Clifford is Show Manager with CornellGroup, Inc., an advertising / public relations firm and trade show producer located in Fair Oaks, California.

How did you get started with Chirp?

We had been searching for a way to help us get a better handle on what we were doing on a day-to-day basis. We searched the Internet and evaluated 4-5 software alternatives before selecting Chirp. We didn't spend any time looking at web-based alternatives.

What attracted you to Chirp?

We felt it sat nicely between Outlook task lists and traditional project management software packages. Outlook personal task lists just didn't give us quite enough team benefit. And project management applications concentrated on Gantt charts and planning, which didn‘t help us because we don‘t have a lot of projects that run for a long time. Instead, what we really needed was a tool to help us manage a continuous flow of deliverables in a stream of client projects.

We are also a multi-platform computing shop. Our business management people are all on Windows, but our creative people are all Mac users. It was really important to have something that could be used by everybody in the company, regardless of computer type.

How are you using Chirp in your business?

We provide a number of different types of public relations and marketing services to our clients, so we use it to track the various items of work as they progress.

There‘s one other aspect: Our company owns and runs a trade show, which I spend most of my time on. The way I use Chirp for these activities is somewhat different from how the rest of the company uses it. So what I‘m looking at on my desktop is different than what many other employees are seeing. Yet, the boss can see it all. In my mind, this flexibility is actually a great strength of Chirp.

What do you think of it after having used it a while?

The short answer is that it has given us the visibility that we were seeking into what we‘re doing. So in that sense, it‘s performing exactly as we need it to.

One of Chirp‘s strengths has also been a bit of a challenge for us. It has a lot of flexibility to it, and we‘re still experimenting with discovering how to organize things within Chirp in a way that most reflects our business. (Editor‘s note: See our suggestions about structure on our Best Practices page.)

What parts of it do you consider the most useful for you?

We really like the reporting function, which has improved our client communications quite nicely. When we need to pass progress info to our clients, everything is in one place. We actually create reports in Chirp, output them to a file, touch up the look & feel as we want, and send them to our clients as progress reports.

What types of computers are you using?

All our business team uses Windows, though we aren‘t using Microsoft Exchange or anything. Our graphics people use Macs.

What is the volume of your Chirp usage?

We have 10‘s of projects active at any given time, and each project will have a half-a-dozen tasks in it that we want to track.

What were you using before you used Chirp?

We were using Outlook and lots of spreadsheets and Word documents that we would email around to each other.

How has it been to be a Plum Canary customer?

Product support is better than pretty much anything I‘ve experienced before. Generally speaking, I think most consumers aren‘t happy with software product support. I can only think of two instances where I‘ve been happy with customer support, and Plum Canary is one of those.

Thanks for your comments, Clifford.

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