Like many new companies, creating HMS and what Chris Vandersluis, along with his colleague, would do with the company came as an opportunity. In 1984, they were a two-person programming and consulting team with some project management experience. A family friend had a contact at Philips Electronics in Montreal, and that helped the duo get a contract to choose, customize, and implement a project management tool and, as part of that work, create a timesheet.Chris and his colleague wrote what they thought was a winning design, and the Finance people were delighted. Across the table, the Project Management people were not. Undaunted, they went back to the drawing board and came up with an even better design. This time the Project Management people were all smiles. Across the table, the Finance people were not. In the end, they wrote the timesheet almost three times because the essential requirement was that the same timesheet system would work for the project management team to update project progress and, at the same time, work for finance to provide information for payroll, HR, and financial reporting for R&D tax credits. That became a unique and winning product.That work took over a year. By the time they were done, HMS had become the exclusive distributor of a project management tool in Canada, leading them to work with some of the largest companies imaginable.For example, a Fortune 500 company engaged HMS because it had tried four unsuccessful times in the early 1980s to find a complete project management tool to do what it had imagined it needed. "It's hard to remember now what the project management software industry looked like then. The IBM PC was only released in August of 1981. By the time we got into business in 1983, there were very few project management tools for PCs to choose from," says Chris. "Project Management software before 1982 was all on mainframe or minicomputers. We found a handful of options, so flexibility was important to us." They had numerous thoughts about functionality, most of which weren't helpful. Ultimately, Chris learned to work backward from the business requirements to what they needed on a screen and custom-write whatever there was a gap for. This early work would lay the groundwork for what would ultimately become HMS' timesheet business with TimeControl some ten years later. In 1994, ten years after HMS was founded, they shifted the company from consulting/distribution to being a publisher. They had already created numerous timesheets for different clients and knew that their internal expertise and experience could quickly create a commercial product for publication. That product would be named TimeControl.Over the thirty years that HMS' TimeControl timesheet system has been on the market, they have focused their attention on looking at the present and history. A timesheet system stands in the present and looks back at the week, the month, the year, or even the duration of a project and lets you track progress. In the case of TimeControl, progress is made by project and by task. HMS has made TimeControl to do that very, very well. However, TimeControl is hyper-focused on Project Actuals and believes their work in the latest edition of TimeControl, TimeControl Project, gives them the opportunity to look into the future for work on project plans. "More and more of our attention will bring the power, flexibility, and success of the TimeControl timesheet to TimeControl Project. We believe the combination of both TimeControl and TimeControl Project will be a powerful one,"
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