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If you’ve heard about project management tools and wondered if what they’re all about, this short video is for you! I dig through what project management tools do, why you should use them, and make a very strong case for Teamwork as your choice. I’ll also go over my absolute favorite features of Teamwork and cover how you can customize it to make it exactly what you need to keep your projects and your team organized and on track.
Check out Teamwork for yourself here: https://www.teamwork.com/partner/aq51dvjy62
Here’s a glance at this episode…
The transcript is below if you would prefer to read this yourself instead of watching the video!
Hey! I’m Sandra B, your Sidekick COO. I help overworked, overwhelmed, multi-hatted entrepreneurs like you become CEOs of your very own sustainably scalable, and powerfully profitable business through proven business tips, practical processes, and a touch of tough love. Heavy on the love.
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How important is a project management tool? What’s your favorite and why? All right. So project management tools, I believe that a project management tool is absolutely essential if you wanna scale your business in any appreciable way. Even if you’re only working on your own, to try and keep all of that knowledge in your head, all of the things you have to do in your head, or even on a piece of paper means that when it comes time to actually hire, help and delegate, you now have to take all of that information outta your head and put it somewhere that they can get at.
It’s no good if somebody has to constantly come to you to find out what’s the next thing that they need to do. It needs to be somewhere that they can just pick and choose the tasks that need to happen and be able to help take things off your plate.
Having a project management tool, absolutely essential for doing this and my favorite is Teamwork Projects. I love teamwork projects. So I used to be a huge fan of Asana. Asana is very simple to use and has a lot of features in it for free. It’s getting better and better all the time. They’re putting in a lot of development hours into Asana and it has come a long way, but to me, Teamwork blows it outta the water.
Teamwork is so flexible without needing a lot of setup. You can just get it and start using it, and it’ll be fine, but you can also take some extra time and customize it for different projects so that you can use it in different ways for different projects and customize it for your own personal use in regards to how do you work every day? Or how do you work as a team? It has so many amazing features, but a few of my favorites are you can track billable and non-billable time. So if you need to track your budget for work that you’re doing for a client, or just to make sure that you’re actually budgeting your projects properly and quoting your projects properly, you can monitor all your time. You can actually track all your time and then mark time as billable or non-billable because we always have, you know, some admin time that we don’t bill for and we always have obviously billable time to a project. So you can track the difference there.
It has so many features and it allows you to turn them on and off at will so that you’re not constantly distracted by tools that you’re not using.
It has a notebooks feature. If you want, you can have all of your notes and plans and things like that in these notebooks that are directly in Teamwork. I pretty much never use them. So on all of my projects, I kind of turn it off because that way nobody uses it. Nobody’s starting to use it and starting to develop a process that we’re not actually wanting to use, and nobody’s getting distracted by it and wondering if they should use it, we just turn it off. They give you a bunch of different ways that you can look at your tasks and I will turn off most of those ways. So, you can look at it in a list, you can look at it in a board, you can look at it in a table, and depending on how I have this project set up, I’ll usually stick to either a list in a board view or a list in a table view. I’ll turn off one of the three different views so that people don’t get confused by what they should be looking at.
It has a messaging feature right in it. So you can write comments on all of the tasks, but you can also message based on the project. And it’s just a really good way of communicating and keeping everything in one spot so that nothing gets lost and nobody gets confused. And without having to have a bunch of emails. So I really love the messaging feature and I really love their search.
They have a really, really, really advanced Searching tool and it’s really super easy to find anything that you could possibly be looking for. And you can search by like tasks or comments or projects or whatever, and you can, you can set all these search criteria so you can hone into specifically what you need to look for. But the big bonus to that is that it also has these saved filters. So once you figure out what you want to search for, you can save it so that the next time you have to search for that, it’s right there. You don’t have to go and put it all in.
It’s fantastic for reporting. It’s fantastic for being able to keep an eye on just the things that you need to keep an eye on. So for instance, if you have a larger company and maybe you are managing like five of the 15 projects that your company is doing, you don’t have to be distracted by the other 10 projects. You can just look at the five that you need to look at. So those are the top ones that just come to mind off the top of my head, the things that I love about teamwork.
There is so much more. You can put an estimate on all of your tasks. You can put a time estimate and then you can plan your workload. So you can actually just go in and see this week, who has too much work to do, or who has too little work to do, and you can move things around on the fly. So it’s really good for reporting.
It’s really good for workload planning and their customer service is freaking top-notch. They have the best people working there. They have the best customer service. They are so, so responsive. Plus they just had a big round of funding, I guess, anyways, they got some money. So now they are doing a lot more development and investing in the product. And it’s just been really great to see where the product is going and it just become, it gets better and better every single time they make a release.
So I highly recommend teamwork projects. I cannot recommend it enough. So check it out and I’ll make sure to put a link in the description below. Yes, it will likely be an affiliate link because when I like something this much, I do become an affiliate, even though half the time, I forget to use my link, but this time I’m gonna use my link. My affiliate link will be below, but you can just go to teamwork.com if you wanna check them out now.
So make sure to check out Teamwork and Like and Subscribe to this video so you don’t miss the next session.
And while you’re at it, why not share this video with a fellow entrepreneur that needs to hear about it? If you have any struggles going on in your business, tell me about them in the comments below, and don’t forget, together we thrive.
Take care.
Sandra Booker, Founder of Changemaker Inc. (home to Sidekick COO and The VA Studio) and creator of Scale Society and The Advisory Board, is a mentor, Fractional COO and growth strategist. She specializes in helping overworked, overwhelmed, multi-hatted entrepreneurs become the CEOs of sustainably scalable, and powerfully profitable businesses.
After helping local businesses thrive, and receiving accolades in her community (like the 40 Under 40 award) Sandra turned her attention to the world of online service providers, and her clients include familiar names like Chanti Zak, Tarzan Kay, and Laura Belgray.
In her (efficiently used) spare time, she teaches others how to build and grow their own 6-figure virtual assistant practices and is on a mission to create a million jobs by helping her clients and students scale their businesses.
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