Geometry-S: The Value of Worksection for an Engineering Company

Oleg Sam­chyk, CEO of GEOMETRY‑S, shared with us how his team migrat­ed from Bitrix24 to Work­sec­tion in just a week, what main tasks the project man­age­ment sys­tem helps to han­dle and what is the ben­e­fit of Work­sec­tion for an engi­neer­ing company.

GEOMETRY‑S is a Ukrain­ian com­pa­ny that designs engi­neer­ing net­works of civ­il and indus­tri­al build­ings using BIM tech­nolo­gies (infor­ma­tion mod­el­ing). The GEOMETRY‑S team has been work­ing on the mar­ket since 2012.

The sys­tem was actu­al­ly intro­duced in 2017. Our team was grow­ing steadi­ly, and so was the num­ber of projects we were run­ning at the same time, so we real­ized that Google spread­sheets were no longer up to it. That’s how we start­ed work­ing with Bitrix24.

Switch­ing from Bitrix24 to Work­sec­tion took up to 1 week. Some dif­fi­cul­ties came up while migrat­ing the tasks, because there were so many (more than 8,000), so we had to clean up Bitrix before the migra­tion — delete all the old tasks and keep only the ones rel­e­vant to cur­rent projects.

Our team, which cur­rent­ly includes 15 engi­neers and about 10 con­trac­tors, is well-coor­di­nat­ed and there­fore ful­ly sup­port­ed the tran­si­tion. It took sev­er­al days to set up stages, labels and user accounts. It’s also worth not­ing that a demon­stra­tion of Work­sec­tion’s fea­tures and set­tings made the adjust­ment sig­nif­i­cant­ly quick­er. In just half an hour, we received answers to all our questions.

The main project tasks have fixed bud­gets, so it’s very con­ve­nient to see a pro­jec­t’s finan­cial report­ing — what bud­get was planned, how it’s dis­trib­uted, and how much is cur­rent­ly left. Also, for some projects (main­ly for­eign ones) we have hourly billing, so we use track­ing as well. We can set an indi­vid­ual hourly rate for each user (for exam­ple, if we have a stu­dent on a tri­al peri­od), which is also convenient.

And the most impor­tant thing is the task his­to­ry: you can open the archive at any time and find every­thing you need in the com­ments. Our entire com­pa­ny is con­nect­ed to Work­sec­tion, and all work com­mu­ni­ca­tion hap­pens there.

We’re a project office, so our projects cov­er the entire devel­op­ment cycle of engi­neer­ing net­works and archi­tec­tur­al objects — from col­lect­ing the clien­t’s ini­tial data to get­ting the project doc­u­men­ta­tion approved by all the expert bodies.

A pro­jec­t’s full cycle involves a large num­ber of tasks. Some can run in par­al­lel, oth­ers only sequen­tial­ly, so a shift in the dead­line for one task affects the dead­lines of the whole project. This is where we use a Gantt chart: we link the tasks togeth­er, adjust them as we go, and see the real pic­ture and the real fin­ish date. This lets us avoid ​“sur­pris­es” and make deci­sions in advance.

We also involve clients to projects in the sys­tem, in par­tic­u­lar for projects with hourly rates. The client can see the track­ing, par­tic­i­pate in the prompt dis­cus­sion of issues direct­ly in the com­ments to the tasks, approve and even inde­pen­dent­ly cre­ate new tasks for fur­ther work. It is a com­plete­ly trans­par­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem that reduces rou­tine work and offers the man­ag­er more oppor­tu­ni­ties for strate­gic issues.

It is very con­ve­nient that the sys­tem has inte­gra­tion with Telegram. Cur­rent­ly, 90% of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in tasks is con­duct­ed pre­cise­ly through the Telegram bot.

Yes, we have a num­ber of inter­nal cor­po­rate reg­u­la­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly for work­ing in Work­sec­tion: require­ments for nam­ing tasks, fill­ing in the ini­tial data (dead­line, effort, bud­get), the Task Board stages and who is respon­si­ble for the stage a task is ​“mov­ing” through, as well as rules for clos­ing and accept­ing tasks, and so on.

Def­i­nite­ly! If you want to grow, soon­er or lat­er you’ll face the ques­tion of imple­ment­ing a project man­age­ment sys­tem. So why not do it now? Espe­cial­ly when there’s such a cool Ukrain­ian product.