One of the difficult aspects of managing a large job or project is ensuring everything remains in context.  Not only for you as the project manager but also for the benefit of the staff working on the job.

As the information on the job grows, especially the number of tasks, milestones, notes, documents and costs it becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain visibility between relevant items.  In the end you end up with a lot of information on the job, but in order to find anything you can easily get lost in the detail. 

Late in 2008 we introduced a concept of Note and Document Folders to a job.  This allows you to group all common notes and documents together placing them in context.  For example, Images, Emails, Contracts etc.  Using the example below, clicking on "Images" would list all the notes from the images folder.

In the upcoming release this weekend we've extended the Folder concept to apply to the entire job.  In addition to notes and documents - tasks, milestones and costs can now be grouped into folders.  This allows you to visually break a job up into multipe components or sub jobs allowing you to gain increased visibility on each individual stage or component without the unnecessary noise from the other elements of job.

Clicking on a folder will display all the tasks, milestones, notes, documents and costs specific to that folder. 

Furthermore, you can quickly and easily create purchase orders and invoices for each Folder seperately from the remainder of the job allowing you to more easily manage your costs and income associated with each part of the job.

Back in 1995 when Team New Zealand won the America's Cup their campaign was focused on a single value - "Does it make the boat go faster?".  Before undertaking any activity they would ask this simple question.  If the answer was no, it wasn't worth doing.

At WorkflowMax, we've adopted this value along with our core focus of building job management software that is simple and easy to use.

As the WorkflowMax service has grown we've started to notice some performance bottle necks with our original architecture of the application.  A couple of months ago we decided to undertake a project to focus on improving the general performance of WorkflowMax.

Before you can improve the performance though, you first need a benchmark to compare against.  As part of our standard application monitoring, we log the execution time for every page request made to WorkflowMax.  This allows us to easily identify the requests which take a long time to execute as well as determine metrics such as average page execution time.  

The requests taking a long time to execute are generally easy to fix.  Most often it's a case of optimising the database query or tweaking the application logic.  The good thing with these types of performance issues is you can measure these against the benchmark and any performance improvements are obvious.  Thankfully there were not too many of these issues in WorkflowMax and we've managed to resolve most of them.  We do feel there is still room for further improvement which we will continue to review over the upcoming months.

Reducing the average page execution time though required further analysis of what was happening inside the application during each page request.  By enabling query logging on the database in our development environment we were able to identify several common database queries which executed for every page request.  These requests returned the same result each time indicating they were prime candidates to be stored in a cache. Some examples of these queries include determining user permissions and which application modules are enabled for a users account.  By introducing Memcached as our caching tier, we were able to reduce the number of queries to the database per page request and thus reduce the loading on the database itself.  

Over the past several weeks we've incrementally grown our caching tier to a point where combined with our other performance improvements, we've reduced the average page execution time from 190 milliseconds down to 105 milliseconds.  This is a significant performance gain that has allowed us to process more requests per second which utlimately leads to faster page generation and through put on our servers. 

Having a benchmark as a reference point has enabled us to measure which changes have or haven't resulted in a performance improvement.  By releasing these improvements incrementally to production over several weeks we've been able to measure which changes had more of an impact than others giving us valuable knowledge which we can apply to our future development strategy and design.  The really pleasing aspect to all this is that the performance improvements have occured at the same time the number of people using WorkflowMax has increased.

Going forward, in addition to delivering new functionality for our users, we'll be devoting time to each release to ensure the boat continues to get faster and doesn't get becalmed in the water.

One of the most important assets to your business is your brand.  Communicating your brand, whether it be on your web site, via marketing material, newsletters, business cards, and trade shows are all means for your business to create awareness and to communicate with existing and potential customers.  It is therefore vital, that all external communication from your Job Management system to your customers and/or suppliers reflects your brand.

WorkflowMax's templating engine allows us to build custom templates so your invoices, quotes, purchase orders and job briefs, communicate your brand using your design.  

Below are several examples of templates we've built for our customers. 

If you are interested in having us build custom templates for your business, please contact us to discuss your requirements and pricing.

The development team has been busy over the past month implementing some fantastic enhancements to WorkflowMax.  Below are a few of the key feature requests we've implemented.

Part Payments

Part payments can now be recorded against invoices generated in WorkflowMax.  Further more, if you're using Xero or KashFlow as your accounting system, WorkflowMax can import all payments (part of full) eliminating double entry.

Custom Client Rates

If you have a custom rate you charge specific customers, you can now set this up on a per client basis.

New Cost Search

We've implemented a new cost search which includes the supplier name, product code and purchase price.  This is particulary useful for our trade and manufacturing customers who purchase product from a number of different suppliers.

WorkflowMax the leading online job management solution has partnered with 4Growth Inc., a Toronto based business management and SaaS distribution company specialising in SaaS solutions for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises.

SteveBielawski, Managing Partner, 4Growth Inc., will head up the new operation."Small businesses in the US and Canada are moving to Software as a Service(SaaS) applications", comments Steve, "They are attracted by the low cost of ownership and fast implementation, but they also want low complexity and solution flexibility. WorkflowMax provides all four."

WorkflowMax will be building a channel program in North America based around technology distribution and publishing companies, industry associations and conventional project management software resellers. Partners will gain an annuity revenue stream over the lifetime of their customers.

California based Gold Coast Graphics have been using WorkflowMax since early 2008 and traffic manager Marcie Harris is thrilled with it, “WorkflowMax has definitely saved me a lot of time.We are able to keep track of all of our jobs, with everything in a central place. We don’t miss anything that happens and we are able to easily capture and invoice all time entered against a job.”

According to Gartner 90% of companies worldwide are planning to grow their use of SaaS, and a recent survey by Microsoft showed that 86% of small to medium sized businesses will move to SaaS in 2009.

About 4Growth

4Growthprovides evaluation, strategic planning and active management services to helpour clients overcome obstacles to growth in their businesses. 4Growth’s SaaSdistribution division, works with leading SaaS vendors to grow their businessin North America through direct and indirect sales channels.The 4Growth team has over 75 years combined Executive experience in startups,small, medium and large businesses. A complete management team combinesexpertise in all key roles, including CEO, Strategy, CFO, Sales and Marketing,Product Development, Strategic Partnership, Channels, Services, Support, HR andIT. 

www.4growth.ca  

Our latest integration project has been with Zendesk.

Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk - customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies.

The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk to a company’s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. 

The system also leverages Web 2.0 ideas on the back-end, such as tag based categorization throughout instead of the usual pre-defined drop down lists, RSS feeds for every customized view and a complete REST/JSON API for virtually every entity in the system.

MSNBC.com and Twitter.com both have a Zendesk Helpdesk. Zendesk integrates with Salesforce, 37 Signals products and now via WorkflowMax to cloud accounting tools like Xero, Kashflow and Sassu, as well as the traditional accounting packages like MYOB and Quickbooks.

We have created a widget that Zendesk users can utiilise to record time against trouble tickets.

Using WorkflowMax the timesheet entries can be invoiced and analysed to determine things like:

• which clients are costing the most time
• which employees are most productive
• what our costs are to maintain support for a particular client
• work in progress billing
• job cost reporting 

With our existing integration to online accounting providers Zendesk users now have a complete end to end system available to them on the cloud. Zendesk provides the help desk, WorkflowMax provides the time sheeting, job reporting, invoicing with the seamless transfer of invoice data flowing through to the back end accounting solution. To read more ...

We're really excited to announce a customised version of WorkflowMax for the iPhone.  Now you can access your jobs from almost anywhere.

WorkflowMax for the iPhone allows you to keep track of your jobs, important dates and time sheets.  You also have full access to your clients and suppliers which you can call with a single tap.

WorkflowMax for the iPhone is available to all WorkflowMax customers at no extra charge.  Simply login at http://m.workflowmax.com.  It's also available to all trial accounts.

Some of the key feature include:

 Overview

 View your time summary, upcoming important dates and overdue milestones/tasks.

When we began building WorkflowMax we had several target industries in mind. The industries we initially focused on although diverse to the outsider, proved to be intrinsically linked in their business process. If we tried to convince a Mechanical Engineer that his job management and invoicing almost identical to a Graphic Designer he probably would have chased out of his workshop with a gas axe.

Time and time again WorkflowMax is proving itself to be highly functional and incredibly flexible across different industries. This was starkly highlighted to me today when dealing with one of our newest customers who operates a quarry. Each vehicle is charged out at an hourly rate, mixed grades of metals are additional costs on the job and are charged out on a per meter basis. Perfect fit.

The very next customer contact following the quarry was with a small team of physicians who require scheduling of appointments and very finite time billing down to the minute.  Another good fit.

Quarry's, physicians, what's next?

Even though I shouldn't be, I am constantly surprised by how many types of business WorkflowMax is a very tight fit for.