Tip 5 of 7 – Get Customizable Web-Based Software and Get Productive – 7 Tip Series

By Kathleen Lamphier | Posted on April 22nd, 2009

Here’s tip number five for boosting project team productivity with customizable web-based software. Tip six is coming next week.  If you’d like all the tips now, click here to request them.

Tip #5 – Automate recurring processes
The whole point of project management is to make more effective use of everyone’s time. Every hour of busywork you eliminate through automation is an hour liberated for more productive and more profitable use by team members.  Automating recurring processes reduces or even eliminates administrative work while providing more timely and in-depth communication.

Customizable, web-based project management software can help you:

Manage reports:
You can automatically distribute reports on a pre-arranged schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Recipients can then interact directly with the real-time information in the report by making on-the-fly changes to the report and sorting information by category, dates, resources and more. Empowering users to create and modify reports saves you the time of creating one-off reports for various team members.

Communicate progress:
As work proceeds on the project, the application can be set up to automatically send status alerts that notify team members when new projects or tasks are assigned to them and update them when information changes – for example, when work is completed or delayed.

Prompt action:
Your web-based project management application can send reminders to notify team members in advance of task due dates to ensure that key dates are met.

QuickBase’s automatic email features streamline communication
Are you familiar with Intuit QuickBase’s automatic email features? They include:

Scheduled report subscriptions:
Creating a scheduled report subscription enables you to automatically email a report to application users on a periodic basis. For example, you can create a report subscription which automatically emails a report of all open tasks to your project team before the weekly status meeting.

Notifications:
QuickBase can automatically send out e-mails to notify one or all of your users – or notify you – when information in a record has changed or when a record has been added or deleted.  For example,  you might want help delegating work, in which case QuickBase can notify a user when a new project or task is assigned to him.

Notifications also let you apply very specific conditions to trigger the email and also target only appropriate individuals for receipt. For example, imagine your QuickBase application tracks deliveries for your company. When a delivery’s status changes to “Ready for shipment” you want QuickBase to automatically send a notification to the person listed in the “Driver” field. No problem. QuickBase can automate communication based on what data a record contains.

Reminders:
Don’t miss another deadline. QuickBase can let you know that a due date is coming up. You can set up your QuickBase application to automatically send an email reminder to you or any user to warn that an important date is approaching.

For example, you could tell QuickBase to email a reminder to each user five days before their task is due. If you want, QuickBase could also send the reminder a certain number of days after a task was due, to jog a user’s memory about a still-unfulfilled (and now overdue) task.

Coming next week, tip #6 – Get personal.

It’s your turn to share.
Do you use QuickBase’s automatic email features?

What kinds of reports do your team members subscribe to? What was your reporting process like before QuickBase?