Simplicity is always welcome in the workday. And for busy interior designers who are juggling too many tasks and deadlines, this is most definitely the case. Making the move towards streamlined procedures and productivity tools is the foundation for success. Here are some thoughts on how to achieve greater simplicity within your project management.
1. Make Collaboration Easy
When staff can work together seamlessly, momentum builds and work gets done faster. Internal procedures and access to the right information when it’s needed is critical to keep projects moving along and to avoid getting hung up for avoidable reasons.
Making sure there are ways for staff to work on projects together is so important. Online software is one of the best ways to ensure staff can seamlessly collaborate and access documents or other work when they need to. Be done with document versioning and restricted access and take your business online!
2. Reduce Duplication of Work
Many firms report that too much data entry, copying and pasting, and re-entry of data into other systems or documents is hampering their productivity. Redundancies are one of the largest time drains on design firms. Make this area a priority when you’re reviewing how you can simplify project management between you and your staff or bookkeeper.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to reduce the amount of tools you’re using to keep the business running. If you’re using Excel, Word, Dropbox, apps, and separate accounting software, you have a lot to gain by moving to a more streamlined model.Software built for interior designers, with integrated accounting, is readily available and will solve this problem for you.
3. Keep Accounting and Project Management Together
Having your project data in the same software as your accounting is one of the easiest ways to simplify your project management. Why use two or more systems when you can use one? Besides a reduction in the amount of duplicate work and entries (which is huge!), you’ll also save time by having access to automated projects and business reports.
4. Focus Staff Members
Many software tools allow for concurrent users within the system. This helps with collaboration and momentum, and also allows for the business owner to divvy up tasks as they see fit. With the right project management software for interior designers, the business owner has control overwhat functionalities each person has access to. Is one person managing client invoicing? Is another handling purchase order creation and tracking? Does everyone need to track their time? All of this custom access is easily set up in tools built for the workflow of design firms.
5. Use Software Built to Manage Your Business
One of the easiest ways to simplify project management for interior designers is to do your work in the cloud. This simple change to online software makes your business more accessible to you, your staff, and your bookkeeper, which makes it all the more likely that everyone keeps their tasks up to date.
Reduce redundancies, assign tasks, and keep work moving ahead no matter where you are with the ultimate in flexibility and access for your business.
