Project Management Tools-Xojo Snippet [Video]

There are many Project Management Tools you can use to help monitor and track the progress of your project. In this video, a snippet from a Xojo presentation, I go over my favorite PM tools.

Please find a full video transcript below: 

Susan:  I’m going to ask you to repeat after me on this one. Email, not a project management tool. It’s not. It’s just not. If you’re doing it that way, you’re doing it wrong and I can tell you that point blank. It is a way to get things lost, to make sure that nobody knows when something’s due, to make sure things spiral out of scope. Budgets are going to get toppled, everything. Don’t use your email as a project management tool.

There are plenty of softwares out there. I’m sure you guys are smart enough you can probably build your own for yourselves if you want. But Basecamp is my, that’s the one I like the most and it’s the one that I’ve used the most. It has a simple structure similar to Xojo it’s a nice base that you can then put your process on top of and build out and build a structure to the way you want your project management to work.

I always recommend – this is a big one – that you have weekly status meetings with your clients depending on how long your project is. If it’s shorter, maybe you don’t need that many, but making sure that they know, when is the next time I’m going to talk to you. Where are we in the process? What are the questions and answers that we might have to exchange? Here’s a big reason for that. It’s going to prevent interruptions. If they know they’re going to talk to you on Monday, they’re not going to call you Thursday and interrupt your day. They’re not going to email you over the weekend with details that they could share with you at your status meeting. They’re going to know in their head, oh, we’ll talk on Monday, I’ll bring it up then. It serves two purposes there.

Another tool, and people don’t think of it as a tool in a project management process, is your proposal. How you are defining the scope, the budget, and the timeline in your proposal is part of how you’re going to manage your project. So making sure that’s clear and the client is aware of it upfront is very important.