Agile Project Management Methodology, Tools, and Software for Small Businesses

Project Management! What are the best project management tools and methodologies available and what are the most cost effective? In this weeks AutomateMySmallBusiness.com podcast Matt & Brandon discuss project management assets such as project management software and tools like microsoft project and basecamp. Learn the advantages of agile project management methodologies like scrum over traditional waterfall methodologies, and how these methods are executed in business to maximise the effectiveness of the development process and help get the project off the ground quickly.

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Links from the show:

• Waterfall methodology
• IDEO
• Agile methods
• Scrum Agile method
• Sprint
• Project Backlog
• Basecamp
• Backpack
• Microsoft Project
• Google sites
• Skype

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to Automate My Small Business podcast episode # 7. This is Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we’re going to talk about project philosophy and project management. But before we get into that, Brandon, what have you been up to lately?

BRANDON: I’ve been really busy these past few weeks. I’m taking a well deserved little vacation. I’m going to Paris for the week, next week.

MATT: Oh, that sounds awesome. I’m jealous.

BRANDON: Yeah. And I kind of let the business kind of run on its own as it was designed to go.

MATT: Yeah, that’s really nice. You don’t have to worry about that your business is not going to make any money. You’re going to leave and you’re going to be getting paid to sit and drink coffee in a café in Paris.

BRANDON: Yeah about that, yeah I’m pretty proud of that. You know that’s kind of where we strive to bring ideas to our listeners and to help automate their businesses whether they’re existing or new. So yeah it’s something I’m happy to report. I think it’s going to go fine. You know the gears will keep on turning and …

MATT: So what are you doing in Paris? What’s the excitement? Or is it just rest?

BRANDON: Just to have some fun. Just to have a little bit of time off you know. I do have one child, we have a second one on the way. And I’m sure all of the parents out there probably are familiar with the hard work that it takes and it really kind of sucks your social life away and all that.

MATT: So it was pretty much now or 2030?

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s pretty much now or 18 years from now. So that’s really where we’re at. But, yeah, we’ll just have a little week off and see some new part of the world.

MATT: That’s awesome.

BRANDON: Yeah. How are you? What have you been doing?

MATT: I kind of got bored a little bit so I’m starting a new project.

BRANDON: A new project again. That’s great.

MATT: I know. It’s only been, what, two weeks since the non-profit started but that’s up and running and it’s kind of starting to move on its own and we got all the paper work filed. So I started looking around and there’s a couple of projects that I had on my list of things that I wanted to do when I realized they’re all kind of the same projects so I can bind them and I’m starting to look at that. So I’m doing a little bit of research and getting prepared and ramp up to that. I’m really excited because it’s right along the lines of all the things we talked about on this podcast. I can’t really reveal what it is yet. It’s still on stealth mode.

BRANDON: Okay.

MATT: But it’s back to my normal profession of being a software engineer. So I’m excited to build something that’s software and incorporate all of the things I’ve learned from doing the product and the affiliate business and all the other things that we’ve done.

BRANDON: So you really touched on all the different corners of the different business models we’ve been talking about. The product business, you did one of those. You did the non-profit, you did the service business.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: And now this is kind of the monthly membership subscription software business.

MATT: Yeah, as part of all these I realized that selling a product once, that’s great. But you spend a lot of energy and a lot of money trying to find your customers. And so once I found my customers, I want to make sure that you know I get a consistent stream of revenue from them. And I found that to be really the best business model of the ones I’ve tried so far. So I’m going to look at that and go back to my area of specialty and start building something out on that but I’m really, really excited about it. I can’t wait to talk about it.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think that’s a good point to make. I mean as entrepreneurs, we’re always looking for the perfect business model or the perfect type of business to start and to you it might be the software monthly membership cash flow. And to me, I’m a product guy. I like the hands on. I’m the designer-engineer-inventor style.

MATT: You want to build something you’re going to hold in your hand.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, I just like, you know, with the mechanical engineering background, I like that kind of stuff, you know. I like to tinker. So everyone has their own favorites in terms of business style and business model but…

MATT: I do really recommend people to try to expand those borders. Oh, I mean I learned so much trying to get out of my area of comfort and start businesses in areas and things I didn’t even know anything about. I mean it was a great learning experience. I call it my mini MBA.

BRANDON: You do learn a lot if you’re successful or not and I’m glad to see that you’ve actually been successful in all the businesses you’ve started and you’re still cranking away so that’s great.

MATT: Yeah. And once you get them automated I mean you can expand and do more and more and more. And then it just kind of builds like if you have one business that makes you $500,000 a year, that’s great. But if you have a couple of different businesses that are each making 50 grand a year, that’s awesome too. And it diversifies your income, right. That one business, you know, if something can happen then it could disappear. But these little mini businesses I have, if one goes away, well that kind of sucks. But you know the other ones are still making money.

BRANDON: Exactly. Good. Alright, well, what are we talking about today?

MATT: So today we’re going to talk about project management and you know some of the tools that we use. But before we get to that I want to talk about project management philosophy and our approach to building products or doing the marketing or things like that. So I want to distinguish between your typical operational work and your project work. So operational work being things that your contractors are doing every day or once a week or the day to day things that happen over and over again. That’s not what we’re going to talk about today. Today we’re going to talk about project base work. And project base work is where your company improves the service it offers or the product it offers or the way you market. This is something that you’re going to use to improve your business. This is the area that you know you as the entrepreneur would really want to focus on and leave all that day to day operational stuff with someone else. I think this is the place where you’re really building businesses.

BRANDON: So the value is really in the section of managing.

MATT: Yeah, I mean this is where you create value and in the operational areas is where you preserve that value that you’ve created.

BRANDON: Well said. So you know in the models that we used where we’re outsourcing to virtual teams and we’re always managing the projects all over the world, we’re using tools and techniques that are kind of a little bit more modern than the traditional project management style of the 80s and 90s and…

MATT: Yeah, if you go back and look at those traditional models, you’ll hear this word “Waterfall.” Waterfall is a project management methodology that was used by the Department of Defense for all its projects and because of big organization like the Department of Defense use it you know every big company felt like they needed to use it. And so basically what it is is what you spend three months gathering requirements and you write a whole bunch of documents and you know the business analyst will write these documents and they kind of write down maybe 75 percent of what they learned and that’s based up to 75 percent that they understood from the actual business people that are going to use this. And then someone goes and builds his product and they understand about 75 percent of what the business analysts wrote down and they spend six months to a year building this thing. And then once it’s done, it has all these problems and you spend you know months testing and trying to fix all the problems. And then finally you know, two years later, you have this great product that meets 30 percent of the original requirements and that remaining 30 percent of the original requirements has changed because the market conditions that were around that time no longer exist. So you end up with this project that doesn’t work. And I mean since its existence they say, 80 percent of project based on the Waterfall model outright fail. Like 40 percent of them never even get released and the other 40 percent are just over budget, don’t deliver what they promised so it’s just an awful methodology.

BRANDON: And you can see why they came up with that concept in the first place. I mean it’s a very comfortable model, right. It’s very well planned. It’s very well documented. Everybody has their role. There’s really no stress involved in turn there’s no real failure because you’re not getting it out there and finding out what the customers want and finding out that they say that they don’t like it because you never give them the opportunity to give you feedback. So it’s…

MATT: Well, and it doesn’t suck in every particular case I mean there are areas where the Waterfall method is pretty useful, right. And one of the reasons it was adapted in the first place is that the biggest projects we knew of at the time were all run with this and they were run fairly successful. But there were things where you knew exactly what the problem was you’re trying to solve and you knew exactly what the solution needed to be, and that was never going to change.

BRANDON: Yeah, right. So for example…

MATT: Yeah, like building a bridge, right. You know exactly where this bridge is set to start and where it has to end up and you know how much traffic it has to hold. As you’re building the bridge half way through, the island that you’re building it to doesn’t move. So you know exactly kind of what it is you need to build and how it needs to be built and you have all that factors upfront. So…

BRANDON: I would say that a better example of, even though I do agree that a bridge falls into that category, but I would think even a better example is a free way or something that there really is no design stage at all. You know the design stage is short because it’s so well known, the project is well known and result is known. You just want to run an asphalt lane down the middle of the desert whereas the bridge the only reason I hesitate to agree with you on the bridge part is there’s a little bit more of the design phase at the front end of that. So…

MATT: But still that’s the point is that you didn’t build anything after that iterative design phase. They may iterate on design and then change the design, and change the design again but they don’t know if the bridge is going to ultimately stand or fall down until the bridge is up, right?

BRANDON: True.

MATT: It’s not like they build half the bridge, it falls down and they go, “Okay, we need to you know alter the way that we’re building the bridge.”

BRANDON: So the point is that this Waterfall method works well where there’s a short or no design phase at all and the process and the problem is well known.

MATT: I would say no. I think design phase – if it has a design phase, that’s fine. It’s just that the point of the Waterfall is that you do all your analysis at one time. Then you do all your design and inside that design you can like go through a couple of different designs and iterate on that. And then you build like all your product building and then you do all your testing and then you’re done. And that’s it. And the project’s over. The product is done. You’re not going to touch it again.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And that’s just not the way building a business works.

BRANDON: So what’s the better way there?

MATT: So one thing that we want to make sure that you understand is that when you’re building a product or building a business you want to do this iteratively and then short steps, right. So you want to build something and have their product or marketing campaign or whatever you’re trying to do, you want to complete that work in a short amount of time, two weeks, a month. I know you use one week for some of yours. So that you can get that out there and get results and feedback. And once you have that feedback you can make a decision if the way that you’re going is the right way to go or if you need to change direction and do something slightly different.

BRANDON: So the difference is basically either the traditional model of your set-to-go run a marathon and you’re going from beginning to end and the road ahead of you is 26 miles and it’s this long process versus short sprint to finish lines again and again and again. And so you’re recreating yourself or you’re taking metric every step along the way to redirect yourself or changing course.

MATT: Right. I mean if you look at like you know you’re trying to take a plane flight from LA to New York. Well, if you chart that whole course and you know the wind blows you’re one degree off course and you don’t correct that because you’re on that plan and you’re making some progress on that plan, well, by the time you get over as far as New York, you’re going to be hundreds of mile off course. But if you’re constantly correcting your course the whole time as you’re trying to get there, you’re going to be on course and you’re going to be on time.

BRANDON: So basically you’re sprinting to these short cycles and an example I have is I designed a product that still is doing well. It’s a pet product that I designed in my garage and I literally built it from parts at Home Depot and threw it up online to see how well it’s sold.

MATT: Yeah, I think your story is really interesting. Because I come from a software world and where these practices are really well accepted and everyone is using these practices but I don’t see them outside of the software world. So when I saw you doing what you’re doing with iterative development and getting products out in the market early, I knew you’re going to succeed as soon as you started doing that.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean I was building new versions as they were selling and you know I have one version on the site and then sold it. Put another picture up on the site the next day and sold that one for a few days and then decided to change it. It was that quick and …

MATT: Yeah, I think you went through like 11-12 versions in like your first couple of months, right.

BRANDON: Yeah, yeah. And you know what you’d think that because traditionally customers wouldn’t put up with that but on the web and as long as you’re honest and straightforward with your customers, a lot of them were very, very okay with it. Yes, the price was well, below what it is now and so I was giving them a good price but it was kind of like a beta testing scenario where the software industry does this all the time. You know you have customers that know that the product is flawed. They know that the product might have bugs in it and they’re willing to take that chance because whatever their need is is going to be at least somewhat fulfilled better with a flawed product than it is without a product. So yeah you can get customers that are early adapters unless you call them visionaries. They want to test the product, even give you feedback and give you compliments on parts that work and criticism on parts that don’t.

MATT: And as entrepreneur, we all think that we know exactly what the customer wants. In fact, we think we knew it better that what the customer thinks they know but the truth is you’re going to find customers that are going to be able to give you a better answer about what your product needs to be than you would have ever thought of. And for some people, that’s hard to accept and take in but the people that are really successful are the ones that listen to that feedback and adapt their product. Keeping in mind the long term vision that they have but pivoting and changing the course of the company to adapt to what the customers are saying and what the customers want their products to do.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’m a big fan of the design firm called IDEO in San Francisco area and they have designed some of the best, most notable products out there for some of the large companies like Palm and others. But they have a very specific process in which they try to gather as many ideas and get to the end sooner with the successful design and that is basically prototype fast, learn and observe the product in the hands of the consumer and the customer. And reiterate, and iterate, and iterate and iterate. And so your short design cycles are shorter and the number of times to have the ability to change courses are greater. And that’s one of the secrets that they admit to having.

MATT: I know they do a lot of prototyping which is great where you can put something in the hand of the consumer and watch what they do. A lot of companies use surveys and surveys are really great low cost way of getting information. But the information you get from survey is as not 100 percent reliable, right. So if I send you a survey about some product I’m thinking about building, Brandon, you said, “Oh yeah, that sounds great. That sounds great you know I really like it. Oh, will definitely buy that when it comes out.” Now I turn back to you and say, “Okay, great. I have it. It’s a $100.” And then when they’re forced to hand over that money, they’re going to immediately tell you all the things that it doesn’t do and all the things that are wrong with it as oppose to this hypothetical product on the piece of paper where they can just say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds great,” right?

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So I’m sure you have some vocal customers when you’re first starting. It helped you make this great product that you have now.

BRANDON: Oh yeah. Real vocal customers. And you know I started off by saying that the traditional Waterfall methodology is comfortable and that’s true because if you do it iteratively and you’re getting it out to the customers, it’s not comfortable. I mean there’s a lot of stress involved in terms of people relying on you on a product that maybe half baked and you know that’s the right way to go but at the same time the customers are expecting whatever their expectations are and sometimes you can’t fulfill. But so in the end it’s worth it but it’s very uncomfortable.

MATT: That uncomfort is really good for you.

BRANDON: Yeah it’s uncomfortable but it’s good that it’s uncomfortable because that’s what causes change.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: And your change is what you’re trying to go for.

MATT: Yeah. You can get a little bit of uncomfort all along the way and keep you on the right course or you can spend two years building that product then have a lot of uncomfort when your whole company fails.

BRANDON: Oh yeah. A lot of uncomfort.

MATT: So spread it out.

BRANDON: Okay so the Waterfall is old method. What is the new method called?

MATT: So there’s a bunch of new methods within the software industry that are grouped into this category Agile Methods. They’re all slightly different but they focus on that short iteration time. They focus on connecting the person that’s building the product or that piece of software with the customer that’s going to be using that. And so if you’re building stuff within an enterprise which is where the stuff came out of, you sit next to the business person that’s going to use your product. Now this is a little bit harder in a public customer facing product because you don’t really know who your customer is. So by getting a product out there and trying to sell it and market it, that’s going to help you find and identify those customers so that you can get them next to you as a product developer and then incorporate their feedback in your product. So that’s kind of the twist from the enterprise model’s Scrum to the public model’s Scrum and Scrum is one of the more widely accepted Agile methods. It doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s based off kind of really Scrum in the rugby. I never really understood the name but those are some of the things that it brings up. Another thing is with the Sprints you’re going to identify a set of features that you’re going to work on for that so you know if I’m building a software product, I may say, “Okay, it’s going to have feature A, feature B and feature C. “ And that’s what we’re going to focus on in the Sprint and the Sprint is two to four weeks like we talked about before. And in that two to four weeks, you’re going to do everything that was in that old Waterfall model. You’re going to you know think about design, you’re going to sit there and talk with your customer why you’re doing it and then you’re going to implement this while they’re there and they’re going to say, “Hey, this is good or bad,” you know whatever. And you’re going to make sure that you test this part of the product as you do it and then it’s going to be completely released within two to four weeks. And so you’re constantly updating the product. So that’s kind of what you’re doing when you’re building your product in a couple of days and then you release it out and then you get some feedback from those people that you sold it to and then you incorporate that feedback in the next sprint and say, “Okay. Now you know I have this box that I really need to change it from wood to plastic because I’m getting a lot of feedback about that,” right.

BRANDON: Right. And this isn’t necessarily always applied just for products. This applies to any part of the business at anytime along the way where you know, let’s say, you wanted to redesign other website and I’ve done this actually a couple months ago. I decided this particular week in April I was going to do a sprint to the finish with a complete redesign. I got my web designers in one room with me and actually there’s a shopping cart designer and a web designer and a little bit of a data base programmer. All of us in one room and we cranked out a block of time, it literally took us about four to five days to get it all done but we did it all in that one sitting really to get the changes made and the feedback as soon as possible. So…

MATT: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting places that does not product development that this works in is marketing especially with adwords. Because in adwords you have a measurable amount of feedback. So when you’re building your product, you get kind of loose feedback, you get comments but you don’t really get very much that’s measurable. With advertising and marketing within adwords, you’re getting measurable results from click through rates to conversion rates. So if you set up a Sprint that where you’re going to work on an advertising campaign, you could really measure and tweak that during that time. So by the time you get through that end of that Sprint on that campaign you have a well refined and measured campaign.

BRANDON: Yeah, good point. Adwords is by the way a great way of getting feedback on even just concepts. If you wanted to find a new tag line for your product or something, you throw it up in adwords and test it you know.

MATT: Yeah, I mean we talked a little bit about the unreliableness of surveys because people know they’re taking surveys. You can create kind of virtual surveys with an adword based on what they click on and what they don’t click on. And I think you get much more truthful results because they don’t really know they’re being surveyed.

BRANDON: That’s true. So what kinds of tools are there out there for project management in this particular type of methodology?

MATT: Before we get into the tools yet, I want to take up one other thing in Scrum which is a project backlog. And so one of the things that is important as you’re breaking off this little sprints of things to do is that you not only have a list of what you’re going to do during the sprint but you have a whole list of things that what you want to do in the future but you’re not ready to do yet. So in Scrum they call this the project backlog which is just like a list of stories or descriptions of the different features that they want to implement. And I do this with my projects and we talked about earlier that I’m starting this stealth project right now that was on my list. And so I had this list of all these ideas and things that I might want to do. I was looking through there and I saw, “Hey, you know, for this starting a new business sprint, I want to take these ideas and form them into one coherent business.” So just now in marketing but just in forming of the business or new product ideas, just getting all the stuff out, it falls in line with our Get Things Done brain dump part of that, right. You can do that for your business like a feature dump or a requestor bug dump, all that sort of stuff. And once you have all the stuff on the list, you can look at it and weigh things against each other. You can say that you know this is really important, no, this is not really important. If you come from like a traditional project management background, big organizations call this Project Portfolio Management where they’re looking at a portfolio projects and choosing the ones that have the most return on investment. So by getting a reading on paper or some sort of list and a tool, you can look at all these ideas and weigh which ones the most valuable or the ones going to impact your business the most. So let’s get into some tools. What are you using right now, Brandon?

BRANDON: For managing my teams, I use Basecamp which is made by 37 Signals. I do have a Wiki that I’ve started that I like to kind of overviews of our projects that I used Google sites for. It is free. I’ve tested a little bit the use of another product by 37 Signals called Backpack and it’s another way of kind of adhoc communication of projects all in one page and then you make a page for each project. And you kind of keep all the resources of those projects on that page and that page can expand or collapse as small or as big as you need it. And I like that.

MATT: That’s cool. Yeah, I use Basecamp too. There’s a lot of things that I like about it. It’s pretty simple project management system especially compared with you know some of the more enterprise things that I’ve been used to in my normal job. But it’s basically like a task list and a calendar and then you get into some of like the chat and the more communication stuff with the Backpack product that kind of snaps into that.

BRANDON: Well, I used to use Microsoft Project back in the day when I was doing real estate development. Those are much larger longer projects I mean we’re talking two or three years sometimes for development to take place and there was definitely roles involved like architects and engineers. And I think there was some part of it that it worked well with but there’s always gaps in the communication system. In fact, it really had no real communication built in unless you’re using this server version which is now much more popular.

MATT: Right, yeah, I mean so like if you come from an enterprise area you’re probably really familiar with Microsoft Project because almost every project is managed in Microsoft Project in some way, right. But taking what a big enterprise does with mini resources and scaling those across many projects and doing that project in portfolio management that we’re talking about before and tying that into your HR system, well a little business that don’t need to do any of that. So the tools that we use, those are overkill for what we’re trying to do. We don’t need that long term planning and all that stuff that project does really well. We need something that’s simpler and something especially that is on the web. Everything we talked about with all these tools is we want web-based products that are hosted up in the Cloud of the internet and that your whole team members can get to. One of the problems with the project file you used to have is that if you want to share it with someone, what would you do? You’d email it to them. And when they wanted to go and mark something that was completed, they either updated the file or they emailed you, they say, “Hey, Brandon, I’ve completed this part of the project. Update the file,” which creates an administration nightmare. Because you get multiple versions of the file or you become the bottleneck of updating it. So you want something that’s hosted in the web and that’s viva feature of Basecamp is that it’s on a website and everyone can access it at two in the morning your time or whatever, right.

BRANDON: True. Now there is benefits to tools like Project where you know if something was to change, let’s say, double on length or there’s a delay on something, it automatically updates the rest of the project plan to maybe delay even the end date because of that. And you can readjust your plan based on which dependencies you have in there. And Basecamp won’t do that, at least not that I’m aware of.

MATT: That’s true. But if you’re truly sticking to like the Scrum methodology or the Agile methodologies, you shift after whatever your sprint time is. If you need to throw something out of that sprint, then you drop the feature out. And see the managing in that way.

BRANDON: Yeah and it kind of reminds me of the GTD method, the Getting Things Done method, which is on the personal, very small scale where it’s built on you know things happen and the part that you need to have set is that the system can respond accordingly. So that you’re basically having to take a review maybe once a week and the GTD method is a weekly review. The way things happen all the week long, you’re adding new parts, you’re adding new tasks, you’re adding new features, you know you get something that comes at you, an obstacle or challenge that you aren’t expecting, and that’s okay because you know what you’re having, you know what you need to do and everybody is on the same page. But at the end of the week you review and you reset.

MATT: Yeah and in the Scrum methodology, you have kind of a daily meeting that’s really short like 10-15 minutes to say, “Here’s what I accomplished, here’s where I’m stuck,” and that allows you to realize it people are getting stuck and respond to that quickly. Now in a virtual world, you might be able to have those over Skype but you can also get that same feedback by everyone updating into Basecamp or you know some sort of wiki or Google wave or whatever the communication tool you try to set for your business. So you can get that information every day, review it for 15 minutes and make adjustments if necessary. And then weekly you can have maybe a little bit longer meetings.

BRANDON: So I think it’s fair to say that we have yet found the perfect project management tool, if there is such thing. Tell us where you think tools like Basecamp fall short.

MATT: Basecamp essentially is a couple different ways of looking at today or entering the day, you can enter a task list, you can enter data into the calendars so you can see due dates or you know you can kind of randomly enter a whole bunch of information in kind of wiki form. And really just because something is one place, it doesn’t show up in the other in Basecamp. So what I really want is I want something that let me enter the tasks and so I can see them in a, you know, this is what George is doing for the week and person by person list or I want to see a project by project list because I run multiple projects simultaneously so I want to see, oh, for project A what are the tasks this week, and who’s working on what, and for this other project you know what are they doing. But I can’t do that in Basecamp. So Basecamp basically says you see it in the way you entered it and if you entered it as to do, you’re not going to see it on the calendar. If you entered it in the calendar, you’re not going to see it in the to-do list and so I don’t like that. I want something more enter the data and then I can tag it up and then I can look at that same data from different views, either calendar view or person by person view or project by project view or filter by task that are running late, things like that.

BRANDON: So the problem here is that there’s all sorts of tools out there that can do each of those very well but they’re not all integrated into one.

MATT: Or if they do that well, they’re not in a web 2.0 kind of hosted in the cloud scenario like you can get all that out of Microsoft Project but it’s not hosted up in the cloud for you.

BRANDON: Yeah which kind of defeats the purpose because nobody can collaborate on it. There’s only one manager that has the file and…

MATT: Yeah. I do like the Basecamp will send out emails automatically when you update the task list so I don’t feel like I have to send an email to one of my people telling them to do something. I just put that task into Basecamp and all of a sudden they get an email and then they’ll go look at Basecamp. And because it doesn’t have that wiki kind of built in for that particular task, sometimes if it’s a really lengthy task, what I’ll do is I’ll put something into my wiki – right now I’m using Google sites, and I’ll put a bigger description of what that task is and I’ll just link to that out of the Basecamp task.

BRANDON: So explain a little bit how, you say wiki, people think Wikipedia. How does that work with your project management?

MATT: So it’s basically just a webpage anyone on the team can update. And so I want anyone on the team to update it because if they’re doing the task that are to be repeated and the way I expected out in the original thing is not exactly how they ended up completing it. I want them to go and update that so that the instructions are right for the next time we need to do that task.

BRANDON: So it’s a way of documenting the project.

MATT: Yeah and you know the other thing that I used that for is that eventually they may not be the same person doing that, I want to gradually build that set of standard operating procedures for my business. We talked about you know making virtual trainings and all that sort of stuff. But if you can gradually capture this information about how your business runs and it’s not too hard to do 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there to add all this information but if you have to sit down and do this, let’s say, I’m just going to write the standard operating procedure for my business you’re taking months to do.

BRANDON: And you’ll get it all wrong because you couldn’t do it all from memory anyways.

MATT: Exactly. So I’d like building all these stuff iteratively as well. So it ties in with that as well.

BRANDON: Yeah, I like that idea also. I like it having all of the information at my fingertips in one location. So for each project I like having a one-page overview with top level task that some people are working on. And also any resources like documents that they’ve uncovered or links that they may have researched and found information on and comments on and maybe even important emails or chat threads…

MATT: Or some videos uploaded.

BRANDON: Yeah. Or training videos which are great to put on those kind of sites.

MATT: Yeah I really liked doing that. I love making a little Jing video of kind of showing what I’m talking about and then just uploading that and maybe writing up a little bit of the overall what I expect to be done at the end of that and that’s the easiest way for me to do it.

BRANDON: So really there’s two areas to be focusing on during the management or during that communication of tasks is that on-going task list completion of that communication is being spread between everybody, when things are getting done, what needs get done, what are the priorities, that’s good in Basecamp. If you want to document your project you want to keep the resources all in one place, that’s great for even just a page editor like Google sites that Matt and I both used.

MATT: Yeah. I mean there are other wikis out there that I think are better than Google sites. That’s just kind of what I started with and there’s a whole lot of good tools and I think project management tools are a little bit better than the Basecamp stuff that we started with.

BRANDON: Did we talk about Backpack?

MATT: We mentioned it. You want to talk about Backpack a little bit more depth?

BRANDON: Backpack is also along the same lines of having a one-page project overview for each project and it’s by far the best interface, very easy to use, easily edited right there on the screen. You don’t even have to go on edit mode, you just click edit and fill in the tack, upload an image or upload a document right there on one interface and it’s very well designed. Little pricey, I think it’s 25 bucks a month but that gives you I think 6 users. There’s a free version but it’s unlimited, it’s not worth even using.

MATT: I think it’s funny what we think is pricey now that we’re in the web world. I mean we expect everything to be free.

BRANDON: Yeah. And anything that’s not free I’m like, Can’t I find a free version?

MATT: It’s so expensive. I could eat you know a steak for that. I can feed myself for a day.

BRANDON: You know I shouldn’t complain. They made a fantastic piece of software and its well worth every penny to be honest. But you know if you can get something free you know you just have to know a little bit how to use it, it’s all preference. I guess there’s other you know just the basic tools that I think all of us use on a daily basis that are just sometimes not used properly. I know I always get an email for my full time VAs and team members. I give them an email with our domain. That gives them access to the Google sites area and also gives them a email address that can be used for Gmail or Gtalk I should say which is fantastic for communicating. So I mean if we want to just talk about communication, email is still by far the most used. Instant messenger is good for adhoc quick messages, quick discussions, quick questions on the fly and maybe you wanted to Skype somebody, instant messenger is a good way of kind of ping them, get their status whether they’re available then you get on Skype. Then you got your Basecamp which is your tasks at hand so if anything comes up during that conversation, you document that by putting the tasks in Basecamp and then anything that comes out of the task such as research or documentation that goes on your wiki. So from the beginning to end that’s kind of how I see the collaboration working.

MATT: Yeah, I mean I think email and IM and Skype leave a lot to be desired in communication in a team scale. I mean I think those are great when you have a conversation with someone but all those things you communicate during that instant message, or that email, they’re all kind of trapped in their own little silos and no one else on the team can really get access to those. I know we’ve talked about Google wave on the one of the other podcast. I’m really excited about Google wave as a way of centralizing all that information and the communication so that people who weren’t in there originally can get access to it. I think that would really change the dynamic of teams and make the flow between the different numbers that team a lot more free and more productive.

BRANDON: That’s a good point. I mean if you can have a way of communicating where anybody can access that, not only in real time but even weeks later, of course that’s the best of all world so…

MATT: Yeah, so I’m really looking forward to those upcoming collaboration technology so everything that is in email I try to get it out of email. I try to do as much as I can in the Basecamp tasks and comments on those tasks.

BRANDON: Yeah, that is something I think is worth saying is you know if you do have people that are utilizing Basecamp or something like it, if you use email some of the time and Basecamp some of the time, you can’t have this hybrid version going you know.

MATT: You pick something and stick with it.

BRANDON: Yeah. You don’t really know where to find information later because sometimes it’s in Basecamp and sometimes it’s in your email and yeah it’s probably best practice to choose one of the other. I guess if you’re going to use Basecamp you might as well really, really use it and so you keep all your communications inside of it.

MATT: I mean I still use email sometimes and I use instant messenger a lot but these are places that I really want to improve in the future and I think those are ways to do it.

BRANDON: So there’s tools out there I don’t think we’ve gotten to the perfect solution for it to all work but there’s definitely plenty to choose from.

MATT: Yeah, I mean so if you have a great tool that you love and you think works really well, we want to hear about it. Tell us. Because we’re constantly looking for better tools in this area so we want to hear about it.

BRANDON: Yeah. And you can always drop us a line or come see more podcast at automatemysmallbusiness.com.

MATT: Or you can email us at podcast@automatemysmallbusiness.com.

BRANDON: Yeah and you can Twitter us, just put in the #amsb and we’ll catch it. We can respond to it, answer any questions that way also.

MATT: Yeah, lots of ways. I mean even just doing a commenting on the podcast page about the particular podcast that you heard, if it’s this one or some other one and give us your feedback and let us know what you like about the podcast, let us know what you don’t like. Just like we’ve talked about today with Iterative development, this podcast is in Iterative Podcast so and we’re looking for feedback from you to make it better and turn it into the product that you want so we give you the information that you need to make your business better.

BRANDON: So that’ll be it for our podcast. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

MATT: See you.

BRANDON: Take care.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

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