Office management tools

We have spent hours/days…literally weeks researching the best systems to use for a successful management of digital projects and our eyes have been bleeding from all the demo videos, FAQ's, API's, Plugins, etc. we watched and learnt about along the way.

I think we are finally there now, so I thought I would share it with you as a potential work flow method because the process is daunting to say the least and might save some people out there a little time.

So what did we require?

• A ticket management system
• A messaging system
• A task/project estimating system
• Integration with Version Control software
• Posting of ticket time against projects and turning that time directly into invoices
• Ability to send PDF invoices as well as automatic recurring invoices and time against retainer invoices
• Good-time tracking system

So at the start of last year, we had began looking into Agile approaches to development, which in a nut shell is doing, and billing work iteratively and keeping the client informed at every juncture whilst working to estimated times/costs rather than being pinned down to fixed budgets, which inevitably puts a huge pressure on everyone involved.

This research made a lot of sense and led into the use of a manual system called Kanban, which was a very hands-on post-it-note system that assigns tasks to individuals and allows you to literally move that task through the Kanban board from proposed, approved, design, development, feedback and testing, done and live…and 'blocked' for any reason (very important from a Project Manager's point of view).

Before being introduced to Kanban, we were using Basecamp to organise all our todo lists and although clients seemed happy to be able to see todo lists and messages in one place online, our developers found it to be a very stressful way of managing their tasks. The reason is that you return to it each morning and the todos lists just get longer and longer and that can be very demoralising.

The difference with Kanban is that a Developer has 1x task active/in progress at any one time, and once done they move it to 'Done and ready for testing', which in itself as an action is very satisfying. The Project Manager of any team can then see at a glance what tasks are in-progress and does not have to constantly ask what people are working on and micro manage…sound familiar!?

We then had a new developer start who had previously used a ticketing system called FogBugz, which instantly made sense, and low and behold…it had a 'Digital Kanban Plugin', meaning we could ditch the physical board in the corner of the office and allow everyone to have it on their bookmarks to easily see what they should be working on, what to work on next and what tasks are blocked.

(I am looking into getting this Digital Kanban on a touch screen board as I still like everyone gathering in a scrum, shifting the tickets around manually and discussing them together.)

So we had FugBugz, which solved the ticketing system and allowed us to track all tickets, add estimates to tickets, submit time to tickets, add messages, re-assign to other team members, message clients, creating discussion topics, etc. and we then had Digital Kanban plugged into this, which solved the project and task management side of things. Nice…so now all we had to do was tie this into the financials.

This was actually the most complicated task of all, as it had to work for the accountant, tie into time tracking, tie into tickets, create auto invoices, etc. but also there are tons of these systems out there:

• www.freshbooks.com
• www.getharvest.com
• www.freeagentcentral.com
• www.synergist.co.uk
• quickbooksonline.intuit.com
• www.invoicemachine.com
• www.pulseapp.com
• www.letsfreckle.com
• www.zemno.com
• www.xero.com
• www.creative-manager.com

...are just some.

We ended up going right through to demo downloading and project setup stage on a lot of them but they always seem to be missing one element, which was either a) not doing retainer invoices, which can be a major part of Agile work flow or b) Not talking to the ticketing system that we had chosen…or any ticketing system…and if they did do a ticketing system, it didn't have all the features we needed.

After several meetings with the team, and them feeling my pain, one of the developers kindly spent a weekend writing an API link-up between FogBugz and Harvest (a system which did do retainer invoices) and we now had a ticketing system, which developers could add their time to and the API plugin would then send all that time to Harvest at 04:00am each day. Sorted. (Will OpenSource this to github Harvest and FogBugz as a plugin once we have fully tested it.)

A few weeks in, and demo licences are just about to run out but it's looking good. Ticketing System - done, Time tracking and exporting PDF estimates and invoices for clients - done, Kanban project management - done.

All in all, its a far more pleasant, stress-free working environment. Clients are feeling like they are well-informed of the work we are doing for them, Omni management are feeling they are more aware of estimated time and real time against tasks, developers and designers are feeling like they are making progress and not overloaded with todos, and we are able to ditch a lot of monthly outgoings on multiple systems that were certainly starting to add up and were not talking to each other.

So, in conclusion I would say that for an agency our size, these tools solve our immediate issues and I'm sure will serve us well in the future. In the two weeks of using them, I have already seen a noticeable difference.

We are still using Basecamp for the moment but really all we use from it are 'messages', so seems a bit of a waste and will probably phase it out and send direct discussions to clients from FogBugz, which you can then create a live ticket from.

I hope some people out there will find this useful as I wish I had found an article like this before I set myself off on that long and intensive research mission.

Here's to efficient stress-free work flows.