Having a project management system in a workplace means there are a number of activities that need to be completed to warrant organisation of tasks and projects. It solves the problem of disjointed and/or related tasks by putting them into an orderly system so individuals and teams can get them completed more efficiently and in a timely manner.
I use Omnifocus on the Mac for my tasks, but would implement Trello, Asana or something else for clients working in teams. I have used a lot of them over the years, from Basecamp back in the day to Coda now, where you can define, control and share everything more easily.
Basecamp was amazing. In 2006, I was working with two or three different spreadsheets with similar information, all trying to manage nearly 100 publishing projects… with lots of people working on them. There were two in my team, many internal stakeholders and external suppliers too. That was interesting. I evaluated a few options and settled with Basecamp. It brought us all together on one platform and worked well with email to keep everyone informed. It had great benefits:
- we stayed organised
- we knew what was expected of us at any given time
- it made us accountable to each other.
For a nominal cost a month, I saved people a lot of time and energy. I removed duplication, wasted effort and updated processes so we had more time to do the work that was important. Our capacity increased and we were dealing with more than 100 projects at varying stages. We were a smooth running, hardworking team, but we made sure we went to the pub every week to reward ourselves!
If a client doesn’t already have a PM system in place and needs visibility on tasks fast, I use online spreadsheets to manage projects. Google Sheets helps to keep track of progress, keeps everyone up-to-date and is easy to share with stakeholders. Combined with links to files on the server or Dropbox makes it a quick and useful solution to getting things done.
