Severity One: S1 Reviews

Independent Review

November 2002, MDI Corp commissioned Mr Chris Quigley of The Writing Factory to independently interview Severity One users to gain an insight on S1’s functionality and assess the products commercial viability.

On completion Mr Quigley commented that within his professional career ”I have never seen a product or service with a 100% positive response from clients”. Mr Quigley went on to say that “clients usually take the opportunity to disclose at lest some form of dissatisfaction with the product or service.”

Who uses S1 within your organisation?

Everyone internally and externally. We use the system internally and also in our relationships with external suppliers such as developers, help desk support when its required and with clients. It provides us with:

faster turnaround on requests
enhances productivity and resourcing capabilities
requires less resources than a phone help system
comprehensive details of what is required/being requested and
a precise auditing and reporting tool.

Carol Knee-Omant - Product Development Manager, CBD Online Limited

CBD Online use Severity One primarily as a project management tool. It's time saving; reduces resources and most importantly provides me with a clearly defined audit trail from the moment I log a request.

I use it with third party suppliers such as ISP’s, developers, designers, engineers etc. from project initiation through to completion, S1 lets me track and schedule such things as:

uploads of sites and ongoing site elements
system administration issues

In regards to clients, I provide them with user names and passwords and they can then log requests and issues through the system rather than a phone call or more likely phone chase where the information is often not concise or complete.

Logging requests through the Severity One interface prompts people to take the time to really address the requirements/issues behind request they are making. Instead of 'My web page doesn’t work – people have to report useful information such as what they were doing at the time – what exactly isn't working – when they tried to view etc.

If they are requesting new or additional information or content the Severity One System is a great tool for enabling them to get control of what it is exactly that they require – again as opposed to – 'I need a new page to highlight the blue products.'

Severity One permissions means that I, as the development manager, can determine work priorities and permission levels for clients to log priority requests – for instance any high priority requests must be approved by me before proceeding to developers or assigned suppliers.

Severity One is simple to use and so powerful in enabling us to communicate with both clients and suppliers and keep a tight accurate track of project tasks and issues.

Through the CBD Online organisation, our clients and third party suppliers, all project tasks, requests for new or additional work and help requests are all recorded through the Severity One system. As a result we:

save time on phone chasing and interpreting vague or minimal information
can easily follow a task's progress through the S1 audit trail and
can readily access specialised resources such as programmers, designers etc to quote/commit to undertaking a task within set time and guidelines.
Finally – the most important element of a very good system – the capacity to track and manage projects.