“What gets measured gets managed” - whilst the majority of small and medium sized business owners would agree with this statement, the reality of the day to day running of a business means that measurement and analysis are seldom a priority. Often the reason for this is that the information required to perform any meaningful analysis is held in a variety of different locations: spreadsheets, time sheets, paper records, accountancy packages, to name but a few. The sheer effort required in searching out information for analysis can make this task difficult and time consuming.

The Project lifecycle

So the idea behind Slate is simple - pull together all the aspects of a typical business process (what we call the Project Lifecycle) into a single user friendly package, meaning that measurement and management are effortless by-products of an integrated approach to business tasks that you need to do anyway!!

The Component Parts

Slate has broken the Project Lifecycle process into the following components and provides a main screen (plus drill down screens) for each of these components.

The Implementation

One of the principal design priorities of Slate was ease of use. The very process of combining aspects of the Project Lifecycle into a single system is an excellent start but Slate goes much further to make the system easy to learn and use.

The screen layout dispenses with the problem of cryptic menus and sub-menus for navigating the system. Instead all the major screens (only 9 of them!) are available at all times through tabs (much like the tabs found in a filing cabinet drawer). All the drill-down functions, (“show the milestones on a project”, for example) are available from the major screens by means of a similar tab system. At all times users can see exactly where they are in the system and can easily navigate to a new area; carrying relevant information when they move; for example, if a Client is selected, navigating to the Project screen can automatically select all the Projects for that Client.

Another user friendly feature of Slate is its searching capabilities. Unlike many systems where data searching is only successful if you provide precise search information, Slate employs a flexible search, which is more akin to an internet search engine. For example, to find John Smith from Glasgow simply enter this as the search criteria and the system will find the record even if the Client was entered as “John M. Smith Jnr”.