Thanks to your excellent marketing and sales skills, you’ve won the client contract you’ve been targeting for months. Now the celebration is over; it’s time to roll up your sleeves and deliver on your client promise, and a large part of this is going to be down to how well you can manage your time and workflow (and other people’s if applicable).
The good news is, you don’t have to be a project management professional to run a successful client project, but there are some fundamentals to get right that will definitely help.
Here are 3 of them:
1. Visualize Your Workflow
To ensure projects don’t overrun or hit any otherwise avoidable speed bumps along the way, a key element of project management is properly planning ahead.
Once you’ve reviewed and agreed the scope of the project with your client in writing, including timescales, milestones, expected outcomes, deliverables, and your payment terms and conditions (including methods of payment), it’s time to map it all out.
Being able to visualize your workflow and see what needs to happen, by whom and by when is essential. Whether you use a simple wall planner or a more sophisticated online project management tool or platform where you can assign and add other people is up to you. But being able to visualize your workflow is a great help.
With Invoice Ninja, our project features include a Kanban board that provides you with a visual overview of every project. Furthermore, columns and cards can be fully customized to suit your exact workflow so you can plan, update, and analyze everything all in one view.
Find out more here.
2. Communicate well throughout the project
Part of the project scope should include who is responsible for what and when, including communication channels and methods. It’s also important to keep all communication channels open during the project so that all parties can be kept aware of progress or any unplanned hold-ups, delays or reroutes.
You may have regular project update meetings or a weekly check-in to ensure all is going smoothly and to adapt time frames and deliverables if necessary. Keeping in communication will also help you identify and manage any potential scope creep.
You may make use of a project management tool for these updates to collaborate with others, but you’ll also need to keep a tab on your time commitments too.
With Invoice Ninja’s Tasks feature, you can directly integrate your Google/Microsoft calendar so that you can log time from your calendar events.
This, along with Invoice Ninja’s Tasks and Projects features, which allow you to track billable time on each project, means you can keep track of everything and view it at a glance, so you can always keep clients and other project members updated.
3. Deliver (and get paid) on time
Naturally, a key part of a successful project is delivering on time.
This is where good time management comes in. It makes sense to allow for more time (and budget) than you think you’ll need so you have room to maneuver in the event of the unexpected.
Giving yourself more time than you need can result in you completing the project earlier than expected, which means you can deliver even more value for your client.
In any event, even with the best will in the world, sometimes, when you are managing a lot of projects and clients, tracking time spent can get complicated. It’s important that you track all your billable hours, tasks and projects so you deliver on your promise, AND you get paid for all your time spent.
Fortunately, with Invoice Ninja you can record every second spent on a client project and convert it to an invoice with 1 click. No manual data entry needed.
In addition to converting timed tasks to invoices, you can create projects, tasks, and track billable work time. You can define work rates per account, client, or task, assign tasks to different account users, and much more.
What’s more, every action your client takes is recorded and can be viewed in their client-side portal. You can also upload documents so everything is accessible and recorded to ensure a smooth experience for you and your clients.
Everything you need to help your projects run smoothly, invoice accurately, and get paid on time.
Time Tracking and Projects are included on all Invoice Ninja plans, including FREE.
Find out more here.
Create your FREE account here.
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