The Way I Manage My Projects with brightpod
Unlike a lot agencies, all our staff are in the office all the time so that we can provide fast paced, reactive service for everything creative around advertising and business development created on Apple Mac’s. That is film, photography, radio, copy, design and PR. Keeping on top of projects and not letting a client’s needs slip day to day is very important to us so we have myself working as a project manager to help keep on top of all projects.
I start my morning with a commute like most, but as I am in the car for a good hour, I check my emails before I head to the office and use that time to troubleshoot in my head and develop campaign ideas. Then I attend to emails, check in with the team and check that everybody is set for major outings for the day, whether it be filming or meetings. Generally my role is 70% Project management and 30% producer of either film, photography, graphic design or campaign development and copy.
I think that being up to date and ahead of the curve is the most important hack their is. Apps like LinkedIn help me follow other professionals working in ways that could make our product better. Secondly taking the time to think even when it is incredibly busy is also really important as it means that quality is always at the forefront of your mind. Thirdly, I think an intuitive CRM and physical workflow like Brightpod alongside an agile whiteboard system in the office is a great way for all of the team to actively manage their time.
We have a team of 13, and we are running about 25+ projects in Brightpod at one time. Our projects range from filming TV campaigns, running PR and Social advertising campaigns to designing and rebranding for web and print. We are a very adjustable business providing one, or all of our services to our clients for a truly tailored service.
We used to use Office Time and Daylite to manage our projects but Daylite was more of a glorified calendar. For such an agile business it wasn't quite right, that said it was great at managing appointments and emails. We now use Brightpod and Office Time in unison as we aren't always based in the office. It allows us the perfect solution to analyze our time effectively so clients get the best use of their budget with us. The ability to integrate them into the project management side of projects and comment reactively in the messages section is great as we can work on projects in realtime.
Not so much as the application serves the exact purposed we were looking for.
I feel that the team reacted well to a 1 month transition period. We launched and literally switched in one day to the new system. After half a morning of training and a few smaller sessions after that, we are now all using the system to its full potential. It was relatively intuitive but still required time to adjust to slightly different ways of inputting data.
I think one of the most effective features in Brightpod is the ‘Me’ page. It helps our team all assess their workload more accurately and plan their day to make sure we don't promise more than we can deliver. More importantly it keeps focus on the task in hand as inputting milestones and tasks at the starts of projects is much easier now. We have clear pipelines to keep in line with, and work between agile whiteboard project management and Brightpod.
I think as we have just moved to Brightpod, not having it would be a pain! Its helping us develop our business in terms of time management and project planning. Without it I think we would have to invest more in training of traditional techniques of time management which quite frankly aren’t reactive enough to manage a digital business.
I think overall Brightpod needs some more features in the calendar, events and task assigning to allow you to assign multiple members of the team to events and tasks. Once that is added I think it will be a key player.
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