How I optimized my business by building an in house project-management app
I glanced over my monitor and I saw that the end of the month has already come. A big smile grinned over my face. It’s gonna be the first time in months that I won’t be worried about those timesheets.
I won’t have to take all the google docs sheets from all the employees, reconcile them, make a report and send it to our clients. It was grueling, stressing and I didn’t like it at all.
Not to mention all the state of fear I would experience after sending the report: “Did I miss something? Oh God, I’m screwed…”. Those time are gone! From now on, I will use the project management app we’ve been working on for the past year and my problem was solved. But wait, what was the problem?
The problem
We spent too much time on centralizing the data from every employee and making a clean report for the clients where every minute had to be justified and documented on what has been worked.
The solution
We didn’t want to waste a lot of hours anymore on centralizing data. We just wanted to have a tool that would help us track on every project the following:
- how much hours were spent working on them
- who spent those hours and what type of activity was performed (coding, design, testing etc.)
- a description of the task that has been performed
And based on the above data we would have a clear view about:
- which projects were profitable and which brought us losses
- how well the employees were performing
- how well the company was performing
We couldn’t find a tool to do those things and we got sick of endless google docs sheets and decided to find a solution on our own. And that’s how three years ago, Fiirefly was born.
Scratching our own itch
We were lucky to be a web development company because we could build the product we need, for our own use. And so we did.
We basically did what David Heinemeier Hansson calls “scratching your own itch”. We had a problem and we went on solving it.
But it wasn’t merely a product we had to make, it was a product we really wanted to see it in the world no matter what. So, for the next 6 months we put in all the passion we had and made Fiirefly happen.
Building Fiirefly was for sure the period when I had the most fun in my life. It definitely had tiring and stressed parts, but damn they were worth it. We are using Fiirefly for three years and the rest is history as the saying goes.
However, it goes without saying that after building that first version, we’ve been iterating and added new functionalities. It’s been an organic process guided by our ever changing business needs.
The story by numbers
This story would not be complete without showing how much we won as a company by using Fiirefly. Having the timesheets reports a click away and clients being able to see them in real time saved us a lot of hours for the past three years.
But it’s not about the hours we saved, it’s about what we have been investing in those hours. Less hours spent on centralizing data meant more hours invested in:
- 1 to 1’s with our employees
- creating a more personal relationship with our clients
- developing new businesses and ideas
- my personal development
To get an idea about how much time was saved after we started to use Fiirefly, just take a look at the following infographic:
One more thing
Recently, a friend told me why do I keep Fiirefly just for my company? Why not launch it for the public? Why not show other small & medium companies like mine, there is an easier way to manage their businesses? I thought about it and she was right. It would be unjust not to make the product public.
That mean it’s time for Fiirefly to spread its wings. We’re glad to announce that we will launch Fiirefly soon, but until then you can join our pre-launching list and get an invite when the product will be launched.
So, without further ado, you can join our pre-launching list at http://fiirefly.com/.
Thanks a lot for reading and if you liked this, click the 💚 below so other people will see it on Medium and find about how Fiirefly can help their business.
