After a delay due to some career changes that Jen talked about earlier, From the Business Desk is back. From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature revolves around ensuring that all of your business projects have fully completed.
As a small business owner, staying on top of everything necessary to run your business is no small task. With a constant turmoil of new projects, new customers, and everyday business inquiries, it is important to understand what is required for you to close out your existing projects; by successfully and formally closing out a project, it can be put to rest with all parties comfortable that their requirements have been met.
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| Not all Project Management needs to be this complicated. A few simple tips can keep you on track to successful completion. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart |
One of the first items to be aware of in the closing stage of a project is that it’s important to identify up front what the final items on your project or to-do list are. For example, if you are working on establishing and running a new class at your shop, you may think that the project is complete when the class runs. Thinking this out ahead of time can help you identify items that are always good to check off before putting a project to bed Namely, ensuring that all compensation and contractual terms have been met and a project post-mortem to document lessons learned. Following through with these steps ensures that you don’t forget some of the important elements of a project for any business: getting paid, and meeting legal obligations. A post-mortem, either publicly or internally is a good time for one or more parties involved to learn from the project, documenting what went well and what could use improvement for next time.
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| This is an example of using Insightly to keep track of project tasks. This is the project list for the pattern Sweet Strawberries. |
Keeping track of all of this can be overwhelming; fortunately there are several options available that are easy to use in web form. I’d recommend ZOHO Projects or Freedcamp as two of the better solutions available out there for someone just getting started. Other options include systems that link Customer Relationship Management and Project Management. Here at Tinking Turtle, our CRM system, Insightly includes an integrated Project Management module. This provides additional functionality to link projects to various associated parties, and track when a project is waiting on a third party to take action.
No matter how extensive or basic your knowledge of projects is, ensuring that you take some time on all of your projects to double check that your steps are completed is well worth the peace of mind.. The more projects that can be completed without final steps left un-done, the easier managing the entire workload of your business can be.
~ Mr. Turtle
