As our lives get busier, we require more software to help manage effectively. No longer is a pad and a pen going to get it done. Software makes keeping current with tasks and staying organized much easier than ever before.
Here are a few online tools (both offline and SAAS ones) to get you started.
Managing Expanding Task Lists
As the list of tasks grows daily, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up. Being able to create separate lists of tasks and assign different people to be responsible for their completion allows for a new level of organization and delegation.
Tools like ToDoist and Wunderlist are useful ones for those who need to add tasks to different lists and assign responsibilities for them. ToDoist is a bit more technical whereas Wunderlist sticks more to its traditional things to do roots. Remember the Milk is another option which has powerful custom lists created using its own natural language system to extract just the information needed and no more.
Connecting with Your Team
Asana is a SAAS with an online site and mobile apps that lets every member of the team keep track of the tasks that they’ve been assigned. For the managers, there is a useful dashboard to get an overview of all tasks that are either not started yet, currently in progress or already completed.
Conversations inside the app let both employees and contractors/freelancers communicate between the team to ask questions about their task and confirm important details. With both the team’s tasks and communications under one roof, it’s easier to keep track of what’s going on in the department or the business in real-time.
Training the Staff and Issuing a Certificate of Completion
Staff training is an important aspect of keeping the team up to speed with the latest developments in best practices, business procedures and anything specific to the industry. Training can be developed in-house or provided off-site.
When training is conducted in-house, use a certificate generator to produce a certificate of completion to make everything look official. It also gives the employees a sense of completion after finishing the course.
Shared Spreadsheets
Another way to deal with projects that are complicated is to use shared spreadsheets online. The spreadsheets are completely compatible with Microsoft Excel. Both Office Online and Google Docs are popular options to access a spreadsheet with multiple staff members able to see changes and make them in real-time.
Spreadsheets are useful for project management for SMEs because it allows complex data to be organized visually. Bringing them online lets different members of the team see what’s needed and contribute their knowledge to update the spreadsheet accordingly.
While task lists are certainly useful, spreadsheets are also helpful to small businesses with limited resources that need to share information economically.
It’s not just one software tool that small businesses find useful. Depending on the industry, and especially with cross-border business ventures, software tools should be increasingly used to stay organized and not forget an important registration or submission date for an application. There’s a lot of paperwork to handle with international transactions, so staying on top of things matters more than ever.