Starting and running a small business is a painstaking process. Finally, after putting in all the hard work, your business catches on and is steadily growing. You’re happy with the progress, but feel worn out by all the additional work. If you’re wondering if there are any solutions out there that can make everything more manageable, well, you’re right! Project management tools may provide you with the perfect solution.
There are several tools available to make the growth easier, without any significant additional costs of hiring an extra management/admin team. Let’s discuss the top solutions that are available for effectively managing your small growing business:
Types of Project Management Tools
Planning, Scheduling And Budgeting Tools:
From to-do lists to scheduling, cost management tools and resource allocation tools, it has never been easier to keep track of your activities, appointments, time and finances.
Most project management and time management tools allow you to
- create a project,
- break it down into smaller tasks,
- schedule each task with timings and deadlines,
- allocate resources and finances to each task, and
- assign tasks to different individuals.
Associating each task with its time and costs makes it easy to not only track the general progress and costs of the project. Also to identify and locate which specific tasks are causing time and cost overruns. This makes it easier to react and streamline your processes.
Calendar integration similarly allows you to harmonise your business appointments with your personal calendar.
Communication Tools:
These project management tools will ease your communication by effectively integrating all your communication channels within one platform. You can now initiate and track conversations on emails, video calls, conference calls, voice calls, team messaging all within minutes. The social media integration features allow for the sharing of content to all your social media platforms.
Additional features such as screen sharing are also available, allowing your virtual assistant and other members of your team to conveniently view an operate your computer screen with no limitations as to the convenience of physical location. Most project management tools also allow for feedback and comments on the designated projects. With all these in place, you no longer have to scroll back and forth between different communication apps wondering where that last important communication was sent.
Collaborative Teamwork Tools:
Project collaboration is an essential feature that allows all the members of your team to work and contribute to a single project concurrently. Creating project activities and allocating to different groups allows you to efficiently manage and track the productivity and input of every member of your team, as well as improving the synchronization of processes.
A bonus feature for such tools if often file sharing and management, which allows for the uploading of all relevant files to a central platform allowing access to all authorized individuals, and allowing each individual to download or edit the files when needed.
Reporting and Analytics Tools:
Various project management tools allow for the analysis and automatic generation of reports for the visualisation of the progress of activities on graphs, Gantt Charts, pie charts, tables, and other templates.
Analytic tools further analyze data and generate trends, identify opportunities for improvement, carry out predictive analytics and web analytics among other processes.
Summing Up…
With the growth of technology and innovation, there is a tool for almost any challenge you may be experiencing in your business. Selecting a tool that simultaneously integrates most of your business processes in one simple platform will efficiently reduce your workload.
As for the paradox of choice, hiring and consulting a virtual assistant to assess your business, suggest the best management and workflow tools, integrate the needed features and apps, tailor and automate the systems of that tool to fit your business, may save you tons of time, energy and costs.