Form: Project Update

OVERSING : STATE OF THINGS : THINKING OF VALUATION

Right now, as it sits in its current state of development, Oversing is about three times the scope of Jira’s functionality.

It will have something like ten times its functionality when we are complete. Plus our Workflow interface and engine is, orders of magnitude better. Our Agile planning, and working boards are radically better. And it’s not difficult to make the UI better. Jira’s is…. terrible. Really. It’s a bug tracking system that grew into an agile development system because of Greenhopper. We used it. It was the best available. But that doesn’t mean we like it.

So, that scale of 10x is just useful for putting our work in context.

I think the closest product would be TenRox, which is probably the previous generation of software for this industry. But Tenrox is a bit antique in terms of project management features, and is traditional in its resource management. I mean, we couldn’t buy it for my company in the last decade, and we are already in a new one. Good product though.

The product that’s customer base is quite large is Compuware’s Changepoint. Which, with some development work is pretty good for IT centric organizations in the old WBS model. We couldn’t make it work for us. Too much custom development would have been needed to get it to handle Oversing style of resourcing.

FunctionPoint is a product I’ve always loved. It’s for smaller agencies and tech shops. But it has a good UI and most of the features you need for small firms.

The most popular agency-ware I think is Workamajig, and it’s a bit old but it does most of what you want these products to do. I’m not sure about adding media buying to Oversing. I think maybe as a later add-on.

Really, nothing at all has our feature set. Some products have pretty good agile boards (they are a dime a dozen now – the world has pretty much taken the agile method as the defacto workflow model. And if anyone in the world hasn’t they should. Our model collapses the two so that your agile is always sitting on top of a WBS that’s either visible or not, at your discretion, but allows you to meet contracts (WBS management) for delivery as well as manage your workflow in streams (kanban) or sprints (agile).

And we have tried to keep it ‘creative friendly’ for the agency market. And that is something I hope to work into the product in ‘the win without pitching’ sort of way of thinking. And to push collaboration even harder.

Oversing is sort of like Facebook with the option of working on stuff with your friends in agile or wbs format, for customer who is also on FB and where you can work together to get your projects done. While at the same time, there is someone in charge of those projects to drive them, and someone above that person to drive all of them.

Microsoft Dynamics of course, is a full financial system. And Dynamics PSA is very powerful – the most powerful in my opinion. And the’re our sort of benchmark target. The problem is that most of us want something that works like FunctionPoint, that has the power of changepoint, and that integrates with financial packages as well as Dynamics PSA. And Dynamics is freaking hideous and painful to ask your staff to master.

Oversing does not have the ability to add dynamic dimensions yet (which is what drives up development cost of any ERP system exponentially.) I wrestled with it. But that takes the product from one that can do almost everything except financial accounting, and sort of invades the turf of financial accounting, breaking the barrier between management accounting (how well we run the business) and financial accounting (how well we finance the business). And it takes it from a product that you spend some time configuring, into one that you spend a lot of time planning and installing. And, that jus doesn’t make sense to me. I think financial accounting is an art, and I think management accounting is an art, and neither should be compromised. If you bundle them together you start to get extraordinary compromises. And we have worked too hard to insulate the user from the sense that he’s in an accounting system to fall into that trap.

Oversing can easily integrate with Dynamics (or SAP for that matter). But with Oversing and even a Peachtree product you would probably have every thing possible of value to your international business.

My original take was that we could build oversing for 5M in the states if I was very careful, and we’d get no less than a 20M business out of it at 60%. So, 5M in, and no less than 4x, means 50M out. So that’s a good turn. 10x in under 5 years.

But building it here, at 1/5 the cost, changed the multiplier a LOT by cutting the costs of development by 80% – Albeit I had to move here to make it happen.

The thing is, that I think, it’s turned into a product with +50M in annual revenue potential just at the conservative end. And that market is there, pretty easily really. I mean, like anything, we can screw it up. But I think we probably hit the feature / functionality / price point / sweet spot. And we didn’t make crazy financial promises to worried investors. We just focus on the product. Which I gotta say, is a lot more interesting than focusing on managing the expectations of others.

It will be pretty difficult to compete with Oversing. At least by V2.

So it’s looking pretty good right now. Normal stuff. “This looks ugly this way”, and ” why are we making all those SQL calls here?” and “Did you think to TEST that before checking it in?”, and “You know, that might sound intelligent in russian but in english it means….” and “Um.. where is the currency selector on this form? Is it like dryers and socks? It was there yesterday!”.

Like I said. Normal stuff. 🙂