Company-X
We spoke with Company-X Co-founder David Hallett and Professional Services Manager Michael Hamid about their experience after switching to Projectworks.
Company-X was founded in 2012. Its reputation is built on providing world-leading software-savvy teams to domestic and international clients. Company-X is renowned for building highly skilled, tightly knit, self-managed, and co-located teams that stay with projects from beginning to end and deliver software quickly. Its team of more than 50 software specialists include analysts, architects, designers, developers, testers, and project managers with a can-do attitude.
The Challenge
Company-X used disconnected project management and resource planning software to manage its business. The two systems did the job while the business was in the startup phase. However, as the company experienced tremendous growth working with government agencies and large public and private companies, David knew that it needed a software solution to consolidate people, project management and forecasting.
"It was frustrating having various sources of truth around projects. And it was a very manual process to get good reporting." - David Hallett, Co-founder
David needed something to provide accurate reporting in real time so that he did not have to assign people to do it manually.
"It was a very manual process to get the kind of reporting we needed. Spreadsheet jockeying happened behind the scenes as well, which required people to actually do that work."
Growing a business with disparate systems created unnecessary work.
Professional Services Manager Michael Hamid said Company-X wanted more granularity. It also needed a system that could manage multiple currencies.
"Multi-currency reconciliations were always ‘exciting’, so we had to separately deal with things inside Xero for raising and reconciling multi-currency invoices."
The Solution
David considered an internal build to cover Company-X’s unique set of circumstances, but by chance he saw an article about Projectworks online. The promise of Projectworks was it provided the functionality Company-X required to help consolidate available data and provide multiple entity functionality. After investigation and external validation from Aware Group the Company-X team decided to take the plunge.
“We really wanted a system that could provide the business and project information that we needed and to manage multiple organisations inside one system. So, for example, having Company-X LLC in USD inside Projectworks as a related entity, was just a game changer for us. It saves us so much effort.”
The Result
After implementing Projectworks, Company-X went from good to great.
The leadership team now has full visibility of the business without having to consolidate multiple sources of data.
“The information that we get out of Projectworks is excellent. You can immediately answer questions like: What’s our utilisation? Who's working on what? When someone hasn't put their timesheet in, and when they have, why on earth are they working on that!? We have a lot more visibility about what's going on in the business way more than we ever did, and it's in real-time.”
The clear, granular reporting gives Michael the visibility that he needs to effectively communicate across teams, which had a profound effect on team morale.
“Your reporting suite is fantastic. We'd look and go, that's exactly what we're looking for.” - Michael Hamid
Project teams like the simple yet effective time sheeting features as they help the teams improve the accuracy of their timekeeping.
“The main difference is you can just enter time and you can pin your task easily. And then when you open the next week, it's all there for you. You don't need to really find your projects. These are real time savers.”
Company-X has a consolidated, multi-entity and multi-currency view of its business thanks to Projectworks. It can continue to scale with a software system built to facilitate it so that it can focus time and energy on other challenges associated with growth.
We look forward to seeing Company-X flourish in the software scene and continue to support its success into the future.