Macadamian named to the InfoWorld 100

A happy start to the week - we were awarded an Infoworld 100 award for innovative use of technology in our business.

To give a bit of context to new readers, at Macadamian we design and build products for other technology companies. We're a software consultancy whose mission in life is to help other technology companies create great software products. We want our customer's customers to be as passionate about our customer's software as they are about their iPod.

We've grown to over 150 staff, in 4 countries, and we're delivering over 100 projects a year - most of them on tight deadlines. Our methodology blends user-centered design and agile project management. Predictability is key - we need to deliver what we said we would deliver on the day we said we'd deliver it. Or else.

So to tie together a project team distributed around the world, with customers distributed around the world, our Process Improvement team, led by Sylvain St-Germain, developed ProjectTools. ProjectTools is both the glue between our configuration management (namely Subversion and Jira) and collaboration tools (Confluence and secure newsgroups), and a dashboard that collects data from all those systems and presents them visually. It manages tasks, tracks defects, and provides Wiki functionality so that team members and our customers can collaborate and share information 24/7. What's really killer though, is it gives both our teams and customers a simple, visual view of the health of a project. It provides complete transparency - everyone sees how the project is progressing versus the planned schedule, and the full status (defects, planned vs. unplanned work, and a host of other metrics), in real-time.

Sylvain and his team live the Macadamian values - Transparency, Responsiveness, Agility, Collaboration, and Constant Improvement. Customers love ProjectTools, so I'm thrilled that the industry has recognized his team's work. Congratulations guys!