Here are my favourite tools for managing my brand-spanking new team. Maybe this will help you and your team, too!
Slack – “Chat” for work. This sounds like the stupidest thing but I tried it recently and was instantly converted.
There’s no “personal” distractions like you get on Facebook, Hangouts, Skype and all that crap. Just your work colleagues (or employees) and you. So you can get shit done. Lovely!
Plus you get phone apps so if you’re on holiday, you can still reply and delegate but without going into some major project management software.
(You should hire a project manager so you don’t have to deal with daily crap.)
Trello – Super-flexible task and project management. This is almost too flexible. You can end up feeling like you don’t know what to do because you can do anything. So check out their blog for tips and follow along.
My favourite way of using this is to have one “board” per project and lists for: To Do, Doing, Done, Waiting and Resources. You then add “cards” which are like tasks. And you can add checklists to each task. (You can also assign staff to specific tasks.)
I can go more in-depth with this if you like. (Let me know.)
UpWork – One of the best places for hiring freelancers. Right now my business is small. Yours might be too. Last thing I want to do is commit to a monthly salary or 2 or 5.
So I hire folks on UpWork based on how many hours have they billed, for how many different people, and what are their ratings. I also check each project to see if it’s similar to the stuff I’ll need.
From there, I hire them and limit them to 5 or 10 hours a week. This keeps costs down and also spreads risk. I can hire 2 or 3 coders and have each of them do something separate. Then if one is sick, life goes on.
Best part of UpWork is that payments are done automatically. They track their hours (with screenshots) and your PayPal account gets billed. Hey, presto! Less admin!
Right now this is my super-easy way to manage my projects. This got way longer than I expected and there’s still so much I can say about each.
But maybe you just need something once-off and don’t want to hire a whole team to fix your current tech problem.
In that case, you should get “Team Tech Assassin” on board to fix your tech and let me worry about this stuff. It’s what I do.
PS: And when you hire “Team Tech Assassin”, you deal with “The Tech Assassin”. My team is my responsibility. I won’t shirk that off on you 😉
Which means that you can just hire me and have a world-class team fixing your stuff for you without you having to babysit them. Send me an email to get some peace of mind!