Small World Labs Community is a hosted collaboration and social networking platform with easy drag & drop modification capabilities. Small World Labs offers implementation and community engagement services, plus an open API for integration with other systems. Small World Labs has clients across industries, but a high concentration in the nonprofit area.
Small World Labs was acquired by Personify Corp in 2016.
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Planview ProjectPlace
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Projectplace is a collaborative work management solution. The vendor says the product is built with teams of all sizes and complexity in mind, from virtual teams of five to entire global enterprises with tens of thousands of active users. It is also designed to incorporate waterfall and agile workflows.
You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make sure we are always getting what we need. They provide 24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.
ProjectPlace has formats that ensure every project is handled in a friendly manner and that results attained are optimal. Besides, ProjectPlace has an excellent time locating system, where every action is well planned and resources channeled to meet the needs. Further, ProjectPlace has the conventional way of demand planning by learning the market.
It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.
As a cloud based solution, Projectplace is one of the few true multiple location, multi person project management tools available for large teams. The reliability for large projects (with teams of anywhere between 50-200+ people) was a huge selling point for this and I witnessed this first hand.
The Windows and Mac applications for Projectplace are well designed and work impressively well for a project management tool. I found most of the teams had either application installed on their machine and did not have any complaints about it.
Features like AI and project management viewing styles like Kanban, Ganntt and others make the experience customizable for each user and made them adapt it to their preferred project management style.
Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.
Under the time tracking, it would be nice to have a set template that would load each week and not have to click a button to load the previous week's template.
Somehow making it more intuitive.
Having to add in each service line and each detail that I cover for every service line each week is a bit ridiculous.
From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit
We're committed now & have >50 users on Projectplace. All our projects are now tracked in the tool. We this investment of time & training, the cost of maintaining Projectplace is relatively low for the benefit. So we will renew, even if there are some idiosyncrasies in the tool & there are opportunities for improvement.
Planview ProjectPlace is consistent in delivering the promised performance, which is a functional part that brings clarity. Further, Planview ProjectPlace increases the value of every transaction, where recording and documentation are well enhanced to bring a concrete way of business coordination. Finally, Planview ProjectPlace has an orderly way of bringing substantial communications.
The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.
Planview ProjectPlace is quite complex, but it demands better engagement with various stakeholders to initiate a useful work environment. There are credible ways of establishing more live engagement, from direct chats and audio engagements. More so, Planview ProjectPlace is more formal, and this limits some users from outlining their demands or desires in matters of program performance.
In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.
We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.
We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.
It offers a simpler alternative that's easier to manage by the less tech-savvy people. I also think that Planview Projectplace has managed to keep the product updated compared to other project management tools. Miro is perhaps the one that comes to mind, but while evaluating, we saw fewer issues with Planview Projectplace. Overall, the decision came down to the project manager, that had previous experience and recommended the product. For me, using a product from a smaller company is better because I know that there will be a focus on improving it, unlike, for example, Microsoft products that can be discontinued at any moment.
Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.
[We have the] ability to support remote work through projects that scale across multiple groups
We have large-scale quarterly projects, so the ability to save and duplicate project templates are helpful for us to keep track of tasks down to the specific card
