The Alcazar of Segovia (literally "Segovia Fortress") is a medieval castle located in the city of Segovia, Castile and Leon, Spain. The fortress is a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The Castle of Belmonte is a medieval castle on the hill of San Cristobal, just outside the village of Belmonte in the southwest of the province of Cuenca in Spain. It was declared a historic monument within the National Artistic Treasury by a decree of 3 June 1931 and is now a Bien de Interes Cultural.
The Alcazar of Toledo is a stone fortification located in the highest part of Toledo, Spain. Most of the city was rebuilt between 1939 and 1957 after the siege of the Alcazar during the Spanish Civil War.
The New Castle of Manzanares el Real, also known as Castle of los Mendoza, is a palace-fortress erected in the 15th century in the town of Manzanares el Real (Community of Madrid, Spain), next to the Santillana reservoir at the foot of Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range.
The Castle of Burgos was a castle and alcazar, located in the city of Burgos, in the hill of San Miguel above the city. The French, during the Peninsular Wars, in their retreat blew up the fortress; today we can see the ruins that remain.
The castle is in the highest part of Trujillo. It was built in the 13th century on the site of an old Arab fortress from the 9th or 10th century. The square towers typical of Islamic military architecture are preserved. It is built of masonry and mortar and is made up of two parts, the Main Courtyard and the Albacara.
Mombeltran Castle lies, in the village by the same name, in the province of Avila in Spain. Mombeltran Castle lies on a beautiful spot, in the mountains of the Sierra de Gredos, just south of the pass of Puerto del Pico.
The Castle of Loarre is a Romanesque Castle and Abbey located near the town of the same name, Huesca Province in the Aragon autonomous region of Spain. It is one of the oldest castles in Spain.
Peñafiel Castle is located in Peñafiel, Valladolid Province, Spain. The castle is more than 200 metres long and encloses an area about 35 metres wide. Standing in the middle is a 34 metres high three storey keep.
Making the life of small businesses much easier
Castellan Systems is the home of practical solutions for small businesses; while we began with solutions to support the management of Projects, now we have progress to providing support to other type of business undertakings.
Are you still using Microsoft Excel to manage your business? Excel is a fine tool. Everyone needs a spreadsheet. It's a good tool for data analysis. But if you're using Excel to manage your business, then you need to rethink that strategy.
Castellan Systems is dedicated to making the life of small businesses a little easier. We do this with our solutions that provide you with robust and professional frameworks, while making them easy to use.
Castellan Systems prides itself in bringing innovative approaches to business needs; we do this by extensive research and practical observations of those business processes at work. Then we design comprehensive, but easy to use solutions. We are also open to suggestions from our clients on how to improve those solutions or as a source of new ideas.
We provide a suite of Project Management based systems supporting from opportunity identification through to project execution; we also support programme and portfolio management, as well as system support management. Our solutions provide a full, holistic view of what was required in order to completely monitor the whole of the Project Management Triangle.
We also provide a series of applications to support business information management with a focus on small businesses. These include solutions for the retail, service, manufacturing and hospitality industry and have other small business focused ideas in the pipeline. We've also developed some website templates to support those hospitality applications.
Information Management is just that, information management; what the business does is only secondary when it comes to information management. It doesn't matter if you're selling cakes or you're selling televisions; it doesn't matter if you're providing electrical services or plumbing services. Boiled down, the information management needs are the same. It's just a matter of understanding what information is generated, what information needs to be stored, what information needs to be derived and who and how that information needs to be viewed. We believe that a business' information is their most valuable asset; our aim is to make this information work for the business; there is no point storing information if you don't use it to better manage your business. We're not building production control solutions; we leave that to industry experts.
At Castellan Systems we believe that applications should not only be functional but also pleasant to look at. That's why we put a lot of effort into making them look as nice as possible. The user experience is very important to us! It's not a matter of just making them "pretty", it's a matter of making them as easy to use as possible. If you spend a lot of time looking at a screen, the easier it is to read and the more pleasant it is to look at, the more efficient you'll be. Have you ever tried entering actual hours recorded per day/week against a task in Microsoft Project? If you have, you'll know what we mean.
While we have a suite of solutions available, and new potential ideas, we're happy to discuss with a prospective client any ideas they may have for a new application to suit their needs, as we did when we created Almoner. You just need to arouse our interest, and that's not too hard to do.
We have a strong community commitment providing various solutions free of charge. These include solutions for Hospital and Non-for-Profit, or NPOs, organisations' information management. But just because we offer these solutions for free, it doesn't mean that we haven't developed them with the same professionalism and quality as we do any of our other offerings, and we provide the same level of support as our paid solutions. It's not always about money, it's about making a difference.
Anyway, if you require any type of information management system, we're happy to discuss it with you. Just contact us and we can talk about it.
To implement novel approaches to information management for small businesses thus
delivering cost-effective, practical and capable solutions to our prospective and future clients
To empower organisations to deliver their services as effective as they can, while maintaining a
strong information management discipline
Castellan* Systems was founded by Michael A. Velez B.Math DipPM in 2011 when, after developing a tool for his personal use called ProMan, he thought that other Project Managers could benefit from such a tool; Michael began developing ProMan while he was working for a large multi-national organisation in Australia. It was as a response to the lack of project management tools provided by his employers, that he saw the potential of expanding ProMan beyond those confines.
As mentioned already, during Michael's time working in those large organisations he found a distinct lack of tools to support his everyday duties. Every project manager, including Michael, developed their own tool (usually using Microsoft Excel); you have to remember that deep inside every IT project manager lives a frustrated developer or "code cutter". So if projects happened to be handed over from one project manager to another, something that has happened to Michael a lot, the new project manager had to take on this other custom set of tools. Surely there was a better way! What about tool(s) that met everyone's need and were used by all project managers?
In at least in one of those organisations, a few single purpose tools were developed by individual initiative and adopted by the other project managers. One of those large organisations (a very large multi-national) developed a very expensive tool but it really only added to the project manager's workload and was only good for management reporting if the project manager fed it all the information. Michael was already working on his first solution, ProMan, which provided far more assistance to the project manager than this rather expensive "solution" his employers had spent so much money on. He actually built functionality into ProMan that allowed him up update the employer's system at the press of a single button.
So Michael founded Castellan Systems in 2011 in order to pursue the development of ProMan (now superseded by Condotiero and Almogavar) and other ideas. While the initial goal was to help project managers find out whether their projects are on track, ProMan soon grew into a full, holistic view of what was required in order to completely monitor the whole of the Project Management Triangle. The majority of our competitors focus on budget, schedule and task management; but there is much more that needs to be done to have a successful project, like requirements management & traceability, test management (including defect tracking), document control, configuration management and risks, issues and decisions management. Just ask yourself, if you're not performing requirements management & traceability, how do you know you've delivered the contracted product/services? Task management doesn't give you that answer; it just tells you that the scheduled tasks have been marked as completed; but have they delivered what they were meant to deliver?
In 2012 QuarterMaster was created in response to an intransigent resource manager at a company where Michael was consulting. He took the spreadsheet that he had developed to forecast resource requirements and turned it into an application with even more functionality. In 2016 a similar situation, this time the IT department of the same organisation, who told him the change to their time-sheeting systems that he was requesting, couldn't be done. So he set out to prove them wrong; the result was ClockKeeper; he built the core functionality in a week. In fact he added all the best features in all of the time-sheeting systems he had used and put them together in a single solution. The rest of our solutions have come from the fertile mind of our Managing Director and founder.
From 2015 Castellan Systems evolved ProMan into Condotiero which was soon followed by its Agile brother Almogavar. Following their release, development began on other useful applications that support the Project Management Office (PMO) to deliver for their clients. We're continually looking for opportunities to upgrade these applications to provide even more assistance to our customers; we subsequently added Document Management (DMS) facilities, with TWAIN scanner interface, and additional collaboration functionality, like built-in Email and Instant Messaging (IM).
In 2020 we created Celador as a response to a personal tragedy suffered by our Managing Director as a result of COVID-19. Actually, we didn't create it, our Managing Director did. It has undergone 4 major upgrades and it's now the largest, single application we offer and it's still free. That was the catalyst to expand from Project Management applications into business information management applications.
After completing the suite of Project Management based systems our Managing Director envisaged, he changed Castellan Systems' direction into other areas of information management beyond project management and its supporting processes. We had already developed some such solutions, but they were more of a diversion than driven by our mission.
In 2021 he formally redefined our vision and mission to supporting small businesses with their information management needs. This has lead to the development of new applications to support businesses, especially with supply-chain management, which harks back to his professional roots building systems for the Port Kembla steelworks. Not that our applications are strictly for industrial or manufacturing businesses; supply-chain management is required in most businesses.
As such, we now also offer a series of applications to support the hospitality industry and other retail & service businesses; as well as, having other small business focused ideas in the pipeline. We've also developed some website templates to support those hospitality applications. It also has lead to significant enhancements to some of those solutions we developed as diversion, as mentioned above; like turning Chancellor into a full-blown employee management system (EMS).
Castellan Systems is located in Wollongong, Australia's tenth largest city. Wollongong has a long a proud history in Information Technology and possesses a vibrant IT industry that has grown around its fine university, from whose rank of graduates we've drawn the bulk of our team members.
*A Castellan is the keeper or governor of a castle. Michael was born in Madrid, Spain. Madrid is located in the old kingdom
of Castile, or Castilla in Spanish; it means "land of castles". That makes him a "Castellano" and hence "Castellan
Systems".
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Castellan Systems was founded by Michael A. Velez B.Math DipPM. At the time he turned on the lights in the morning and swept up at the end of the day. But to this day, Castellan Systems still remains very much Michael's vision and passion. He provides the direction and ideas that we all try to turn into reality; and still gets his "hands dirty" cutting code*. Michael lives in Wollongong, Australia, although he was born in Madrid, Spain. He was educated both in Madrid, Spain, and Wollongong, Australia, graduating from the fine and much awarded University of Wollongong with a Bachelor of Mathematics degree, majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics ("Information Technology", as a term, had not yet been invented!). If you meet Michael, ask him about his scholastic career across 2 countries; it make interesting listening. His personal interests lay in History, with a strong passion for the Crusades and the Napoleonic period. He also loves movies of any era, but generally passes on soapie girly flics. Since he also has a strong interest in aircraft and all kinds of military vehicles, watching war movies can prove interesting as he picks the wrong aircraft or military vehicle used to represent historical ones. Don't get him started on Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code! |
Michael's favourite, all-time movie star is John Wayne; the first movie his parents took him to see, as a toddler, at the cinema was a John Wayne western. To pay homage to this passion, he has the largest collection of John Wayne movies on VCR (kids, ask your parents what is a "VCR") in Australia, if not, in the Southern Hemispherse. It comprises 155 movies including every episode of the 3 Musketeers and The Shadow of the Eagle serials; it doesn't include any television appearances or movies his company produced but he didn't appear in. He knows this is a big boast to make, but every movie he has missing is either not available or lost to history. So others may have as many as he does, but not more. If you do, contact us as Michael will be most interested in talking to you.
Since he was born in Spain, Football (or Soccer to some people) is like a religion and Real Madrid is his team. He's a third generation Real Madrid supporter and proudly carries his "Madridista" card and displays the logo in every possible way. He has in fact launched his own www.blancosdownunder.com supporters website. Of course he also follows Spain and Australia and prays every World Cup that they don't have to play against each other.
You may not believe this, but Michael's music of choice is Hard Rock and Heavy Metal; bands like Van Halen, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Aerosmith and Metallica are among his favourites. I know, it's hard to believe it looking at the picture above, but try playing anything else here and he promptly tells you what you can do with that "noise".
He's married with two daughters; they are 10 years apart which bring with it its own challenges. As already stated, they live in Wollongong - a great city by the sea. Wollongong is Australia's tenth largest city. Wollongong had an estimated urban population of 302,739 at June 2018, making it the third-largest city in New South Wales. Located 85 kilometres south of Sydney, Wollongong covers 714 square kilometres and occupies a narrow coastal strip bordered by the Royal National Park to the north, Lake Illawarra to the south, the Tasman Sea to the east and the Illawarra escarpment to the west. Wollongong has a distinctly multicultural population, with 24% of the population born outside Australia, coming from over 100 countries. Add to this their offsprings and it gives you an idea of the cultural cauldron that's Wollongong. Many migrants were attracted to the area by the job opportunities at the Port Kembla steelworks (Michael's first employer in its IT department) in the post-war period, and settled in surrounding suburbs such as Cringila, Coniston and Warrawong, where Michael's and his wife's families originally settled.
*The terms cutting code and code cutter goes back to the beginnings of computing, when a program's lines of code would be cut into paper tape
or punch cards.
Michael has worked in the Information Technology business since 1981. In that time he has worked for large corporations like BHP Steel (today BlueScope Steel), BHP Information Technology (today part of DXC Technology), CSC Australia (today DXC Technology), ING Australia (today OnePath which is part of the Zurich Insurance Group) and Pillar Administration (today Mercer Administration Services). In that time Michael has performed a wide variety of roles from Developer, Systems Analyst, Business Systems Analyst, Database Administrator, Support Manager, IT Project Manager, Business Project Manager, Programme Manager and Portfolio Manager. During his career, Michael has supported a varied range of customers from those working in heavy industry, manufacturing and financial services. Michael's various roles have exposed him to a number of technologies in the infrastructure and application space.
From 1992 he worked as an IT Project Manager, Programme Manager and/or Portfolio Manager with customers like BlueScope Steel's Port Kembla Steelworks, ING Australia (today OnePath), Pillar Administration (today Mercer Administration Services), Aon Hewitt and First State Super (today Aware Super). During that time, for his own personal benefit, he began the development of what would became Castellan Systems' first product, ProMan, to save him time doing paperwork and give him more time with the project team.
In 2016 Michael decided he had enough of working for others and having to deal with ridiculous decisions by senior management that didn't know much about project management. So he decided to concentrate all his professional energies on Castellan Systems.
Besides his university qualifications and years of experience in Information Technology and Project Management, Michael holds a Diploma of Project Management. Until 2021 he was an accredited MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) practitioner, but decided not to maintain it further as it's of little use these days as his current employer, himself, doesn't demand it.
