The technology services industry is still one of the fastest growing sectors in the world. And as a company grows in size and acquires more projects, it become more and more expensive and difficult to manage multiple project across the enterprise. LG Soft was also presented with a similar problem.

The Challenge
The company was growing and needed an integrated project management system to ensure smooth delivery of projects. “It was getting more and more complex to plan engineering projects, track defects and issues and fill the engineers’ timesheet,” says Prakasha K N, Head IT & Information Security, LG Soft India Pvt. Ltd. “Many project management tools are available in the market but they are expensive and time consuming to implement.”

This extremely complex environment and tight budget constraints prompted LG to look for options that were extremely effective but did not cost the world.

The Solution
The company looked at implementing the Redmine Project Management tool. Redmine is a flexible project management web application written using Ruby on Rails framework. “It is a time, defect and issue tracker web application with mail and LDAP integration. It also has multiple projects and database support,” says Prakasha.

This is also beneficial for the ITeS company as it is open sourced under the GPL license. Being open source has the benefit of easily available plug-ins. The organisation has also included plug-ins for effort tracking/project planning, timesheet, risk and graphical reports in the implementation. They have also developed a treasure hunt module on it to gather new Ideas from employees across the organisation.

Other plug-ins in the implementation include - Dashboard for tracking milestone; Risk management plug-in; Estimation and Requirement management plug-in; Bulk upload, time entries and other entries for bulk tasks.

The Benefits
To start with, the organisation has already saved more than $100,000 on an implementation of about Rs. 100,000.

Apart from the monetary benefits, there have been many tangible project and personnel management benefits achieved by the project. To start with, now the company can easily track each task assigned and provide its status with respect to milestones and engineers.

For any project-based ITeS firm, it is extremely important to be able to correctly estimate the time and capture the requirements of the project. This tool has been immensely helpful on both counts for LG Soft. We have been able to improve drastically on both counts.

Needless to say, it has helped in better project management also. Project managers now have a lot more control over the projects with easy to monitor dashboards and metrics. The need for project meetings has been reduced as a lot of communication about the project happens through the management tool.

All the data for metrics analysis is captured automatically without manual intervention. The engineer's timesheets are directly linked to the projects to ensure seamless integration and control.

Finally, the project also has Risk Management embedded.

Finally
By thinking outside the box and taking a brave step by adopting an open source tool, LG Soft has been able to save thousands of dollars while improving efficiency in the organisation. A win-win on all counts.