Function Point Productivity Software vs. Projector PSA

Well suited in:

• Project management from estimate creation to final billing.
• Time tracking per job.
• Delegating tasks internally (and externally if choosing to use this feature).
• Creative agency environments where jobs have many moving parts and employees working on.
• Customer contact information management.
• Internal creative collaboration (brainstorming).
• Management oversight allowing team leads to review hours logged per employee to each job.

Incentivized

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Time tracking - like several time tracking solutions, FP uses a clock that will track in real time so that you do not need to remember how long you worked on a project to input later.
• Dashboards - I love FP's dashboards that let me track my personal utilization, the utilization of my team members and all of my open tasks.
• Reporting - FP's reports provide insight organization-wide into how we are doing and where we (as an organization) are spending our time. As with any reporting, though, it is important to manage the cleanliness of your data to make the reporting useful.

Incentivized

• Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
• Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
• Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
• Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!

• Function Point often provided reports that were inaccurate due to bad calculations. The support team would work with us to troubleshoot these issues, but the fact remained that calculations were wrong.
• Function Point was purchased by a new parent company that increased prices over their nearest, superior, competitor, pricing themselves out of the market.
• Function Point's interface is dated, as is its code base.
• New features are being implemented not as software revisions or upgrades, but as new for-pay features.

Incentivized

• Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

• Receive weekly emails from FP team about new features being added and webinars to review.
• Always extremely reliable and quick to respond with answers to questions or concerns.
• Includes function for their clients to make recommendations to their platform.
• Allows for customization on the back end to provide the best solution/functions for each client.

Incentivized

Workamajig was NOT a good fit, after over a year of back-end setup. FunctionFox didn't have the financial integration capabilities we needed, but we used it for years and were happy with the service and support. FunctionPoint brought together the 30,000-foot view of the projects and resources with a simplified process for getting day-to-day jobs into the queue, which was essential for our organization.

Incentivized

We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.

• We have a much more timely and accurate sense of our financials since switching to FunctionPoint
• Our team is more efficient at tracking time, and we are much more able to track resources and profitability
• Our accounting manager is able to use Quick Books in a much more efficient manner than previously

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized