Your interior design business is always evolving. You gain new clients, take on diverse projects, and overcome new challenges as your business grows. As you tackle new assignments, you develop different ways to improve your current work skills and discover more efficient ways to handle duties.
If you’re looking for new ways to improve your interior design project management skills, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five tips.
1. Set Goals
They can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, but regardless of the deadline, setting goals at work encourages you and employees to complete tasks that not only benefit the company, but contribute to overall morale. Giving yourself an objective to reach by a set date provides purpose and direction—and an end point with measurable results.
Hold yourself accountable to deadlines or you’ll defeat the purpose of setting goals. A specific, quantifiable outline give you something to strive towards, while also acting as a useful recording and monitoring tool.
Whether it’s implementing a new social media strategy or meeting project deadlines with clients and vendors, setting the right goals will keep you in line, help prioritize tasks, and leave you with a sense of accomplishment.
2. Keep Talking
Maintaining regular communication is the tip that never goes out of style. You know how important communication is for problem solving and understanding client needs, and this mentality should come through in practice.
Whether it’s scheduled meetings, such as checking in each Monday morning or ensuring an open policy for staff to voice concerns, regularly keeping up with vendors, staff, and clients ensures you stay up to date with your business and client projects.
Communication in this industry is just as important in any other field, and everyone you’re in touch with should feel comfortable discussing all sorts of work matters. Open lines and regular feedback tracks success and improvement.
3. Implement the Right Tools
It’s hard to improve your project management skills without the right tools available. Interior designers have a number of options to do their job. Use social media to expand your online network, promote your business, and connect with a larger audience. Post client testimonials, pictures of finished spaces, and inspiration pieces. An active online presence engages current users and keep you in touch with others in the industry.
Interior design business software is geared directly to interior design, already including the necessary functions and add-ons. In addition to accounting requirements, this software includes project management packages to handle client projects from start to finish.
Integrated and intuitive functions provide better visibility of current workflow processes that can improve your firm. Other available tools to keep you on track include floor plans, scheduling, and note-taking apps.
4. Stay Organized
Each part of your interior design business should have its own spot, either in a physical and digital archive or both. How you file and separate client projects, where you store invoices, and updating spreadsheets for tracking expenses or purchase orders requires a well-maintained system.
Impressive organization skills are crucial for effective project management, so you can easily see what stage a project is at and to avoid confusion. Use tools and stay in touch with staff to keep everyone on track, ease and manage workflow, and reduce duplication.
5. Host Project Debriefs
No two clients are the same, and neither are two projects. The design process may have gone smoothly but there were timing delays that could have been avoided. Upon completion, go over the project, whether it’s just you or with your team, to evaluate what went well and what could be improved.
Evaluate client feedback or new project management challenges. This evaluation can help you adapt the principles you’ve learned in one project to a new one. It also helps track future progress in your interior design business.
