Story written by Thomaskutty Sebastian, CSO & Partner at PIT Solutions
How are you making an impact on the world?
Founded in 2000, PIT Solutions is an established IT service provider with primary offices in Switzerland and India, as well as new subsidiaries in the USA and Dubai. We specialize in developing individual software and web applications based on customer needs.
As an IT services company, we use ActiveCollab to communicate between our project management team in Switzerland and our developers in India. We also give access to our ActiveCollab system to some of our clients, in case they want to communicate directly with our developers. So it’s not uncommon that our clients, our project management team in Switzerland, and our team in India, all collaborate through ActiveCollab.
How would you define Real Work?
For us, Real Work comes when you take full advantage of the many options ActiveCollab has to offer. We consider the most important ones to be:
- All projects are centrally located
- ActiveCollab has excellent traceability of activities
- We can assign tasks to individual team members
- It’s an optimal way to do project discussion, upload images, documents, etc.
- We can add notes about projects
- It’s marvelous knowledge base
- Less confusion and fewer questions from the development team related to projects
- The calendar
- Rights management regarding project access
- Manage expenses and timesheets
- Project planning
- It’s a great document repository
- The estimation and invoicing features
What does one day in your life look like and what does it entail?
Typically, we start with requirement gathering from the customer. Then we document those requirements and upload them in the form of a file in ActiveCollab. After that, we assign a project manager to that project. Our project manager goes through those files thoroughly. If there are any questions, they inquire over ActiveCollab. After that, we update the requirements document. Finally, we do the estimate and send it to our customer.
Once the customer accepts an estimation, we commence with project planning and update it in ActiveCollab. We then add all the stakeholders to the project: project managers, designers, developers, network administrators, etc. If the customer also wants to join, we can invite them to take part in the collaboration.
How does ActiveCollab fit into a day in your life?
A good example of the kind of work ActiveCollab helps us with on a daily basis is Unihockeyshop - an e-commerce portal for hockey sports accessories. This shop has been our showcase project for Magento, since it has a good customer base and high traffic.
This is a project that has been ongoing for many years. Since PITS’s workforce changes over time, it’s hard to keep track of all the change requests we receive, especially if this communication is done over email. ActiveCollab can track and update those changes, even if they have been going on for a long time. Of course, for a project of this scope, we make and use a lot of tasks, discussions, files, and notes.
Another option we also use extensively is the insert image into page feature. This makes it possible to write instructions with an additional image to explain what was written, and it really comes in handy and helps us explain complicated procedures. Our customers enjoy the design of ActiveCollab in contrast to Jira, because it is a lot easier to navigate and comment. Since the usage is so straightforward, even customers who aren’t tech-savvy can use it. And by having email notifications activated, ActiveCollab posts never get missed by the person in charge of the project.
ActiveCollab enables us to have a centralized way of managing our projects and to establish our own work processes that save us a lot of time and money. It’s easy to use, and both we and our clients love ActiveCollab’s uncomplicated and clear interface and helpful features.
