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Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Productivity for the Small Design Studio
Well, not all of us can have full-time traffic managers, account executives, and so forth (aside from ourselves and our design comrades in the shop doing all of these things in addition to our more creative tasks). With that in mind, I thought I'd share some insights into how we manage workflow, job responsibilities, and tracking in the Notchcode office.
In the beginning, it was pretty simple. Since we had just a few clients, a small desktop file folder holder stored all our active projects. We could access things quickly, and keep on top of jobs because there weren't many of them. Scheduling and milestone tracking were also pretty simple; chances were there was only one milestone happening on any given day, across the entire set of projects that we had active.Then, we got bigger. Added more clients. The desktop file was still there, but was now overflowing with active job folders. Sometimes two job folders would share a slot in the holder...not too good. We bought a big whiteboard for tracking job status, upcoming milestones, and project completion dates. This worked pretty well: the deadlines were right there, in front of you, all the time. A good motivator. The problem was that sometimes we had even more jobs in-house than we had room for on the job board. Not good.
So recently, we've taken the next step. We now use an online project management tool: Basecamp, from 37Signals. And we're implementing David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology for tracking all the "stuff" that floats in for projects. There are a number of things a creative agency like ours can use to make Allen's GTD methodology really easy, especially if you are a Mac user. If you've bought a Mac in the last couple of years, chances are it came with a great little program called Omni Outliner. Upgrade to the Pro version for a paltry $35 bucks or so, and you've got a powerful thought organizer tool. I use it all the time to get my ideas in order before a client meeting, or even to take notes when meeting with clients. And now, I find out, there are free scripts available for Omni Outliner Professional called Kinkless GTD, which basically lets you do a brain dump into an Omni Outliner document, and then populate your iCal schedule and To-Do List with actionable items. Change one of these in iCal, and it changes in the Omni Outliner doc too. Pretty cool, especially since it's free.
The upshot for us is this: We can manage scores of active projects and stay on top of things, without enlarging our office staff. That said, we have a part-time project manager now, keeping tabs on things and making sure everyone gets stuff done when it needs too.Just because you have great tools doesn't mean you don't need someone cracking the whip occasionally, just to stay in-the-know.
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