I have tried out a service on the web called PlanHQ a couple of times and from my first visit I thought that they had a very good potential. This visit had been about 4 months ago and I set-up a business plan using the software and it helped me pull my ideas together. I understood the product was still in beta at that point so was quite forgiving of the odd button not working and things like this.

I liked that the application had a button within it to allow people to  give immediate feedback on the page that they were in to the developers - this seemed very logical to me and a great communication tool (I have since noticed it on other sites). Each time I came across a problem I noted it and then carried on with what I was doing - finding a workaround at most times.

What I like most about the service is the core idea - a business plan should not be a document but a living set of data that charts the plan for your company and allows you to look at it from lots of different perspectives. The document has now been reduced to an output from all this data to communicate your plan to other people - brilliant.

The service is there to help you plan in the first place - but also to get you to keep the document alive as you grow your business, and easily compare progress against the plan.

They finished their beta a while back and I knew that I would have to pay for the service - but decided that it didn’t give me enough value to be worth the 30 day trial.

I chose to revisit the site last week as I am in a phase of planning again and I got it working quite easily. I was disappointed with what I found though. The design has changed and I think as a result of this - there were lots of bugs again - buttons didn’t work, error pages appeared. I was so disappointed as I believe in these guys vision but they seem to be going backwards not forwards. What I had found previously as a great beta application that I thought had potential and was recommending to people had become a much less usable application, which I found frustrating to use myself let alone recommend.

I had made a couple of recommendations about the site after the beta - the first was to make it multi-currency which they have done - but this still has bugs - graphs and charts show dollar signs still. The second was to look at the financial planning and allow sales forecasts to have a combination of product, price and volume to allow easier planning.

I found myself now using a combination of google docs and spreadsheets to allow collaborative reviews of the text and figures and I am using Zoho Project to manage the goals tasks.

If the financial element within planHQ was better I think I would pay for it for sure (once usability was fixed).

Truely Unique - part of their service which shines out as an example of what they are trying to do is the analysis tool for comparing markets, requirements and competition. I can honestly say that this took is fantastic at helping you see the woods for the trees, understand what it is your markets want and compare this with what is being delivered. I have gained insight in to my market place with this tool and it has been instrumental in changing my strategy, and the great thing is you can use this tool for free in the first 30 days - then move to easier to use tools for the rest of the cycle with your business plan.

Here is my suggestion to the planHQ guys:

Your belief in an idea is great - you are at the beginning of setting a benchmark in on-line business tools, but you are only just beginning. Look to the Markets section of the product and continue to innovate along these lines in other areas - remember you are not creating a new way to output a business plan document, but a new way of building & maintaining a business plan that allows you to review data in many ways.Your QA processes need to improve greatly - there is nothing worse than pressing UPDATE and nothing happens after you have just spent time typing something in, and there are many bugs like these. Your designers and technical guys need to sit with some users and use this software, at the moment the reasons not to use it out weight the reasons to use it.

I cannot say enough how much I think these guys have the right idea, but the execution is really letting them down at the moment.

Popularity: 58% [?]

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 1:57 pm and is filed under off-topic, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.