Background

Having been an advanced user of an enterprise PM (ePM) application for a number of years, as well as an avid Basecamp user, I was keen to find out which products filled the gap between simple task management/collaboration tools and high voltage ePMs.

I started researching tools about 12 months ago. At the time I was blown away by the sheer volume of so-called project management tools out there – there are hundreds, if not thousands of them. On face value, most of the tools look awesome. They have elegant websites, with seemingly competitive pricing and comparative features. It’s not until you install, then try to use these tools that you quickly sort the wheat from the chaff.

Evaluation process

My criteria for selection was relatively simple. I wanted one web-based tool which could be used for:

• Project management
• Task management & collaboration
• CRM, including pipeline & quotes
• Timesheets
• Billing
• Reporting across all these areas

Three factors were showstoppers for me:

• Was the cost affordable for an SME?
• Was the tool very easy to use?
• Was the tool web-based?

Once a tool met those criteria, I installed it, then started an evaluation process based on my requirements…

Must haves

• Weekly timesheet, populated with assigned tasks, really easy for people to complete and to add new tasks themselves, because you know everyone hates doing timesheets!
• Project management (tasks, milestones, dependencies, gantt/schedule, collaboration, notifications)
• Project financial management (actuals, ETCs, variance to budget)
• Capacity planning (ie a way to capture sold and unsold projects, then move projects around to fill all the gaps in the schedule without having to edit data on individual projects)
• Smartphone app/mobile version, at least for timesheets
• Dashboard view of all projects (preferably gantt) with flags to highlight problem areas (task overruns, milestone overruns, budget overruns etc)

Nice to haves

• Xero API (because I use Xero)
• CRM capability – leads, contacts, track conversations, view pipeline, prioritise, convert to project
• Issue tracking
• Estimates/quotes and invoices (for T&M, fixed price, recurring)
• Financial reporting – budget/actual time/invoiced to date

Here’s a bit more detail about the tools evaluated…

So the winner for me is…

LiquidPlanner – for resource capacity planning, project management, timesheets, reporting. It’s priority-based scheduling paradigm is amazing and like nothing I’ve seen before. It’s not super-cheap but is affordable for the SME market. It enables you to manage work in progress, enables the team to easily do their timesheets and provide estimates to complete (bonus!), fills the gaps in your schedule automatically, and enables you to quickly and easily assess your capacity for upcoming projects.

We’ve coupled LiquidPlanner with Asana for to-do lists, CRM, issue tracking and collaboration with clients and the team. High level tasks are in LiquidPlanner (ie phase level), detailed tasks are in Asana. It’s working well, and is not too much work to maintain.

We use Xero for accounting and financial management. And we have a spreadsheet or two which integrate the information we need from each system. Seems there is no one tool which does it all, yet

I think the one failing is that Zoho claims it has a two-way sync with Google Apps Contacts. After five failed attempts, a lengthy email discussion with the Zoho support people and a huge sigh of relief that I backed up my Google Contacts beforehand (because the un-sync destroyed my data), I aborted the mission. If you’re not using Google Apps Contacts, then this is a non-issue; but I thought the story was worth telling. In fact on further investigation, I am yet to find any CRM with real-time Google Apps Contacts sync, so perhaps it’s an unachievable requirement?

Here’s the notes I took during my evaluation of various CRMs; each CRM is relevant for small to medium digital agencies, but some are better value and easier to use by a mile. I’ve selected those which represent a good cross-section of the available offerings.

Hopefully this will help you in your search for your perfect CRM!

Once I left full-time employment, started my own business and needed to get out there and meet people, I realised social media may be of use to me. It’s called ‘social media’ for a reason, right? But having not used social media to any great extent, I didn’t really know where to start. My first tweet was awfully lame, took 5 minutes to write, 10 mins to pluck up the courage to click the big Tweet button, followed by 15 mins worrying about the impact of my action – what will people think of what I’ve said?

After that first harrowing experience, I decided to spend some serious time learning about social media. I knew it could help me, but I simply didn’t understand it well enough to know how it would help. I wanted to get under the bonnet to find out how I could use it, how others used it, what benefits could be achieved. I was also curious about what all the fuss was about, just in case I was missing out on something BIG.

Of course I was missing out. I very quickly realised it was a fantastic way to connect with like-minded people in a non-threatening way, enabling me to quickly and easily keep in touch with friends and it’s an excellent source of information for my business.

My learning curve this year has been huge to say the least. After just 6 months, I now use the following on a daily basis for business purposes:

• Twitter with TweetDeck desktop/iPhone app – mainly so I don’t miss good things appearing in my stream. TweetDeck desktop app is great for that – it quietly pops up a tweet, you glance at it, and if it’s of interest, you look at it in more detail. There’s a Chrome plugin too – but I prefer the app.
• LinkedIn – I’ve increased my network by 50%, pumped up my profile, received more recommendations and integrated LinkedIn with my other social media apps. I’ve reconnected with a range of people I care about as a result.
• Facebook page – I stopped using my personal profile (I still feel this aspect of Facebook is a bit of a game) instead opting for a business page, integrated with Twitter. Jury is out on whether this approach will be of use to me.
• WordPress blog – after trying Tumblr and Weebly (but finding them limiting in terms of functionality), I settled on WordPress.com and then built the site myself . It’s integrated with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but sadly has no Google Analytics, so I’ll be migrating it to WordPress.org soon.
• About.me profile – this is really just an online business card, but it provides another source of statistics for me.
• Klout – to monitor my reach and influence over time. I question the validity of the stats on this one though – they seem a bit dodgy, particularly “topics” – my mates have commented that they have never used hash tags matching those displayed in Klout, so where are the topics coming from?

I’ve recently started using:

• Bit.ly (to shorten URLs)
• Twitcleaner (to clean up my list of followers)
• Twitter lists
• Twitter searches

And I’ve stopped using:

• Google+ – until such time as they allow me to use my business Google account – it’s too much work swapping between two Google profiles.
• Listorious…
• Formulists…
• and StumbleUpon, due to the huge number of dodgy followers received as a result.

I learn something new every day about social media. I now understand and respect its value and power as a networking and business development tool. Used consistently, regularly and responsibly, social media has become a valuable business tool for me.

Like a garden, social media only gives you what you need if you invest time maintaining it – I spend at least 2 hours a day participating in conversations, retweeting, following interesting links, trying new tools, writing blog posts, seeking new followers, and more. If I stop doing that, weeds will most definitely grow!

Here’s some tips on using social media for business from Mashable http://on.mash.to/pdkHFh

Benefits

• Clearly cost is the major factor for deciding to offshore development. For $10 – $15 per hour, it’s incredibly cheap compared to local prices. Aside from the hourly rate, your operating and training costs are also reduced, which can be very attractive.
• Offshore developers can be very flexible in my experience, particularly in some countries where the culture dictates one should not do or say anything to offend or displease another person. This flexibility is great, but you ought not exploit their goodwill by increasing the scope without offering something in return.

Challenges

• Depending on where your offshore developers are located, the timezone difference can be a challenge. I’m working with people in Pakistan at the moment; they start work around 5pm our time, which means I either need to work into the evening to communicate with them in real time, or lose a day or two each time we send email back and forth. Make sure you allow longer timelines than usual to account for timezone differences.
• Language can be a challenge if you’re working with people who speak English as a second language. Written messages can easily become misconstrued and cause problems if both parties are not careful. I’ve found offshore developers can also be very literal (ie they will do exactly what you ask, even if you are wrong!). Develop strong face to face relationships with your developers using Skype, have regular catchups and take the time make sure your instructions are understood.
• Documentation needs to be much more detailed than if you’re working side by side with your development team. Sure, you should have detailed, current specifications anyway, but I’ve found you need to provide much more detail when working with offshore developers. Factor this into your quote from the outset.
• Quality standards are not always as high as they are in Australia, particularly with regard to usability and accessibility. Make sure you articulate the standards required from the outset, and build in plenty of time for QA and testing.
• As a result of each of the points listed above, you will spend more time managing offshore web development projects. Instead of the standard minimum 20% of the budget allocated to managing the project, you should double it.
• And finally, don’t forget about your local team and how they will react to your decision to use offshore resources. Make sure your team are engaged and committed to working with offshore development partners.

I don’t think offshoring web development is right for every agency, nor is it right for every project. But it does have its benefits. Think carefully before leaping into this resourcing solution option.

Why is that? Well there’s many reasons of course, but a major factor in my opinion is team happiness. If you have an unhappy team, your agency will not run like a well-oiled machine and your profits will suffer as a result. Simple as that.

The happiest team I’ve ever worked with produced fantastic results for clients, on time, on budget, every time. We respected each other, we socialised with each other, we were committed to each project and each other, and as a result, we were highly motivated to do whatever was required to get the job done.

So how do you achieve a happy team? Well, you could read several books on the subject, but here’s my top 10 tips based on 20+ years of experience managing people:

1. Select the right people. Achieving a productive and positive working environment starts with recruiting the right people for your roles. Carefully select people who hold similar values to you and your team – its not just about their skills and experience, they need to fit culturally as well. And avoid creating a role to suit a particular candidate; I’ve seen this happen several times and it fails every time.
2. Make time to induct well. If you’ve been in business for a few years, your approach to delivering services to clients should be bedded down, and you can use it to induct new people into your team. You should also take the time to develop an induction checklist that you can re-use each time you recruit, so you know every new team member is getting the same message about your business, irrespective of who conducts the induction.
3. Encourage flexibility. I’ve always been a flexible manager (ask anyone who’s worked for me) – letting people have days off at short notice for good reason, agreeing to them working at home occasionally, allowing them to leave early for personal appointments, being ok about them arriving late now and again. But if people show any signs of abusing the flexibility – continuously arriving late or leaving early, going to suspect personal appointments (read ‘job interviews’)  or they stop delivering the good quality work expected of them, that’s when I tighten the reigns. I’ve seen other managers use the opposite method – not allowing any flexibility until people prove themselves, and I must say my approach seems to make the team much happier more quickly and is long lasting. It is based on mutual respect, so set some ground rules from the outset, monitor, and at the first sign that the person is abusing the flexibility, pull them up and tell them why.
4. Create a comfortable working environment. At the very least, make sure the team has quality chairs, good natural light, balanced heating/cooling, current hardware/software, adjustable monitors and a fridge stocked with beverages. You don’t necessarily need to invest $$$ on a Wii and you certainly shouldn’t do that if the basic environmental factors have not yet been taken care of – people can resent the gaming equipment if they perceive the money could have been better spent on Aeron chairs!
5. Involve and empower the team. Involve team members in business decisions as well as project decisions. Seek the team’s input to help solve problems which directly or indirectly affect them. Empower the team to make certain decisions themselves (within reason of course). Doing each of these things not only enriches the quality of the outcome, but also fosters ownership and increases the team’s loyalty to your business.
6. Encourage your team keep in touch with their followers and tweet about today’s happenings. I can’t believe I’m saying this – a year ago I would frown if I saw someone tweeting, thinking they were just slacking off – but I now realise this was only because I wasn’t yet a daily Twitter user and did not fully understand its ability to keep you up to date with the world around you. Many people keep their industry knowledge up to date using this media, and should be encouraged to do so.
7. Encourage teamwork. I’ve seen the emphasis on teamwork in business rise to its peak in the late 90′s – where everyone was talking teams, team-building, team dynamics, high performing teams – then slowly decline over the past 10 years where it seems in some industries, teamwork is now almost a dirty word. This is a real shame – I’ve seen the most negative, arrogant, self-centred individuals light up whilst working in a team and enjoy the benefits of solving shared problems and working with like minded individuals. The benefits of teamwork are enormous to individuals, the team and the business, so bring teamwork back I say! #teamwork #rocks
8. Reward at the right time. Be quick to give praise, do it regularly and publicly, so people can see you care about their efforts.  If someone does something wrong or not up to standard, pull them aside, tell them immediately and explain why. Don’t hesitate, or the exercise will become much harder to do the longer you leave it. Timeliness is everything when it comes to rewarding (or reprimanding) people. If you are giving away tangible rewards, make sure the reward is commensurate with the effort – movie tickets are a great reward for small wins, but can be a slap in the face if the person perceives their effort to be huge and is expecting a monetary bonus!
9. Laugh out loud! I’ve worked in places where it was not acceptable for people to have a good laugh or make low levels of noise. Those places had no soul as a result, and the turnover rate was high. You don’t need to go as far as playing practical jokes, but encouraging people to let off steam now and again with a good belly laugh is very healthy. May I suggest http:///faceinhole.com for some Friday afternoon laughter (thanks Mez )
10. Remunerate fairly. Sure, you can only pay what you can afford, but take care to attract the best people by offering competitive salaries. If you cannot afford high base salaries, consider offering performance based bonuses. As they say, if you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys.

Of course, there’s more to creating and maintaining a happy team working environment, but considering these 10 things is a good start.

Over the years I’ve seen every strategy in the book used to get people to do their timesheets and quite frankly, no single approach worked – you still had to remind (read coerce and threaten!) people to do it on a daily basis, and they would do it begrudgingly.  Reward, punishment and everything in between didn’t solve the problem.

I think the tools companies use to capture time are largely to blame here. Everyone working in our industry knows that you must capture the time you spend on the work you do, that’s a given. So this isn’t about people not understanding why; its about how we expect them to do it.

If something is quick and easy to do, people are more likely to adopt it. Just look at Foursquare – your only motivation to check-in is to earn ‘points’ (for what real purpose?) and tell your friends where you are in the world (ok, so that’s useful). Some would argue its a waste of time, yet thousands of people are checking in constantly, every day, without being asked to do so. Why? Well, partly because its the thing to do right now, but also because its so damn easy to participate.

Enter Timy. It’s a Basecamp extension which makes entering time quick and easy, just like checking in on Foursquare. The free app is available for desktop, Android and iPhone, which is even sweeter.

After pairing your Basecamp account with Timy, entering time is as simple as:

1. selecting the project
2. selecting the task
3. selecting the time spent
4. and if you want, entering a comment

So far it’s actually quite true to those words – very simple to use and a lovely clean design. It focuses on enabling testers to quickly and easily flag visual design and front end issues. It also integrates with Basecamp (which is always nice), creating prioritised to-do items with a link to the site.

After setting up the account and installing a Chrome Extension, you just create a project, type the URL of the site you’re testing and you’re away! Click an icon, select the screen element which has the issue, type a comment and assign it to your developer. You can change the priority and status of each issue. All your issues feed through to Basecamp, so you can track them in one tool instead of two.

Nice

1. Read the tender documents – every one of them. And don’t just skim them; read them word for word. Rest assured there is devil in the detail.
2. Run the response process like a project. Assign a PM, assign roles to other team members who need to be involved, conduct a kickoff meeting, delegate tasks, agree the collaboration approach and timing, and so on. There’s likely to be many moving parts to the response, and you need to be very organised to ensure you comply with all the requirements.
3. Divide the response into sections, then assign each section to the specialists in your team. Depending on the number of people involved, you might want to consider preparing a template for each team member, so they are very clear on what elements they need to respond to.
4. Start preparing your response immediately. There’s a cut-off date where you cannot ask any more questions, and you won’t know what questions you have until you’re deep in the detail. And if you miss the date, your questions will go unanswered and you will risk the success of your response. You also need as much time as possible up your sleeve as a contingency.
5. Capture the key milestones in your tool of choice – include the cut-off date for questions, the date of the briefing sessions, the date submissions are due at a minimum.
6. Prepare your response outside the templates provided. There are usually many and varied limitations placed on the structure, format and content of your response, so its much easier to focus on your content using tools like Word or Excel, then simply copy the text into the template.
7. Organise someone outside the response team to QA the response. Ask them to check each mandatory requirement, so you can be 100% sure you have all items covered. If you miss one small element, your response can be thrown out.
8. Once the response is almost complete, put it down for a few days. Tender responses can be energy-sapping exercises; you get too close to the content, and run the risk of missing key requirements as a result. When you pick it up again and re-read it, you will find things you need to revise.
9. When it is complete, read through the response in its entirety to ensure the language and tone are consistent (particularly if there were multiple authors). Cross check the response against the specified requirements to ensure you’ve covered every element.
10. Prepare the response in the required hard or soft (or both) formats. Do exactly what is asked for – no more, no less. And make sure you allow enough time to either submit it online or run to the Tender box! The online process can take time, so don’t leave it until the last minute.

Drop me a line if you need me to give you a hand with your RFT, RFQ or EOI

I know, I know…Evernote’s been around for ages you say. Better late than never

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. I’ve downloaded the app to both my laptops and my iPhone, and now I can happily jot down things-to-do on any device and it syncs automatically. Nice.

It serves a purpose, is easy to use and so I’ll persevere with it for now, until the next bright shiny object turns up!