Episode 87: Project Management Systems: Why Small Business Owners Need To Have One for Their Team (and Recommendations)
It’s a quick ‘tool’ episode - where Fiona shares the importance of choosing a project management software that works for your business and your team and how this simple tool can help improve your team’s productivity. Listen now to get Fiona’s recommendations as well!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Becoming a podcast guest
Project management systems
Recommendations
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 87 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
Today, you are listening to a quick tip episode and these come out every single Tuesday. I have a longer episode that comes out on Thursdays and those are either a coaching episode with me where we go into one area of business in a bit more detail, or they are interviews with small business owners from across the globe.
If you are a small business owner who listens to this podcast and understands the format and would be interested in being on the podcast, feel free to email us at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. I would love to hear from you if you are somebody who does PR for other people's podcasts, definitely get in touch if you wish, but make sure you've actually listened to the podcast. I get so many requests every single week for people to be on this podcast and quite often it's very apparent that they've never listened to an episode.
So for the small business owners out there who are like, yeah, I might want to be in a podcast for the first time, definitely get in touch if you do or other people to be on podcasts, definitely get in touch so long as you've totally understood the types of people that we interview here. All right. Rant over. This is a quick tip episode. So let's get stuck into it, shall we?
All right, so today I'm talking about a tool, a tool that if you're not already using, you should definitely consider using for your business. And specifically I'm talking about project management software. So if you've never heard of that term, basically it can be as simple as an online to-do list where you can add other people or it can be as complex as the full overview of your systems and processes in your business with tasks and deadlines and colour coding and everything else that you can imagine.
Project management tools have completely changed my business and also just made things so much simpler for us to have a look at, especially as we are growing and hiring different people. So there are so many different platforms out there and in the shownotes, you'll see a couple of those linked you want to think about.
Firstly, who else is on your team and what sort of project management system do you need? Some of them you'll have to pay per user so they can be quite expensive pretty quickly. Others are completely free up to a point. Others still might be, you know, if you're in Australia, you might want to support a small business like Hassl, which is an Australian version of these. Or if you have people all over the world, you might want to use one that people already identify with, such as Trello or Asana.
Now, when I was looking up a bit more information about this in terms of how much these are used, because, of course, I want this to be useful. And I was thinking, well, does everyone already use project management tools with the people that I work with? A lot of them haven't used it before. And so once we start working with them, they'll see an example of what we use and start using it. And we actually build all of our notes for our clients in a project management tool called Trello. But when I was researching this, I looked and found that something like only a quarter of businesses out there, less than a quarter, are less than 25% actually use project management software.
So I think part of that is just a lack of understanding of why they should use it, but also just a lack of using the tools and seeing how simple they are to actually, you know, create a management system for your projects, for your tasks or for any other parts of your business. So firstly, why should you use a project management system now? I feel like it's just really a great way to have organisation in the business, in your tasks, in your structures, in your processes. It's a great place to store process documents, your SOPs or anything else that you're working on. SOPs for anyone who doesn't know is standard operating procedure. So that's just kind of a corporate term. But basically any kind of documentation, any video tutorials, anything that's going to help people in your business do their job, particularly new people that are starting with the company.
So you might have a project management system that has various sections to it, and one section might be about our brand. And in that you might have tutorials from, you know, how to use the software. How do you Shopify for us? Or you might have tutorials on the tone of voice for our brand. You might have documents in there about your visual branding and you might have this is how we use our logo. These are the colour palettes we use. These are all I can be templates for Instagram tiles, everything else.
So you've got it in one easy space for anyone to be added into that card and be able to see that information. You could also have a project management system card or section for things like content. So we have that. We use Asana internally and for clients we use Trello. And the reason that I do that one, I think Trello is a bit easier for people to understand. It's very much drag and drop. And also I like to keep them separate. So I know that if I'm spending time in Asana, I'm spending time on my business. If I'm spending time in Trello, I'm spending time for my clients and that's fine. But I just like to keep the two separate. But sometimes people say, well, why do you use Asana for your business and Trello for clients? That is why. But we have a content section in Asana and in that we have the content that we plan for Instagram podcast, Sunday emails.
What else? Pinterest. We have the Good Business Group, what content we're planning for that. Usually that's a live that we're doing. And so we left that all out. And one of the things that's great about most of these tools now is that they have a calendar view. So you can have a board view, which is kind of like a to do list where you're sort of dragging and dropping elements and you can have people's names attached to certain things in there. You can have deadlines, you can collect it, but you can also then click view calendar and you can see at a glance where everything is and if you are the owner of the business or if you've got one or two staff. You can also have assigned things to those staff members and you can see what's been completed and what hasn't.
So it just eliminates the kind of paper trail that is emails going back and forth. It's not to say that, you know, it's a perfect system. It needs to be maintained all the time. And you do need to spend some time, depending on which system that you've chosen or which software. If you've chosen Trello, you need to spend a bit of time educating yourself on how to use Trello. And all of these platforms have so many great tutorials. But I wanted to bring it up today because I think it's something that people are missing, particularly when they start mapping out their processes. We have in Asana, a process board which shows you blog process, email process, podcasting process and say in the podcasting it'll have this is a process for graphic design, for podcast graphics.
This is our process for the actual recording of the podcast and getting it edited. This is our process for sharing and promotion. And those things are listed step by step so that, again, anyone in the business could go in and follow those step by step. And they're not relying on me to tell them, oh, now you do this part or now you do that part. So it's really, really a great tool to have in your tool belt, I guess, your digital tool belt for your business.
Other reasons that project management software are really useful collaboration. So you can add people, like I said before, you can add people to tasks, but you might have just a collaboration, a campaign that you're doing with another business or a business owner or a freelancer. And you can add them into just particular sections of the overall project so that they can say, you know, I need to do this. You just keeping everything in one spot. The other thing is that you can you know, like I said before, schedule and plan. You can see the calendars. It's another great way to kind of manage your resources, whether they freelance, whether they in-house.
Like I said before, you can see what tasks people are up to, where they're at. You can put in comments. You can you can also integrate with a lot of these. You can integrate your Gmail, you can integrate your slack messages. I don't want to get too technical because this is a quick type episode, but you can have one project management tool that feeds in people's emails to you and so that everything is just housed in the one spot. The other thing that it's really great for is documentation. And that's something I talk about quite a bit, processes and systems, and you need to have things documented. It's just it doesn't allow you to scale if everything is in your head.
So even if you're just working for yourself and your solo operator right now, having things like a Trello board to map out, contain ideas, all your different ideas for campaigns, you're just even a board of different things that you've seen on social media that you think are really great and maybe would be good for your business. You can just make them all into your Trello board or your Asana board or your Hassl board or so many other ones Monday, Notion.
And you can then be able to see everything at a glance as opposed to being like, oh, I wrote it in a notebook, but I also put on a Post-it on my desk. Plus I think I've got it in my iPhone notes. You can put all of that into just one space. So if you don't already have a project management system or project management software, definitely have a look around.
The main ones that we use, like I said, are Asana and Trello. But I do have clients that use Monday, clients that use Notion. Base camp is another one. I used to use that many years ago at a digital agency that I worked at. There are just so many you want to have a look at. What do they do, how easy are they for you to use? And depending on, you know, the tech savvy of your team? The reason that I do use Trello for all of my clients is I actually think it's the easiest to use. It is very simple. And there are so many tutorials. There are also so many templates. So if you don't know where to start with a project management sort of mapping it out, you can look at their templates and just sort of take one of the templates and start from there.
So a few reasons, like I said, why they should be something that you consider. I've talked about documentation. I've talked about collaboration, scheduling and planning, being able to manage your team and resources. Another thing that is quite exciting, I guess, for small business owners, because we're always watching our bottom line is the ability to kind of manage your budget or manage where your expenses are going. One thing that you can integrate as well with a lot of these is time tracking tools. So I helped to set up these boards for a digital agency that I was working with. And we were able to add time tracking into various tasks so that when things were sent out to freelancers, they were able to have an understanding of, OK, that should take thirty minutes, that should take two hours, that might take a day. And so they were then able to kind of reverse engineer that and be able to come up with proposals for their clients that actually make. Back to the time that it was going to take and those time constraints were put into the project management tool, so everyone was really clear on this task is due by this date. The person responsible is this. He has all the information you need. Plus this is how long we think it should take. And can you track your time so that we can say if it took them or if we were being unrealistic?
So if you haven't already definitely consider a project management tool, I will leave a link to something that I think are good in the shownotes that I mentioned and you can find the shownotes over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/87 as this is episode 87. All right. That's it for now. A little bit over the 10 minute mark that I'd like to keep these quick tip episodes to, but I hope you found it useful. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
