StreamFocus™ Blog

We opened for beta a couple weeks ago. Since then we’ve received some great feedback, and we’re continuing to improve the product and invite more people for trials. Peter has written a great review. He points out a number of weaknesses in the UI, all of which I agree with. Much of our early work was spent on developing the ideas for the software and how to organize projects and workflows and our collaboration system. We have improved the UI a lot in the last month and still have work to do. We’ll be adding a few ajax elements to streamline use where plain html isn’t sufficient, but without overloading it. We appreciate the feedback.

We do need to create more documentation and explanation of how the system works. We’re planning a screencast, a short video, explaining the underlying principles of the system and how to make it work for your projects. It’s not difficult once you know the steps to take. Currently, an overview of the concepts is on the homepage.

In addition to the beta, Fred and I made a presentation of the product for AIASF, where we met a few people in the architecture and construction field. As small business owners, they have a few employees, but the number of tasks gets beyond the number they can manage in their heads. This is what StreamFocus is designed for. Tasks can be entered ahead of time, by days, weeks or months as you need and a critical path established that sets the sequence those tasks must happen for the project to move ahead. Organized into workflows, the team members will know which tasks to work on now - those that are in the critical path - rather than being confused by non top priority tasks that should not be worked on yet in their to do list. If priorities change, the team member task lists will automatically change when critical path links are moved in the project plan area. The automatic priority system works for any team, from 1 to any number of team members.

We’re continuing to expand the beta by giving out more invitations. Please sign up. We look forward to learning what will work for you.

The Problem

My architectural firm began work on a large project with a team of 7 people, and we needed a way to manage the firm’s many tasks. We started using web based project management tools to organize our activities. At first, it seemed like a great tool. Tasks would be created and assigned, email reminders would automatically be sent, comments about the tasks could be made and viewed. In a short time, however, the quantity of open tasks became larger.

With a large project, the key is to always work on the top priority task. The web system provided no intelligent way to help determine what the highest priority task was. Entering deadlines for tasks is useful, but when a project-critical task is delayed because of an immediate deadline on a less important task, especially if the deadline is self-generated, the consequences can be dire for the success of the project. Task dependencies are also a nice tool, but again, someone has to spend time massaging these relationships on a daily/hourly basis with the currently available tools.

Our number of tasks became overwhelming. The only answer I could find was to actually have a new position created to focus on organizing these tasks, but then I would have to spend a great deal of time explaining how to prioritize in addition to the new person actually going through all these tasks to set priorities as they came up. In other words, the task management system slowed us down, added costs, and threatened the success of our project. Eventually, we threw up our hands and abandoned the web project management tool.

What We Need

The most important thing we need to know is: which of the many tasks that need to be done is the top priority. The other big issue is: what information do we need to have before starting on a task. We found that so many times tasks would be started and then have to be revised again (and again) later because information needed to complete the task was missing at the onset. This amounted to a great deal of lost time and productivity on the order of 30-40% of time spent working. Additionally, we needed to have the information necessary for the task available immediately while the task was being performed. Another 10-20% of time was lost looking for information for tasks.

For service companies such as my architectural firm, the material we work with is primarily information, and the processes are to a large extent mental. Managing this complexity seemed daunting, but the reward is to gain back the 50% of lost productivity and dramatically improve quality for our customers. This potential improvement in my firm was well worth finding an answer.

We needed a management system that allowed us to focus on the top priority task we needed to do, to focus on the exact information we needed to complete that task, and to not let us start a task until we had assembled all the necessary information and other processes to complete the task to avoid rework.

It was these problems that led to the development of StreamFocus, an on-demand project and action management application, with which we achieved a 50% productivity increase with better quality.

©2007 Organon Technologies LLC

Case Study: Architecture

We’ve been using StreamFocus at my architectural firm for the past 6 months, and we are having a dramatic experience: 50% increase in productivity, a large increase in quality, and happier clients and staff with a growing business. This sounds impossible, but it’s a fact.

Please read these articles to find out about the main features enabling us to achieve this large productivity boost:

• Project Templates establish Project priorities and organization
• Workflow Templates and constrained Workflows prevent costly rework and provide easy to use project and action management
• Information made available contextually for the action at hand allows users to move easily from one action to another and stay fully informed on the information they need to get the top priorty job done and collaborate in a powerful way.

With StreamFocus, we are able to customize our project and Workflow templates to optimize our business and continue to improve the flow and quality of our work. Additionally, because the action sequence is captured in the Workflow templates, users are able to benefit from that captured knowledge and operate at higher levels with less direct management input and greater satisfaction levels - allowing me to focus on designing a great project with less time spent managing.

©2007 Organon Technologies LLC