It is certainly possible to use this sort of system — one of those informal discussions I had was with a website designer who manages about 30 contractors with a few shared Google spreadsheets. But it is a lot harder. You can’t share Post-It notes with someone who doesn’t come into the office on a regular basis and such systems can mean that a business can’t easily expand to work with contractors and employees who work remotely. That means that the boss is tied to that same physical location. These systems can require more time to maintain (when time is money) and can be lost in a matter of seconds.

Organic Growth and Project Management

There’s a very simple reason that a smaller business winds up with a less formal approach to project management. More often than not, a system grows organically: the boss needs to notify an employee of a change to a project and that pad of sticky notes is convenient. Pretty soon, it’s standard practice to write a note, stick it to someone’s monitor and consider the matter done. In much the same way, a set of spreadsheets can evolve and grow, adding on extra pages to handle new facets of projects. After even a few weeks of this sort of organic growth, it seems impossible to get away from these spreadsheets. Not only is this the way you’ve always done things, but it’s also a system that you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into setting up. Making a change not only will take time, training and money, but you’re throwing away the effort that’s gone into maintaining those spreadsheets.

Bringing Small Business Project Management Online

On the surface, it seems like the best method is to compromise — stick with the existing situation, but maybe share some of those documents through a tool like Google Docs. But for small business owners, finding robust project management tools (especially web-based applications) can scratch itches you didn’t even know you had. Simply by being more organized, you can expect to be more efficient and save your employees’ time — but it goes beyond making it easy for your staff to know what to work on next. Someone has to check over your system regularly, to both make sure that everyone’s doing their job and to make sure nothing’s slipped through the cracks. The more you can automate that progress, the more time and money you can save — and you can be sure that you’re not disappointing a client because your spreadsheet didn’t remind you of a due date.

What project management tools do you use?

Image by Flickr user avlxyz, licensed under CC 2.0

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SpreadsheetLIVE Beta from Pagos is a new entry into the web office applications space, currently dominated by Google, Microsoft and Zoho. Pagos is targeting corporate intranets, but also has a hosted version that could be useful for many web workers. Currently, this hosted version is available for free.

SpreadsheetLIVE has an easy-to-use layout that makes creating, uploading and accessing spreadsheets very simple. In my experience, of all the basic office applications, spreadsheets give most trouble to users, so anything an application can do to help the user get started is a bonus.

SpreadsheetLIVE has a reasonably comprehensive set of spreadsheet features, including charts, pivot tables and a function wizard. User and file management includes groups, folders, and organizations. You aren’t going to be running an accounting department with SpreadsheetLIVE, but then you won’t be with Google Docs, Excel Web App, or Zoho Sheet, either.  Web-based spreadsheets are great for tracking project information, light accounting like project budget tracking, and other lower-level number crunching tasks. SpreashseetLIVE also has a rather extensive library of spreadsheet templates available.

You can upload your existing spreadsheets into the app — it has a 6 MB file size restriction, which should be big enough to accommodate all but your largest spreadsheets. However, you can only export SpreadSheetLIVE spreadsheets to Excel 2007 (*.xslx) format currently, which could prove limiting to project teams with members using Office 2003. It would be nice to see the final version of the product support *.xls and *csv expert as well, since they are more common formats for spreadsheet data than *.xlsx.

SpreadsheetLIVE is a solid entry to the web office space; it probably has more marketing, rather than technical, challenges ahead of it in getting and maintaining user attention in this very competitive market.

Which online spreadsheet tool do you use?

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To some freelancers, keeping track of these leads is just as easy as remembering them. But for those freelancers — like me — who are on the forgetful side, we need to have a system in place. Because of this, I’ve created a spreadsheet to manage my leads. After all, I don’t want to leave potential clients hanging.

Here’s how you can make a similar spreadsheet yourself.

The Columns on the Spreadsheet

The image above shows an example of the spreadsheet I use, but with fictional entries. You can create additional columns if necessary, since we all have different needs. Add whatever factors are important to you. Some freelancers might want columns for expected pay, expected total work hours, etc. As for me, I just included the ones that I’ve found essential to keep track of, such as:

• Organization. This column contains the name of the organization, business, or company that’s planning on working with me. If an individual is hiring me, I simply put his or her name in this field.
• Job type. Since most freelancers wear different hats, we tend to be interested in a variety of projects. In the example above, a freelance writer’s job types may include writing e-books, blog posts, sales letters or site copy. On the other hand, a graphic designer may have the following items: logo, web site, or product packaging. For automatic input, I made a drop-down menu listing all the job types, which means that I don’t need to type in the text.
• Contact person. When communicating with an organization, I only find myself coordinating the details with one contact person. So that I don’t get names mixed up, I make sure to include the contact person for each lead. That way, if I need to know more about a job I know who to talk to. On a separate column is the contact information such as their email address or phone number.
• Submission date. This is the date that the query was submitted — whether I’m the one who applied for the job or the lead came to me.
• Last contact date. Knowing the last date of contact allows me to follow up on the lead appropriately. If it’s been a week since I last heard from the organization, I may need to follow up on the lead. Instead of searching my email or social networking inboxes for the last contact date, I can easily refer to the sheet.
• Status. Like the “Job Type” field, I made a drop-down menu for the status of the lead. This tells me if I got the job, if it was rejected, or if the decision is still pending. For easy reference, I applied conditional formatting to the different status items. For “Rejected” I used a dark blue font color, green for “Accepted”, and bright red for “Pending”. This is so that my attention is drawn to the pending projects whenever I’m looking at the sheet.
• Notes. Any miscellaneous notes, comments, and other remarks go to this field. Filling this in is optional.

Tips and Resources

I use OpenOffice Calc for all my spreadsheets, but you might be more at ease with another program altogether (Excel or Google Spreadsheets, for example). Here’s a list of relevant tutorials that can help you compose your own lead tracking spreadsheet on your favorite program:

• Google Spreadsheets. Here’s the official tutorial on how to apply formatting rules. Unfortunately,  users can’t create drop-down selection lists with Google Spreadsheets so you’ll have to input the job type and status items manually.
• Microsoft Excel. For Excel, this tutorial shows you how to do conditional formatting and here’s how you can make a drop-down list.
• OpenOffice Calc. Applying the necessary formatting rules in OpenOffice Calc requires similar steps to those of Excel. To be specific, though, there are two tutorials from the OpenOffice Training blog on how to do conditional formatting and creating a drop-down selection list in Calc.

How do you keep track of job leads during busy months? Are you able to remember them all or do you need a more thorough system?

Photo credit: stock.xchng user michu633

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Back in July when I originally covered the beta of Smartsheet Task Manager and Project Collaboration service, I had some reservations about adopting it. While I thought it was a strong app, I also believed it was lacking some of the core features I would need.

With their official launch of V2 today, I wanted to give it another look to see how things have changed since I last looked. I also had an opportunity to chat about Smartsheet with founder and chairman Brent Frei who shared with me some of the design philosophy behind the service and productivity in general.

According to Frei, Smartsheet is built upon 5 Foundational characteristics that define and guide the user experience, and where in the process most applications fail. From the initial first impressions through to company wide adoption, Frei claims that Smartsheet is designed to address the needs of real users through each of these phases.

One of the most intriguing of these 5 Foundations to me is their “No Adoption Required” philosophy. If you have ever tried to incorporate a project management tool into a team or collaborative environment, you understand the challenges of trying to get everyone on board. Whatever the case for the resistance, the tool ceases to be effective if the team doesn’t use it. Smartsheet and the “No Adoption Required” philosophy tries to combat this by enabling folks to be a contributor without needing to ever create an account or log in.

Acknowledging that email is still the primary communication tool in most organizations, Smartsheet has really beefed up notification and participation options through email. Using live secure links, users can access the area of the project that is relevant to them and incorporate their updates directly in to the Smartsheet system. These live links are also used for access to attached files.

I really can’t stress how easy and seamlessly this is done. Say I need a status update from a particular user on the line items he is responsible for, I can send them a quick update request link to just those items. They can add updates or comments, change task status, add files etc…

Reporting options will allow these status update emails to be scheduled and automated making it really easy to create a nice consistent workflow process.

File attachments and threaded discussions can also be affiliated with each line item task which is really handy.

Another really thoughtful feature is full change management and recording. Track who completed what and when and highlight the changes over a particular time period.

Options for branding and customization are also nice and can be adjusted for each organization you work with. A new branded distribution program adds customized templates and workflow along with revenue sharing.

All together these improvements and refinements, along with some upcoming reporting options, make Smartsheet a much more compelling option for project and task management than it was when I reviewed them in beta. It is simple to use, easy to access, and affordable.

Even though I’m still not convinced the spreadsheet metaphor is the right one for me, there is a certain comfort and familiarity to Smartsheet that makes it easy to just jump in and start working.

Pricing for Smartsheet starts with a free 2 sheet Starter Account with additional sheets and reporting options available for the higher account levels. I really like that they don’t limit users with any of the accounts. I believe pricing models like that tend to inhibit the desire to bring folks on board. Smartsheet allows you to share with an unlimited number of people with any plan.

Are you ready to give up your spreadsheets for Smartsheet?

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