In Part 1 we spoke about job management and how we moved from a paper based job tracking system to an integrated online job tracking system and how this change helped us save hours upon hours of admin time every month.
Today we will be talking about project management and how we managed to put together a project management system that works for us without having to sell our organs on the black market!
First, lets talk about project management. The term can mean different things to different people, when some think about project management they start to envisage , Gant charts resource availability sheets , man / hour lists and all sorts of bells and whistles. For us, project management is about seeing the big picture and knowing who is doing what , when and what the outcome was for completed tasks.
When we started taking on bigger and bigger projects we came to realize that we needed a way to track the work we were doing, we already had shared calendars and our CRM system could track tasks and record their outcome, what we didn't have however was the glue which puts all of these pieces together.
So after sketching together a few concepts on a piece of paper we came up with the solution, as mentioned before we try and run our front office operations from within our CRM system, we decided that our project management system should be part of the CRM system (just like our Job tracking system).
After a couple of days of work we had our first prototype , we built version one of our own project tracking tool, it is very simple (intentionally) and it does exactly what we wanted to, it allows us to have a full view what is happening within any of our projects at any given moment, we can drill down on the details of open and closed tasks and update these tasks as necessary.
One might wonder, why are we talking about this? the answer is simple, part of what we're trying to do is to show that technology can be used to enable the implementation of any business process , we're also trying to demonstrate that a small business can have all the tools they need to gain a competitive advantage without having to pay an arm and a leg!
One of our goals is to provide small and medium businesses with the tools and knowledge that can be used to make their lives easier , by that we mean saving time , streamlining workflow and eliminating unnecessary admin work!
We believe that if something works for us then its bound to work for someone else out there , if you are running a small or medium business and think that you we could assist you in any way then make sure to contact us
If you would like to know more about Xact Software or if you would like to talk to us about how we can help you improve your business then make sure to visit our website and to also follow us on Twitter
Sounds pretty cool, we also have integrated project and job management, but not the accounting information like you have.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting thing you don't seem to be doing is telephony integration.