Projector PSA vs. Deltek TrafficLIVE

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

Traffic is suitable for most agencies, regardless of size. You don't need to use all of the features in order to get good results. And it can be linked to Maconomy which is useful for larger agencies. We have around 80 employees and it works great.

• 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!

• The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
• It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
• It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
• Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.

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.

• I would like to be able to colour code my clients, so I can see at a snapshot what projects staff are working on.
• I would like to be able to colour code staff holidays, public holidays so I can easily see what resources I have available.
• As an administrator, I can't see at a glance the actual time spent on a task work or comments a user has logged.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Deltek TrafficLIVE was the pre-existing system when I joined the company. When we decided to purchase a new system, we considered a number of options such as Kimble PSA, Oracle NetSuite & Mavenlink. We decided to go ahead with Kimble PSA because we felt that as a package, it provided all the functionality we need against its competitors. It had far more functionality than TrafficLIVE and was more suited to the scale of our business.

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

• Much more clarity as to how much time each different type of brief should take to complete as we can back reference as to how long it took last season.
• It has lead to better customer service. We can visibly demonstrate where we are with jobs and who has been assigned. In the past verbally confirming the different stages did not always convince the project leaders that they were being given the actual real time.
• From the Studio users point of view it has empowered them to manage their time more efficiently. If they receive a request to move onto another job their calendars can be reviewed to see if they are available or not.