Divide & Conquer: A Simple Approach to Complex Management

Written by Irina Gutnik, marketing manager at GBKSoft

Most of our customers come to us with just a bare idea or a set of problems they want to solve. Therefore, 90% of our projects start from scratch: no detailed concepts, mockups, wireframes or specifications. Considering that we usually run from 4 to 7 projects simultaneously, it’s not hard to imagine what kind of mess can emerge without careful planning and task execution.

With the help of ActiveCollab, we created an efficient framework to structure the workflow at three main activity levels: project management, development itself and task management within a particular project.

File Storing & Sharing

In our work project management starts from the first contact with a customer and lasts until the final delivery and maintenance. In order to make sure that nothing is missed we are using self-hosted ActiveCollab. This approach lets us store and share all wireframes, mockups, and references with our clients within a single environment.

Costs & Time Tracking

Being an offshore development company, it’s vital for us to be trusted and transparent. ActiveCollab lets us track project expenses starting from the first estimate that we provide to a customer.

The entire development process is carefully accounted for in ActiveCollab so that our clients can be confident that every penny is spent with a purpose. The same tracking tool lets us monitor deadlines and efficiently redistribute workload between our team members according to their productivity.

Development

This is where all the beauty of ActiveCollab is revealed. It allows us to structure our projects according to objectives and split the development process into milestones (task lists) with a certain amount of tasks and time assigned to each of them.

Regardless of how many milestones or tasks are assigned, we can easily track progress or get the statistics on how much time each of them takes. This simple structuring helps us to meet deadlines and improve time estimation along our work.

Moreover, they are the key feature that facilitates billing process for our customers, so they can clearly see achieved results and pay in line with work we’ve performed.

Task Management

If you’re working on a complex project, there is always a risk of excessive delays at the stage of task transferring from one member to another. In order to streamline this process, we’ve created a set of custom labels that are assigned to tasks upon completion of each stage.

ActiveCollab is a simple and yet flexible PM tool that you can gradually adopt in your company. 4 years ago we’ve used it as a simple task management tool and here we are... trapped in its network of features.