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 I recently read a great article over at WebWorkerDaily the other day that examined a topic that I’ve found to often be overlooked in the everyday hustle and bustle of business operations, specifically as it relates to web design: Project Management.
Don't worry it's not as scary as the capital letters make it appear to be. After all, if you use Post-It notes or e-mail Calendar reminders on a regular basis then you're already got a good head start. If not, well then, pay extra close attention. The biggest obstacle of creating a successful model for project management is taking your personal reminders (such as dozens of Post-It notes) and converting them into a system by which your workflow communications can travel the proper route with the least amount of lost productivity. When done right project management is simply a method for you, your team and your clients to effectively communicate each step in the lifecycle of a project and ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction and towards the same goal. The downside of sticking with your tried and true Post-Its for something like this is their inherit lack of accessibility when it comes to sharing them with others. As Thursday Bram mentions in her article, "You can’t share Post-It notes with someone who doesn’t come into the office on a regular basis and such systems can mean that a business can’t easily expand." In other words, you're setting unnecessary limitations when you rely on an inflexible stack of paper as your only means of guiding a project along. Likewise, you create an indistinguishable scope* that can cause confusion and incur greater costs (time and money). As a crew of six, we here at Productive I.T. have invested a lot of thought in developing our ideal project management strategy; one that allows us to visualize and execute every step in our workflow cohesively and collaboratively. Since this isn't my specific niche, however, I've asked our resident Project Manager, Mary Gibson, to explain: "Essentially, our strategy consists of a 7-step process that includes a Sales Meeting, Project Discovery/Design Meeting, Design Concept, Client Feedback, Content Insertion, Training, and Going Live. As the first step, a Sales Meeting helps to define the overall goal and budget of a client while also determining which platform their site would be best suited. After this information is collected we have a follow-up meeting, called a Project Discovery in which we begin to "discover" how the client wants their site to look and feel. Then, it’s up to the team here at Productive I.T. to prepare a checklist for the project that identifies team roles and tasks. Once our Design Concept is complete we send it off to the client for their Feedback and, pending their approval, begin to insert their Content (images, text, and video). Training is then scheduled for up to 4 members of a client's staff to better instruct them on how to fully utilize the platform they've chosen. This way, once they've Gone Live it will be super easy to make updates and changes. While this strategy may not apply to every client that we work with (after all, the goals of every client are different), we do strive to make it a best practice so that we can provide our clients with the best service possible." So there you have it, Productive I.T.'s project management workflow in a nutshell. So, what kind of strategy works best for you? *In project management, scope is defined as the totality of work that must be done in order to fulfill a predefined goal. Budgeting, pre-planning, layout design, copywriting and so on are all considered part of a typical website scope. Boundaries are the areas in which the work is sorted so that the appropriate member of the team can fulfill their tasks. | 
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