This case study is presented by Lucas Young, CEO of Digitalus Ltd.

Company Profile

Digitalus Ltd. is a web-design company based in Auckland, New Zealand.
Since its inception in 1997, Digitalus has specialised in offering quality, jargon-free web design at a reasonable price. As a result, the company has been invited to work on some of the biggest sites in the country such as www.fencepost.com and www.fonterra.com.
Sites developed by Digitalus have won awards including the HitWise Top Ten Award, an e-business excellence award, and the Future's Trust top e-democracy site award.

More information about Digitalus Ltd. can be found at the company's web-site.

Challenge

We used a variety of techniques to manage our projects before we started using EasyProjects - these included our own memories, spreadsheets, dotProject and Microsoft Project. Eventually we settled for Excel. However, that system didn't notify our team of tasks, and required us to manually update spreadsheets. Adding hours to the spreadsheet was cumbersome and time-consuming, and consequently many of our team stopped using it. That situation has changed when EasyProjects came along and permanently solved our project management problems for us.

Solution and Results

We chose EP.NET since it has all the features we need, is simple to use, inexpensive and easy to set up. It plays nicely with our intranet, and has an easy-to-use GUI. It allows us to track projects and tasks, record hours worked, associate files with projects, track bugs, and notify users of task status.

EP.NET has a simple layout that works without any issues in our mixed IIS/Apache Windows/Mac environment (I access it from Safari). EP.NET has allowed us to monitor and track tasks and provide not only more reporting, but the ability for our project manager to manage and plan tasks more effectively.

We use EP.NET to manage our web clients. Design and programming tasks are allocated to our staff, who update their timesheets daily and add related notes and files to each project. We found the ability to add files to particular projects and tasks to be very useful.

We have a team of 5 using EP.NET to manage 28 projects in EP.NET at the moment, each with multiple tasks. The most important features for us are definitely the email notification, the ability to manage multiple projects and tasks from the one interface, file uploads, and bug tracking.

As the result of implementing Easy Projects .NET in our company we're able to much more effectively plan out our future client work and more accurately estimate completion dates. Our turnaround time has improved and our client estimates are much more accurate.