A firebrand who works to simplify the Projectplace application

Ensuring a simple and user-friendly software-as-a-service application for project management is the chief goal of Mattias Hällström, Director of Research and Development at Projectplace. "Because our clients use our system on a project basis, it must be easy to learn and understand," says Hällström. "People don't have time to familiarise themselves with complicated systems."

Projectplace is a software-as-a-service application that can be accessed directly through a web browser. As opposed to traditional software that you install on your own server or computer, neither training, a major investment nor significant operating costs are required.

The challenge for Hällström, one of Projectplace's founders, is to constantly improve and simplify the application. User patterns are evaluated prior to each update. Interviews, analyses and tests are conducted. "The best thing about Projectplace being a software-as-a-service application is that we can adapt and improve it based on user behaviour," says Hällström.

Projectplace continually tracks the functions that are used the most and least. "Sometimes we remove those that turn out to be superfluous," he continues. "For instance, we once had a discussion forum, but few users took advantage of it. The option still exists, but you have to activate it yourself." That's the kind of approach that makes the application better all the time. The whole purpose is to save time for users.

"We can't satisfy every project management need, so we pick the functions that experience shows to be most useful," says Hällström. "If you try to please all of the people all of the time, nobody is happy." Accessibility is crucial to an application like Projectplace. Any and all downtime is unacceptable – you must be able to log in 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

"We have designed the system to permit major updates without the application being down," says Hällström "It's something like a heart-lung machine during open heart surgery." As a result, Projectplace offers higher uptime than both traditional and web-based services.

"We were down for a total of 11 minutes last year," says Hällström. "And that was in connection with a scheduled update. Only in recent years have traditional systems been able to guarantee the kind of uptime that has been our trademark from the beginning.

"The purpose of Projectplace is to facilitate cooperation and communication during a project. My job is to make the application as simple and user-friendly as possible. That's what keeps me going."