March 19, 2008

Getting More Done and Seeing the Big Picture With Project Management

Over the past few weeks, I've been trying out 37Signals Basecamp. It's simple to use tool that was recently reviewed by Thestreet.com here.

Although I wish it had a reporting feature, import, expert and a few other things, I'll stick with it for some time to see how it works out.

If you have never used a project management tool, and find that you and your employees or others you work with have many "tasks" to manage, assign and keep track of, a project management tool is an absolute must.

You'll find that with a project management tool there are so many benefits, which include:

• Knowing where your time went. This is incredibly useful as you will be able to see, for example, when it's time to hire additional help.
• Minimizing "status meetings", as you have the status of projects already in your project management tool
• Holding employees/partners accountable for their responsibilities in a given project.
• Help you see which projects took more time and were most or least profitable

Project management, like CRM, is not something you buy, it's how you decide to run your business. Buying a project management tool won't make you more efficient, but properly using the tool to run your business will boost productivity for sure.

Some tools to consider are:

@task
37Signals Basecamp
Clarizen
Microsoft Project
Zoho CRM

There are templates and pre-built databases in Alpha Software, Quickbase, Microsoft Access and File Maker Pro that contain project management functionality.

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