Deltek TrafficLIVE vs. Zoho Projects

On a scale between 1-10, I would score Deltek TrafficLIVE as a 4 in terms of recommendations. This is due to the fact that as a Finance Analyst, I found it a very difficult system to use when all I could get from the system was raw data. It was almost impossible to create reports within the system. It was good, however, for users to input their time.

Incentivized

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

Incentivized

• The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
• It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
• It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
• Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.

Incentivized

• Swiss Army Knife: The suite of Zoho projects can be tailored to fit the needs of any business. It's great to have a bunch of different software offerings that will work together seamlessly.
• Task Customization: Zoho allows you to customize your tasks more than other platforms (add start dates, due dates, dependencies, subtasks...)

Incentivized

• One of the main features I would like to see added is another permissions option that allows Studio/Traffic Managers to the see the 'blue' time added that currently only the user can see when they have added their actual hourly time. This would give the option to view quickly the progress of a job, and to see if its still live or completed. There is the option to look at the 'weekly timesheet' but this in my opinion is not nearly as user friendly as being able to look at a glance each calendar.
• It would be hugely beneficial if along the grey bar on the bottom of the homepage another notification is added that a job had been added to Deltek TrafficLIVE. A simple number would alert you that a new job has been added and needs your immediate attention.
• The job search has been conveyed to me by a number of users as not working efficiently enough. If you have the job number then it works perfectly but if you try to locate a job by the account managers name or project name it will not reliably respond in your search.

• More flexibility on making the user interface more compact (like Excel or MSP). Current interface is well spaced, but some users may like a more compact view.
• More simplified Gantt Charts that help us understand progress and dependencies.
• Ability to export projects to Excel for sharing with others we can't/don't want to bring on to Zoho projects

Incentivized

Zoho has been able to fit the needs of our Engineering organization. The employees and management that are using it have not found a 'catastrophic' reason to discontinue use. Although certain features and better support mechanisms would be much better, it has been able to keep with both basic needs and more advanced ones. A majority of the company has enjoyed the basic interface it offers, the apps it has for iPhone and Blackberry, the mobility of updating a project without needing to be connected to any type of server. There are still improvements that can be made in future releases but as the person who originally purchased the solution for our company, I have found it to be an excellently priced solution in the functionality it offers.

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

Has not been down to my knowledge.

Speed meets my expectations.

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

Synergist - does the same thing, but the interface was far more complicated to use. Looked like a bit of a nightmare to use. Didn't get too far reviewing this one. Was too concerned about on boarding with our workforce.

Paprika - saw a demo, looked 'OK', heard bad reviews from friends in the same industry. Appeared to be plagued with the same issues as Synergistic. Paint to use.

Streamtime - Tested this thoroughly. Loved the interface, and very nearly bought this software over TrafficLIVE for that very reason. In the end it did not allow us to separate time into distinct categories such as 'estimated', 'quoted', 'scheduled', and 'actual'. In Streamtime, if you stretched the time next to a task, it seemed to also adjust the estimate as well. In contrast, Traffic separated time into these dimensions for every task, resulting in a far more useful data set for reporting.

Finally, Traffic was cloud based, which meant that I didn't need the added hassle of hosting and maintenance. In my opinion, Streamtime is suited to a smaller business, maybe 5-20 employees. It might have improved now but it's been two years since I reviewed it.

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

• We use Deltek TrafficLive in an in-house studio environment, so we don't use all of its features. However, we couldn't function as efficiently without it.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, prior to creating Project Task Templates we'd occasionally miss a step and something that was necessary would be overlooked.
• The creation of the Project Templates was a team collaborative effort to make sure that everyone had some input as different people was integral to specific projects.
• It took a little while to learn some of the more tricked out features like task dependency but even starting out with the most basic of features was very significant.

Incentivized