A Simple PM Tool for Simple Projects

Situation: You're curious about SaaS PM Software tools...

Recently Sergei Podbereschi, co-founder of 5PM contacted me about their SaaS PM solution.  They are new to the market, but apparently are gaining ground by keeping their solution open and flexible.  I think its missing some basics for managing projects of any scale, but like many other online solutions, it could be great for putting some structure around simple projects.

Q.  What is the ideal type of user for 5PM in terms of experience, industry, and project type?  What's the wrong type of user, industry or project to be using 5PM?

5pm was designed with simplicity in mind, as a horizontal application. A lot of developers are creating PM tools tailored for IT developers. We tried to stay away from this trend and design an application that can be used in different industries. Our customizable interface and non-enforced features are ways to archive that.

Our "ideal" user would be comfortable with internet, using his/her computer from different location and working with a distributed team.

Our plan was always to adapt - that's the power of an SaaS model. We are constantly monitoring users' feedback and adjust our plans. If we will see a particular industry reacting strongly to our product - we can switch into a more vertical version of our product, or even create a separate version.

So far, we are pleased to notice that 5pm is used by a lot of traditional industries. We even have dentists using 5pm! At the same time, we have bigger companies managing dozens of team members and projects. Lately we started to get contacted by companies that anticipate 400-500 projects.

We do understand that our product will not fit everybody. In fact, I think that's why there are so many PM applications out there - there are too many approaches to PM. I wouldn't call some users "wrong", but I can see how some government agencies, or the ones handling very sensitive information will not be able to use 5pm as a web-based service. For those type of organizations we are planning to start providing a self-hosted service.


Q.  5PM, like many online PM tools offer a very simple way to look at tasks on projects.  Does this imply a limit to the complexity of the projects that the tool will deal with?  How would you define those limits? Would it be no more than X tasks, x people, x business units involved?

"Simple" is almost a cliche now. With 5pm, when we talk about simple, we mainly mean the user interface ("glance-ability"). We try to hide the complexity from users, but still provide a lot of power "under the hood". For advanced users, 5pm can grow more complex as they discover all the features. Plus the features we plan to add soon (new reports,
updated Timeline) will add even more power.

As about the size of the projects 5pm can manage... We have about 400 tasks right now in the version of 5pm we use to manage the 5pm project itself (we eat our own dog food). And it doesn't slow down the application in any way. If the number of projects grows, they can always be moved into newly created Groups. That's how, pretty much, 5pm
works - you may not even notice or use Groups, till you need them one day. And when you need to - it take one click to move a project from "no groups land" to any group...

We still have time to experiment with bigger numbers, and we expect our bigger companies to help with their feedback. I anticipate, for example, that we may need to add groups for user profiles as well.

Bigger companies have different needs. A lot of them use contractors besides the main staff, so the relatively "flat" security of simple project management doesn't work well there. That's how we introduced "External User" not so long ago.

So don't be surprised to see new features making it even more simple to handle more data.


Q.  Task dependencies are a basic feature among desktop PM applications, but not always among web-based PM tools.  What drove your decision to not include them in the 5PM toolset?

I do agree it's a nice feature to have.

There is always a choice what to include or not in version 1.0.  After a year of development we had to come out with a working product. But we never stopped developing and added a lot of features in the past months (for example, email integration is a big one).

We definitely plan to add the dependencies in the Timeline view. In fact, Timeline is the section of our application that will go through dramatic upgrades very soon. So expect this feature sometimes soon in the future.  Same about drag-and-drop in the Timeline.


Q.  How do you see your toolset evolving over time?  Is you your focus on developing more collaboration features? Requirements management?  Resource management? Some other area of functionality?

We have a bit different approach to collaboration aspect of a PM application. We don't plan to expand it into different directions trying to implement it all, at the end killing the idea of a simple application. I still like my email client, I like my IM, my phone, my blog and other tools I use. I don't plan quitting using them just because some tool implemented them all in one over-bloated interface.

Instead, we are looking mostly into integrating with other tools. We already added email integration, so the tasks can be created directly from emails (also messages can be sent, progress reported, attachments sent). We also added iCalendar support. Our Reports have CSV export.  And we plan to continue growing into that direction, supporting
popular formats and integrating with other products' APIs. We also plan to open our API for public.

Also, we are looking a lot into "data visualization" aspect of 5pm.  That's why the Timeline will become even bigger, to show more information there. Reports section will grow considerably as well.

And, once again, we don't have a "set in stone" plan. We prefer to listen to our clients and see what features are really needed at this moment and to balance them with other aspects, like simplicity.