The Way I Manage My Projects with brightpod
Morning is typically everyone checking emails and finishing up tasks from the day before. Then at 10:00am, we have a team production meeting to discuss who's working on what and any potential roadblocks we are currently experiencing. The production team is focused on web development projects and the marketing team is focused on creating content for blogs, social media, newsletters, etc.
Wake up around 5:30am, I typically check my email from my phone while eating breakfast to prepare myself mentally for my day. Once I get in the office, the first thing I do is map out my agenda for the day by 30 minutes increments so that I know what I’m working on at all times. The first 2 hours of the day are dedicated to me working ON the business, rather than IN the business. Then at 10:00am, we have a team production meeting to discuss who's working on what and any potential roadblocks we are currently experiencing. After that, the day tends to be filled with client meetings and sales meetings. I check email usually twice a day from my desktop, but try to respond from my phone between meetings. The day typically ends for me after I have a good understanding of what the next day will bring.
1. Mapping out my daily and weekly agenda have been critical. Every Friday, I map out the week ahead. Every morning, I start the day by identifying my top priorities and plugging them into my daily agenda that is mapped out by 30 minutes increments - starting at 7:30am and going to 6:30pm.
2. Have someone else check my email and schedule my meetings. I have an assistant who has full access to my inbox. She responds to items that she knows how to respond based specific identifiers and she schedules and confirms meetings on my behalf. We use Google Apps for email, so she starts the emails that I need to respond to. This makes it easy for me when I login, I know exactly what emails need my immediate attention.
3. Delegate. If there is something that needs to get done and I know someone else can handle it, I delegate to my team as often as possible.
We have 10 team members in Brightpod. 1/2 of our team is working on web development projects and the other 1/2 is working on marketing related projects. We currently have 15 active marketing projects/pods and 16 web development projects/pods. We also have a few pods that we use for internal activities such as non-billable time logging and tickets (which is what we call any task that is too small to be classified as a project). We keep all tickets in one pod.
Yes. We had tried about 3 different project management systems and then we built our own project management system. Our internal tool worked great for 3 years and then we outgrew our own system. We discussed revamping it to suit our needs versus finding an already established system and well, you can see which direction we went. Brightpod is the affordable solution to our problem!
Nothing specific comes to mind just yet.
Team is still learning it. Two of the team members dedicated a day to learning the system and mapping out our process on how we would use it and then we trained the balance of the team on our new process. A slight learning curve, just really to follow our new process, but not difficult at all. Once you learn what a POD or WORKFLOW is, it’s pretty simple.
Insights are definitely my favorite. I love getting a high level view of where we are within each project, but also seeing where the team has dedicated their time to each week.
I'm happy we are using it right now. The interface is clean and the user experience is fairly intuitive. If we had to switch to a new system, it would be a painful experience for us.
I've been very pleased with your teams outreach in regards to asking if we need help getting started and your openness to our ideas on how to improve the Brightpod experience.
Signup for a free account, follow @brightpodapp or casually read our blog for tips, tricks and working smart.
If you are a Brightpod customer and would like to get featured please drop us a note at help@brightpod.com