Let me ask you something: When will it stop. The madness, I mean?
When will the madness stop?
So all those TMS systems and their developers that thought that everything in the world is just another project can go somewhere and sit in the dark in silence. You know. Not to annoy any more people, because they might end up beaten up.​
Truth is, internally between us best Translation Project Managers we still call everything that we work on "a Project" so maybe in a way, they are right. But in our hearts, we know that a Project is actually something much bigger than that 44th iteration of the same Agency, same PM, same EndClient, same Software to use, same Workflow to use, same everything except that it's now called:
Fragus 45.1 and has 300 untranslated and 271.35 weighted words, and the five similar things before were Fragus 45.0, Fragus 44.9, Fragus 44.7, Fragus 46 and Fragus 45.5.
Why am I so pissed of, then? Well hardly all of them Fragus things (btw, I have no idea if there is actually a company named that, or if it means something - hopefully it doesn't mean anything in the line of offending someone to death), so hardly is every of the Fragus things a new project.
They are just iterations of a long time ago established Bigger Project...
Here's a real life example
My colleague Ivana who is in charge for coordinating projects for our very small but beautiful company has got one project the other day. For one language. Let's pretend it's English to German.
Then a couple hours later, same project came for another language. Let's say it's English to French
Then in 3 hours same project came for English to Bulgarian, the third language that we still cover for this company...
And all that is great.
Except the fact that 99% of TMS systems are not capable of spotting duplicates.
And we used to use one of those systems.
So instead of having one project with three languages, we had three projects with a same name, for one language.
Which is Redundant. Stupid. Time Consuming. Counterproductive. Annoying. Poorly executed. And bad programming.
Ivana asked me how big of a deal it is, because in the end, she can delete the duplicate projects, and put new languages (and all their data, again) to the one created initially but I said no, we already spent too much time on these things, so let's just leave it like that.
Just imagine the time lost entering all the data again and again: Project name, Client, End Client, Project Manager, Prices, Start dates, Due dates, etc.
Three times. Everything. That's a lot of "empty" if you ask me. Empty being, you know. Useless.
Now if you are covering one language or two, you can get away with it.
But if you are covering 15 languages (the biggest we ever had to cover as a small company that offers only 6 languages by default, was 17 languages), this thing would have been entered 15 times! Even choosing the favourite Italian PM by the name Managero Favoritto is painful.
And also, it creates a lot more work for the owner (if it's a really small agency) or the Finance department when the Purchase Orders need to be filled in - you need to enter it 17 times again, and then when invoicing your Clients... but hey, we lived through it.
But only because I have this vision.
- The vision of a system that doesn't allow duplicates;
- a system where you don't need to enter the name of the same project manager 11,000 times;
- a system where you don't need to switch to five different new windows when you realized you forgot to enter your new customer in it;
- simply put, it's the vision of a System that ROCKS.
And yes, it's the vision of miniTPMS in its full capacity.
So you probably can guess, this kind of redundant work, this kind of overhead, and time-wasting process will NEVER be allowed in miniTPMS.
Because what we are creating is aimed to shorten the time you work on your administration, and not triple it. Because it is supposed to have all the relevant data on one place and not in three projects with the same name. And finally because having them all on one place makes it easier to spot patterns (more on that later).
Apart from the fact that we're grouping work in a different way than all other TMS systems combined: those miniTPMS Users who work for same clients a lot, clients who send them similar projects, or small 44th and 45th iterations of chunks of one big project, those will really have a blast.
In the immortal words of Chandler Bing: OH, MY, GOD!
If you are working like this, "mini" could really change your life.
And...
If you start using miniTPMS, I need the cheezy cliché here: it's going to be The First Day Of the Rest of Your Life.
If you want to know how to do that, all you need to do is Grab our e-mail series with all the explanation​ and see if it's a good fit.
