Case Study: The Simplify Company

Virtual business, real clients

Rudy Kehler, the principal of web design and web application development consultancy thesimplifycompany.com, says PBworks is "vital" to his work and the "key to maintaining client confidence." Thesimplifycompany.com is a virtual business whose partners are scattered mostly across Canada's British Columbia, but with participating consultants across the entire country for certain projects. Each participating partner in a project is an independent business that brings its own expertise and team members to the mix. Areas of expertise on a project can range across a number of specialties including graphics designers, videographers, data base experts, and applications developers whose work needs to be coordinated, integrated and presented to clients.

Giving clients more control over their projects

Rudy wanted to give his clients more control over their projects, to not just tell them about the status of a project but to actually show them the status. "Clients are terrified of the Big Unknown," he says, "PBworks provides transparency and accountability for the project that gives clients peace of mind." To accomplish this every member of the project team, including a point person at the client, gets a PBworks account. Contributions to the project by the distributed partners are uploaded to the wiki and project schedules and check lists are maintained and updated there. The wiki also serves as the locus for comments, suggestions and discussions for the project as it evolves. Thus all project participants have access to a central, integrated repository of the history, status, and snapshot of the current state of the project.

Rudy is sensitive to the fact that his clients are sometimes required to provide their managers with status reports at the drop of an email. PBworks allows his clients insight into that status without having to ask for an update from Rudy and his team. One of the big features of PBworks that Rudy especially likes is the ability to give multiple parties access to view the wiki without having access to update or add comments to it. This allows multiple parties at the client to have a direct view of the project and its status while maintaining a single, interactive point of contact with the client, which Rudy finds essential to the smooth running of a project.

Educating clients on the benefits of technology

Although not difficult to use, PBworks introduces a new technology to clients which they may not be familiar with and must master to run a project. This may induce a push-back or reluctance to adopt on the part of the client. Rudy is sensitive to this issue and adopts a proactive stance to combating it. "Education is the answer," he says. Rudy uses the YouTube video introduction to wikis, "Wikis in Plain English," and places a link to it on the wiki. After a short time, when the client is comfortable with the wiki, he deletes it. Rudy says that there is also usually a champion at every client who becomes very involved with the wiki and serves as an inside salesperson to promote its use. "Once a client sees the benefits of transparency and accountability that PBworks brings to a project any hesitancy around its use falls away."

Rudy looked at many wiki products and signed up to personally test two before settling on PBworks. What sold him? "It must look easy to do," he states. "The client is apprehensive about using new technology and PBworks with its clean layout and intuitive GUI satisfies that requirement." He was also impressed by the positive reviews PBworks has received. Other important features to Rudy are the ability to have many clients accessing the system while still controlling who gets to update it. Since the pricing of PBworks is dependent on employees (guest user accounts for clients are free), it makes it very affordable for him to grant viewing access to as many people who want it without affecting his cost of operation. And he still gets to have only a single interactive point of contact with the client which is essential to project control.

Turning project workspaces over to the client

One feature of PBworks that Rudy especially likes is the ability to package the workspace at the end of the project and provide it to the client to run internally. This gives the client the ability to continue the project internally for future upgrades and enhancements or just for operational continuity purposes.

For Thesimplifycompany, PBworks has become the key to maintaining client confidence, accountability, and project transparency through a real-time window on the project. The company has jumped in to using PBworks with both feet. "We're in," says Rudy. "We're just using it. Period."