Design your way

Monday, March 24, 2014

When you’re running a team of creative professionals, you need to know how to organize. Unless you meet your clients’ every expectation with the right amount of resources, and in a timely manner, you’re in for a ride with unpredictable outcome.

Whether you own a small design studio or operate within a corporate-sized agency, the best way to make sure that your projects stay on track is to work with an application that helps you manage your business with little effort.

Copper would be a fine choice of project management software. Right now, a 30-day free trial is available to try this tool for good measure. If you choose to sign up for an account, know that the whole process takes only a few minutes of your precious time.

You need only choose a Copper URL, and provide your name, email address, company, industry, and country. Copper will also ask you to link a credit card, and this is done for your convenience – so that once the trial period is over, the service would automatically switch your account to one of the established membership plans. Needless to say, that won’t be the case if you choose to cancel out at some point, for any reason.

You need to know how easy it is to make Version 5 of this tool work to your advantage. First off, you get started by adding a project and its tasks. Then, you tell Copper what the deadlines are for each task.

Afterwards, you assign these tasks to the right people and settle who is Project Manager. Now, the great thing about this software is the fact that it enables your team members to pinpoint whoever is the most important person at a given time as the project runs its course.

This way, you know exactly who’s doing what – and the exact stages of project completion in timeline. Once it kicks off, your team members add their own estimates with regards to how long their individual tasks might take, and project managers confront everyone’s logged-in time with these estimates in order to make necessary changes in the timeline.

Speaking of changes made to an ongoing project, Copper gives you a perfectly flexible environment to work with. To begin with, the project description settles all the guidelines that you and your client(s) have agreed on – all there, crystal-clear for everyone to see.

However, we all know that some customers are clueless as to what they want, and that you sometimes have to change direction or double back on something already taken care of – in order to please them. In this case, your team members will instantly be notified of any updates on the project page.

Overall, Copper allows creative-minded people to spend as little energy as possible on tending to the administrative side of their job, and devote most of their focus on what they love doing best: design beautiful things.