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Zilicus PM Is Taking Care Of Your Project Management Woes

What’s the key to project success? Well, managing the project properly, of course. That’s exactly what ZilicusPM aims to do with its comprehensive project management software. We caught up with co-founders Nagin Kothari and Dhananjay (Dhan) Wagholikar to find out why ZilicusPM is a cut above the competition.

 

 

Tell us a little more about ZilicusPM

ZilicusPM makes project management incredibly simple and collaborative. It is online project management software that instills transparency and accountability among project team members.

 

It offers comprehensive project management features that go beyond most Task-Management tools marketed as project management tools. ZilicusPM is also a lot more user-friendly compared to other expensive, legacy & complex project management software available in the market. Along with Google Apps , MS Project integration, users of ZilicusPM can use advanced scheduling, interactive Gantt charts, resource management, issue/defect tracking, risk management, document management, time tracking and project calendar features.

 

 

What makes ZilicusPM stand out from the rest?

  1. It is an incredibly simple to use application with comprehensive features at an affordable cost
  2. It has a very quick learning curve with minimum or no training required to use it
  3. Project scheduling can be done incredibly quick (like spread sheet entries) using interactive gantt chart (drag drop tasks, dependencies)
  4. Organogram and user roles take away the headache of managing access/privileges to projects. Portfolio managers and executive management automatically get access to their portfolio of projects
  5. It is one integrated tool to manage entire lifecycle of the project. With ZilicusPM in use, you do not need to use different systems to create project, manage project files, track timesheet, manage issues or risks.

 

Users can take 30-days free trial before purchasing it. As far as pricing is concerned, it is priced at $14.95 per user per month.
Apart from currently offered ZilicusPM we are going to launch ZilicusRM – the requirement management solution. These two solutions combined, will enable organizations to manage customer’s requirement, plan and deliver those effectively. So ZilicusPM along with ZilicusRM, are going to be an end to end solution to manage a business solution lifecycle.

 

 

How do you motivate yourself?

Dhan:

  • Being an entrepreneur, our goals and our milestones!

Doing what we want to do! We have set goals, milestones for ourselves. And these milestones and goals keep me motivated.

  • Customer Feedback

Another thing is positive deviation; the feedback, responses we keep receive from customers, communication with them inspires us.

  • Inspirations from others

Apart from these, I also like to read startup successes, autobiographies of notable personalities from diverse background – politics, academic, business, culture.

 

Nagin: My passion for the technology and the very thought about solution architecture motivates my work.

 

 

 

Got any great bootstrapping tips for the lean startups out there?

I would like to share few things from our experiences.

  • Stop gossiping and make it work

As I said earlier, as an entrepreneur we realized that there are so many opportunities out there in the market. However, it is prudent to stay focused on just a couple of those (which are most appealing and we are passionate about) and not start acting on it. To me, It is like a gossip unless we really start working on the concepts.

  • Check! Check! Does it work for them?

As we worked on our product/ service idea, we realized how important to see if resonates with the target audience; hence we’ve literally thrown our products to beta users and asked them to share ruthlessly honest feedback. We have remained pretty flexible to implement feature requests /changes suggested by our beta users as well as current customers. Since we do get a diverse set of requests by our customers and we know, if we implement all of these, it will kill the solution. Hence we keep product’s strategic, architectural positioning in our mind to analyze and evaluate users requests.

  • Keeping low outgo

Explore possible avenues to get things done at lowest cost without compromising the quality of the delivery. Fortunately we have Google, Amazon, Apache and alike have made various technologies, services available at free of cost or very low cost. First, it helps us to save the cost as well as enabling us to pass on this cost-benefit to users.

  • Start generating money, as early as possible

It translates to getting early users and paying customer. Exploring side-line activities to fund our cost without affecting startup work

  • Make your voice heard

Start early marketing for your product/services, even before you implement it. It gives a visibility and acquaintance in the market

 

What entrepreneur do you admire?

Dhan: I admire Jeff Bezos, for his values – customer obsession, thinking long-term, innovation, bias for action, ownership. He has really cultivated the environment for technology companies (including startups) with Amazon, AWS, Blue Origin.

I also admire Nagin for his ability to take risks. At the age of 50, he decided to leave his high-paying, secure job to start Zilicus.

Nagin: I admire Steve Jobs for his approach in making product designs simplistic and usable.

A lot of people have big ideas. What gave you the confidence to actually put your life on hold and realize yours?

We knew, the product concept we had in our mind has a huge market, we also knew that the solution we are going to offer will be the best and unique in the class. The confidence in the concept, our ideas to make it different than the rest and the confidence in ourselves inspired us to realize our dreams through Zilicus.

 

 

 

 

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs struggling to get their business off the ground?

Dhan:

  1. Your marketing activities need to start a lot earlier than your development/implementation
  2. Whatever value proposition (product/service) you have, take it early to right audience, check if it resonates, what they like and what they don’t.
  3. Generally, It can take a while more than you might expect, to get the visibility, so have patience. Do not quit.

 

Nagin: Make something useful to the user with a simple concept. It would be monetized automatically if people like it. So work for the idea first and not for money.

 

Where can our readers reach out to you?

 

Thanks Dhan and Nagin! Check out the new and improved ZilicusPM 3.1 for iOS, and make sure your projects have the right tools for success.

 

Photo Credits

Zilicus.com

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