Finding The Perfect Manager

We’ve talked a lot about starting a business as a single entrepreneur, but we don’t often post about what it’s like to work with a partner or a team over long distances.

One of the biggest problems James and I had in the business was how to manage the workflow and organization of information amongst the team and ourselves. We weren’t in the same office building. Our virtual business has people working thousands of miles apart. 3,000 miles, to be almost exact.

When you have a virtual business shared with others, you can’t always take a file down the hall or share a local network. There are spreadsheet updating, payroll, and a host of other duties that need to be taken care of. Under normal circumstances in a large office, these files are easily accessible by everyone with one centralized location in the local network. Not so over distance.

The old adage of “too many cooks spoil the broth” applies to our case. I know James uses quite a few spreadsheets on a daily basis. I’d love to help take some of these management tasks off his hands, but I can’t. We’d have to share the information to function well. We’d email back and forth, create multiple copies, jumble information, become confused, lose files… all the while trying to stay in sync.

Ugh.

We researched extensively for the proper project management program to fit our needs. It had to be easy to use, provide to-do lists, notes, message boards or whiteboards, and file-sharing. It had to be in one place, web-based, highly customizable, and it had to have an appealing interface.

We began with dotProject.net, a program that came with our hosting service. It proved to be limited and complicated, not to mention ugly. We moved on to Basecamp. It offers free and premium versions and works well enough for tracking projects. Sort of. Not really. As good as it was on many levels, we ended up working around its limitations. There was still something missing.

We’ve switched to Easy Projects. This program was definitely a step up in the right direction. (No, we are not paid to push this service. We’re blogging about it because it’s cool, useful, valuable and worth mentioning.)

We can track time spent on projects with EP’s Time Log option, we can centralize information about a project and copy/paste email information we receive to keep the other person in the loop, we can manage our team, we can generate reports and customize the project and task fields. EP also offers 1G of storage space and the ability to attach files to specific projects.

We have two users on a web-based hosted service, and it only costs $135 a year per user. Not a bad price at all for this level of project management.

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