Hiveminder For Consultants
I was chatting with a friend a few days ago about task management. He has a small consulting shop and uses a simple and effective method for keeping on top of his activities and billable hourse: lists of tasks get written into a small notebook. As they get done, he crosses them out and marks down the date and time spent.
The system works quite well, but he ends making a lot of manual copies of information - often typing or writing things out multiple times.
I showed him Hiveminder and got to thinking about how consultants might be most effective with the tool. The following list isn't ready for consumption by Hiveminder novices - you'll need to at least set up and account and play around with the system for a day or two before these tips really make sense. If you don't have an account, drop by the Hiveminder site to get one.
If you have a bit of Hiveminder experience, read on.
- Put each client into their own group. This allows you to easily involve the client in task management and makes it much easier to keep track of each client separately.
- Give your clients a project-specific Hiveminder email to send tasks requests to. This won't work with all clients, but others will like it (or being given access to their group.) A side benefit of this is that both parties know precisely when something outside of project scope was requested, as well as who requested it.
- Tag your tasks with a project name. Projects, combined with groups, allow you focus on a narrow set of tasks.
- Update frequently. Each time that you update a task, Hiveminder puts an entry into the task history. This makes it very easy to look back over a project and see any sticking points or areas to improve in the future.
- Use the Hiveminder AIM interface to keep a list of the tasks you need to be working on within easy reach. Use the search and filter commands to focus on just what you want to see. If you use review to work through a list of tasks sequentially, it will tell you how much time you spent in the review when you end the review.
- When doing project-scale maintenance or end-of-milestone cleanup, download a braindump so that you can work more quickly.
That's all folks. Perhaps this would be a good topic for the Hiveminder wiki?
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Posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 2:15
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