on opening up in earnest for a wider audience.

So what does beta mean?

It means different things to different people, but to us it means the following;

“Validating that the product holds true in the real world.”

Our market research says yes, but it’s always good to get this re-enforced!

For the beta testers it means you get to use our product for free until we feel ready to start charging for it – at which point you can stay on board with a chance to win a rather nice “to be announced” perk for your business for being a beta tester. The only thing we ask in return is that you provide some feedback (good or bad) via the feedback link at the bottom of each product page.

What about the product during beta?

From a project management and business management perspective, all of the key functions are in place. We have excluded some minor functions for the moment, but these will not limit the beta testers ability to use the product to help their business projects along.

You may see some aesthetic changes as we receive feedback and continue to include things that we want to see ourselves in the product.

In the interim, we hope you benefit from the product and like what you see!

And if I’m not signed up yet?

No problem. If you are not signed up for our Beta, but would like to be, just let us know by sending us a note to info@myprojecttracker.com and we will add you to the list. The more, the merrier in our view.