Claromentis A web platform for your business
We had a great visit from people behind The Bridges Center (Atlanta, GA).
They provide care and help for Georgia citizen who has problem with their relationship, career difficulties or parenting issue. Learn more about their work from thebridgescenter.com.
They spent 3 days with us in Brighton Office (UK), having training, workshops about what they can do with Claromentis. Check out their video…
We have been reviewing many of our recent projects – combinations of intranet projects, business process management, document management and custom web application development – and getting feedback from those customers on the difference our projects have made to their business.
I do feel that the most measurable value comes from creating a web application within our framework that meets a clear business need, embedded within the portal and leveraging our interfaces and code base.
Measurable Value
Using our prototype process and our API means that we can ensure that the client will receive exactly what they need with minimum risk, modest budgets and over a reasonable time frame.
The fact that we have such a significant code base that can deliver the basics for any corporate application does enable a refreshingly ‘can-do’ approach for even the most complex requirement.
This is a great differentiator for our company – to have a code library at our disposal that already offers :
Means that we can in just several weeks build on this to add exactly the web based application our customers need.
To have staff that are available to whiteboard ideas, talk over requirements and in general engage with customers to mature their often early stage ideas is also extremely important when thinking about how a company obtains value in their interaction with Claromentis.
All this was brought home to me when one of our designers said ‘its really unusual to work for a company when a whole team is working to make sure the customer gets exactly what they want’
I would only add that we do this even before the customer actually knows what they want to any level of detail. We enjoy this whole process, and I think that sense of fun and engagement really comes across when we discuss web applications with our customers.
Of course that fun only comes with years of hard work that provides us with a real confidence when listening to the most complex needs – but in the end I suppose this lines up with most businesses not just web software – whatever you do you need stuff, people and processes – and the more confidence you have in all of those and their ability to deliver, the more you can relax and listen to the customer.
One of the biggest riddle using Microsoft Projects is the confusion between Type : Fixed Work, Fixed Duration, Fixed Unit.
If you ask any hard-core Project Manager who uses Microsoft Project every day they will be able to explain it to you immediately but if you are newbie I can guarantee you will be still confused.
Here are some of the quotes I gathered from numerous forum & blog post:
“When creating a task, you have the choice of fixed units, fixed duration or fixed work. Most use fixed work tasks, but what exactly do these terms mean? “
“In order to get my mind around it, I had to rewrite it in my own words and try to work out example cases for each type in order to try to understand it.”
“it is, I now a famously tricky concept to get hold of or to teach”
“I am confused about Task Types in project planning. I am using MS Project for a requirements project. Up till now we have not utilized any formal project structure to get this job done.”
Take a look at the option of adding a task in Microsoft Project there are 5 tabs and at least 30 options to choose from not to mentioned options within options.
It is a real issue, Microsoft Project is just too complex for most of the projects we’ve undertaken, yes it is a sophisticated tool but you probably need a week course before you can use it.
Recently I read about “Designing the Obvious” by Robert Hoekman Jr. on my kindle and the principles in designing a software is the fact that the software must be able to
We are currently developing a web-based project application, powerful enough to manage complex project yet it must be easy enough to use.
Check out the video below showing how we’re planning to solve the same problem with a simpler solution.
As I mentioned in my last post we are frequently asked to compare the cost of deployment of a range of our software in perpetual license models and Software as a Service.
So I went back over a number of recent quotations for projects we have been involved in around the world, and here is the comparison based on medium size deployments – looking at total costs to date for years 1, 2 and 3.
Comparison of SaaS and Perpetual deployment costs over 1-3 years
Unsurprisingly in year 1 – and I included all services as supplied in both sets of figures – Perpetual is significntly more expensive. After all the customer is paying for perpetual licenses of the software.
However after 2 years the situation is almost equal, and by the end of year 3 the SaaS model is significantly more expensive.
I these figures the cost of hardware IT skills are not at all factored back into the equation – and since when we deploy SaaS solutions we are of course supplying both cloud based infrastructure and all the IT support – it is hardly surprising that after some time the total cost of SaaS does overtake the perpetual license model.
It is also reasonable to argue that the complete flexibility, stop at any time, scale up and down side of SaaS should come at a price. Nevertheless we see a rapidly growing percentage of our new clients opting for SaaS solutions, and we do understand why.
Our job is to offer our customers choice, advice and pricing transparency to help them make the decision in an informed way.
I hope that sharing these general figures over time is of interest!
I am often asked by potential clients to provide information on how project funds can realistically be allocated across the spectrum of software licenses, services, support and custom design and development.
I think one of the best ways to think about this is to take an example small project and a very large one. So I did this for two recent projects – one a very standard example of a standard Claromentis Intranet product led engagement with a UK company of less than 50 staff, the other a recent deployment in the United States for an unlimited user system with a very significant custom development to provide specific sales related functionality, integration with third party systems and reporting through an Extranet.
What we see with this project is that
Large Project Financial Analysis
By contrast a large project has significant spending on Development and Design, as well as international travel and general expenses.
Clearly these are just two examples, but comparing these to our license records for many projects does show that simple projects have a larger proportion of costs related to software licenses, and adding 25% for support and services give a good approximation to the total budget.
However when estimating budgets for larger deployments with more complex and custom requirements half of the project costs are concerned with the delivery of the custom functionality.
In my next post I will be comparing the customer costs for deploying intranets and custom frameworks through our cloud based SAAS offering, compared with a perpetual license model. I will be comparing these costs over a 2 year period.
Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, Services, Solutions, The Framework