A new way of organising tasks in ActiveCollab
In our day-to-day work with partners, we use the ActiveCollab platform: we've tried several similar tools, and in our view, this is the best one. As we wanted to grow and take on bigger and bigger projects, though, we had to introduce a proper way of organising projects and tasks, because on large projects things turned chaotic, it was hard to find your way around discussions (some threads had over 300 comments!), and partners struggled to create new tasks.
How did we fix it?
First of all, we introduced the changes gradually. We split projects into those billed on a semi-fixed price model and those billed hourly. When it came to organising tasks within projects, we started breaking large tasks down into smaller ones, and within these smaller threads, we further broke everything down into subtasks. For example, in the Design department, we started splitting online shop design projects into individual views: one task covered the homepage design, a separate one covered the product page design, and so on. Given the nature of the work, we went a step further in the Dev department, where rolling out individual features is even split separately into coding and styling. Above all, we gave our specialists a free hand in introducing this new task organisation in ActiveCollab, since they're the ones who'd be working on these projects.
The results?
We knew introducing these changes would improve our collaboration with partners, but we didn't expect such a small amount of work to improve so much. The whole project billing process is now far more convenient, there's more order across projects, and finding the key decisions in any thread now takes much less time.
Redesigning our briefs
One of the tools we use to understand our partners' needs is the brief. About a year ago, we made our first attempt at improving these documents: we cut the number of fields that had to be filled in and simplified the wording of the questions. The results were promising, but some friction was still noticeable. We noticed that people filling in an advertising brief didn't understand some of the fields (this was especially noticeable with briefs for online shops), which sometimes led to a big gap between the brief and the final assumptions. After a brainstorming session, we concluded we needed to explain the whole brief better, while keeping the wording short, simple and clear: the goal was to explain certain features so an average person could understand them.
How did we fix it?
We broke the whole process down into stages, and after consulting our specialists, we listed every element of the brief that needed improving. We then split the whole list up, assigning one or two items to each person, which meant the sheer amount of work never overwhelmed us, since everyone only spent 10 to 15 minutes on it. All that was left was to put the changes into practice and test the new documents in our everyday work.
The results?
Although we're still in the middle of rolling out the changes and not every brief has been updated yet, we're already seeing positive results. It's now practically unheard of for a field to be marked "DON'T KNOW", which used to be one of our more serious problems.
Introducing a goal and an agenda for every meeting
We're communicative and we like to talk, but when we organise meetings about projects, we want them to focus on specifics. That's why we introduced a rule at our agency that every meeting has to be clearly described in advance: what the goal of the meeting is, and what we want to discuss during it. This saves us a lot of time, keeps our conversations focused and helps us remember what we're supposed to be discussing (surprisingly, it can happen that some points we meant to cover slip through the cracks during a meeting). Do you like the way we work with clients? Want to start working with us? Our interactive agency would be glad to bring your vision to life.
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