Item: Function Point Productivity Software
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Function Point Productivity Software

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FunctionPoint is used company wide to create estimates, translate estimates into jobs and schedules and eventually into individual tasks. Our sales team uses it to create statements of work for clients, and every employee uses it to track time every day. FunctionPoint provides a solution to the gaps between sales and execution of work for our organization. As an agency, tracking time is everything. FunctionPoint makes it easy for every employee to make sure that the right amount of time is tracked to the right place and billed at the right time.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

Project based billing - when a project is fixed bid, the only way for us to track this accurately in FP dollars is to bill the number of hours equal to the dollar amount which may inflate or under-represent the number of actual hours worked.
Kanban - FP lacks a Kanban board for moving tasks through a workflow in a visually meaningful way.
Shared tasks - sometimes two people need to work on the same task at the same time. FP makes this difficult because each task can only be owned by one person at a time, so it needs to be passed back and forth.

Return on Investment

Efficient time tracking
Efficient SOW > Schedule > Job > Task creation process
Day to day task management - better understanding by every person what is necessary to do that day and organizational workflow

Alternatives Considered

Harvest and Smartsheet

We were drawn to FP for the ease of estimate to task to billing process. Previous solutions were very manual moving between each of these steps. Smartsheet was a glorified Excel document for tracking time that simply allowed multiple users to edit in a single place. Harvest was an upgrade with a time tracking start/stop clock. However, FP is the only solution we have found that covers the majority of our needs in one solution. Others come close, but FunctionPoint makes it so easy from estimate to task to billing to reporting that it is difficult to find another solution worth switching to for the places that it lacks.

Other Software Used

TeamGantt, LeanKit, Marketo, Marketo Real-Time Personalization

Likelihood to Recommend

FunctionPoint (FP) is great for agencies performing any type of task oriented work. If your workflow cannot be broken down into a set of outlined and easy to define tasks (even if the output of the task is abstract) then FunctionPoint would be difficult to implement. FunctionPoint is fantastic at defining scope in an engagement and forcing those who execute the work to stay within that scope if tasks are well-defined. If your work requires a lot of group collaboration and sharing of tasks, you may struggle with FunctionPoint's inability to share a single task simultaneously.

Function Point Productivity Software Feature Ratings

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