My continuing theme is various apps / software programs and how they can help you in your business. The topics are:
1. Accounting
2. CRM
3. Project management
4. Appointments / calendars
This week I want to look at Project management / productivity / collaboration tools. The reason for the alternative names is that you can really do what you need to with many of the tools. The only limit is your imagination.
There are a lot of tools/apps out there – and the sort of software I’m talking about this time is Trello or Asana and apps such as Slack, which is a sort of beefed up messaging tool.
We talked last week about CRM and that’s really all about managing your interactions with customers, suppliers, leads & prospects, stakeholders, donors, fundraisers etc. The above apps are really to manage yourself (!) and your workload and your productivity – but they will all permit collaboration in some way – either with staff (if you have any) or partners such as VAs, marketing companies, telesales etc.
If you work on projects with other companies then these can also be good tools to keep track of who’s doing what.
All of these tools have integrations too – so you can connect them to other apps such as Gmail or your CRM. It really is worth taking the time to work out how you want these to work together.
So what do you need to do?
Do you want to create a new project from an email? Setting up a new project connected to a company with contacts populated from the email is one benefit
Do you want to create a task from an email? Although we often keep emails lingering in our inbox because we want or need to deal with them later you are better of creating a task in your chosen app and deleting the email (or at least moving it out of your Inbox).
Other ideas include:
• Keeping track of your social media campaigns – plan out your content and scheduling
• Managing your new product development (which might be something like a new course) – put in all the steps with due dates and mark them off when done. You can assign tasks to others if that’s relevant to you – you might be wanting artwork done etc. – add the supplier as a user and get them to update as they get things done. It’s often so much simpler than trying to manage email threads.
• Tracking your time – how much time are you spending on projects – you will be amazed at how your time is spent – tracking all your time spent – including project management time – is very revealing, and will help you to develop your pricing model.
Other features which will help you are the ability to move “cards” around easily. You can use spreadsheets to do some of these tasks – but collaboration is much more difficult – and changing the order of things is annoying! And things that really bring the project or task to life such as graphics or colour coding – again this can be tricky when you move things around on a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet won’t prompt you with reminders – and it’s much harder to keep everything in one place.
It’s hard in a short post like this to really paint a picture of what you can do – but as I have said with the other apps – take some time to work out what YOU need in YOUR business.All the main apps allow at least a free trial where you can test out what you want to do. Some have basic versions which you can use forever – but there may be some annoying restrictions.
Again – think about what other apps you might want this to talk to in addition to email – what do you use regularly?
Hopefully this has given you some food for thought and I am always happy to chat about what you might need.
Get in touch if you would like to discuss further.