The Mantis Bugtracker (http://www.mantisbt.org/) was built for bugtracking and does a great job at doing so, but T-Mark was looking for an alternative way to keep track of our jobs big and little. In the nature of our business, priorities, prices, and scopes of projects change on a frequent basis and having the programming foundation that we do, life and business began to sound a lot like a series of issues (projects) and bugs (anomalies) that would need to be tracked on a daily basis.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a mashup and a hack of a system that wasn’t really intended for these purposes and there is probably better project tracking software out there, but our work flow has been effectively streamlined since beginning to use Mantis to track our work.

Here’s what led us to the solution.

As our workload increased we found ourselves bogged down in creating small, one-off estimates that needed to be shared with the customers quickly.  Content or projects need to be turned around fast and there is no time to waste.  E-Mail, even with all of it’s fancy threading and tagging features, lacks the structure and discipline required to truly organize a conversation around a project.  In particular, there are constants you will always associate with a new project such as the cost, the due date and the scope and it’s always handy to have these basic constants in mind when working through a project so you don’t run over budget or out of scope.  As the emails blossomed like the cherry trees in Spring we quickly found ourselves under a mountain of communication that was becoming hard to dig out of.

Mantis was not the ideal solution to our woes when we first started up with it.  In fact, we were using it as it was originally designed for a programming project that we were working on.  To make the transformation from a debugging tool to a project management tool involved two primary changes, 1) updating the status types to things like “invoiced”, “in progress” and “feedback” and 2) the addition of several custom fields such as “cost” and “due date”.  Mantis is not the most intuitive piece of software to configure, but with enough elbow greese we got it to come around and behave.  The last major step was to configure the issues screen so that we could see the information that we wanted to, such as due date and cost, since custom fields do not display by default.

The use of Mantis continues to evolve with more changes to come I’m sure.  Nevertheless, Mantis has lightened the load of our communication to a great degree and proves to be a valuable asset.

Some companies are spun off, some companies are started to address a niche market, and still others find themselves navigating the rapids of the business world.  T-Mark began as an import / export company, importing equipment from the United States to Japan back in the early 90’s.  You wouldn’t think that an import company specializing in ice hockey equipment would become one of Japan’s leading interactive agencies, but the very key to T-Mark success to this day helped guide the company from blade sharpeners and helmet visors to international project management and online marketing strategies.

The key has been adaptability and vision.

These two building blocks have maneuvered T-Mark from the now ancient world of BBS’s and terminals through to the glitsy and bubbly world of Web 2.0 and cloud computing.  Given the speed of the internet even these terms will be ancient history within a year or two and the reason why T-Mark’s focus has also been on adapting with the times.

As T-Mark has adapted we’ve experienced a lot along the way and in the spirit of the Internet revolution and dissemination of information we hope to provide insight into how we’ve succeeded.  Welcome aboard.