Edited by Leslie Gordon
These include Tonka trucks,
Gazillion Bubbles, Shelcore Pre-
School, and ZOOOOS Interactive.
To make great products, we need
to connect our design team in Los
Angeles with our manufacturing
teams in Hong
Kong and China. Because
time-zone differences have
us awake while our overseas
colleagues are asleep, we
needed an effective way to
communicate project status.
So we turned to Web-based
project-management software
called Project Insight.
Our previous project management
software had
us e-mailing individual
schedules around, a confusing
process at best. And
schedules were not centralized.
Instead, they were
scattered among numerous
file folders, making schedules
difficult to coordinate.
Our team usually works
on several dozen new toys
at a time, sometimes up to
100. Managing that many
jobs simultaneously with
the desktop application
just wasn’t working well.
Tracking information such
as milestones, resource allocations,
and times and
budgets was a real struggle.
Project Insight, in contrast, is
easy to use and provides a good
way to keep track of projects. An
Outlook interface “look and feel”
helped everyone rapidly get used
to the software. Because product
development is similar from one
toy to the next within each brand,
we created project templates in the
software. Project managers now
reuse these templates with just a
couple of mouse clicks.
Additionally, a document repository
with predefined folders is created automatically with each
template. This helps standardize
processes and methods because
everyone is familiar with the folder
structure. The documents repository
posts all project comments in
a discussions folder. This keeps our
project communication centralized
and attached to the correct project.
In contrast, the old way would have
had us sending numerous e-mails.
After just a few weeks, we had 50
team members using Project Insight
in the U.S. and Asia. We now have
about 200 simultaneous projects in
the software that are accessed and used daily. A big
improvement has
been our capability
to maintain
project timelines.
Currently, six
product managers
are each
simultaneously
working on 20 to
30 toys.
With the old
method, a project
milestone might
slip by. Not realizing
this, the U.S.
project manager
would not call
Hong Kong to
check on things
for weeks. Now,
Project Insight
shoots off milestone
reports to
each task owner.
We can, therefore,
maintain timelines
in a way not
possible before.
Another benefit:
An executive
dashboard lets
management easily
keep an eye on
projects. For example,
executives
can get a high level
view of all
projects and their
status, then drill down or get a timeline
of projects susceptible to failure.
They can look at 200 projects at
a time and see the red, yellow, and
green traffic-light status-indicators
to understand project portfolios.
The software comes from Metafuse
Inc., 17320 Red Hill Ave.,
Suite 270, Irvine, CA 92614, (949)
476-6499, projectinsight.net.
—John Meyer