Back in 1989, when Chief Software Architect Wayne Nelligan and his two partners started what later became PCA Technology Group, their program management needs were simple. And so were the available tools. With the three owners as the only software programmers and just a handful of clients, keeping track of project statuses could be accomplished with a quick meeting and a simple spreadsheet.
Today, Wayne oversees a team of ten developers working with up to 30 companies on various ongoing and time-boxed projects. Depending on the need, on any given day his team members could be working at a client site, in-house, or remotely. Simple meetings to determine the status of every project could take an hour or longer every week, which impacted productivity.
“One hour a week doesn’t seem like a lot of time until you factor in the costs. Over the course of a year, those 52 hours per person amount to over $56,000 in lost billable revenue, not to mention the cost of potential lost opportunities,” says Wayne.
Wayne was concerned because, as business was growing, his software developers were spending increasing time at work, which was cutting into precious family time, and he wanted to give back to them any time he could. What if he could eliminate just that one status update meeting every week? What if he could alleviate his own frustration trying to figure out the status of every project and what his programmers were working on? What if there was a way to solve the problem of knowing exactly which projects his team members were working on each week? Wayne had been keeping this kind of information sorted in his own head, but he knew he needed a new tool to create better transparency and accountability across the organization.
Enter Statdash. With guidance from the Statdash Solutions team, Wayne was able to quickly create a dashboard where his team members could enter the percentages of their time allocated to various clients each week, allowing Wayne to see where their time was being spent and where additional resources were needed. Best of all, the process was painless.
“It was amazing,” said Wayne. “I thought I would meet resistance, but my team was all for it. Statdash allowed me to automate the status updating process, so all my team had to do was click on a link in an email and update their allocations of time. And it was so simple! The interface is intuitive, so there was no complicated training necessary. It takes them a minute to do the update every week, so there’s no more sitting through long meetings where most of the discussion was irrelevant to their particular projects. Statdash has been a huge win for us.”
And because Statdash allows Wayne to filter his dashboard based on projects his developers are actively working on, he doesn’t have to scroll through every client or pore over outdated information to visualize his team’s weekly productivity. He can get a snapshot in an instant, which is exactly what a busy executive needs.
As a business, PCA Technology Group creates processes and writes mission-critical software systems specific to each of their client's needs. These unique systems help increase profits, reduce costs and maximize efficiencies across their organizations, giving them a competitive advantage in their respective markets. And Statdash has now become an indispensable component of PCA’s internal processes that has given them a competitive advantage in managing employee productivity and efficiency.
