Just wrapped up your latest contract and swamped with potential clients? Do you want them, but not sure if you can take the extra load? We currently have 13 active projects and 18 open products. We’d love to share with you how we do project management.
First thing: we just use simple spreadsheets.
We’d love to share with you the 5 simple templates that help our teams every day.
Oursky Project / Team Index Template
Your index will be simple if everything else is well documented. The index is helps everyone find all of the company’s projects (active, and occasional updates), the PM and the team leaders. This means anyone from from the company can contact the right person and also learn more about what other people are doing. Also, it helps the company see if we are at capacity.
We use Quip to do transparent company documentation on everything from our salary calculator, to our project timelines and guidelines.
Developer Timeline Template
We’ve automated our dates for the spreadsheet. This Google Spreadsheet is also a documentation for all the work we’ve done for the past 2 years. We just keep adding. You can see how different team members have different weekly schedule breakdowns. Some focus exclusively on one project while others contribute to multiple projects.
This template serves two purposes:
- shows the entire team everyone’s workload
- helps project managers give accurate estimations for clients
Some design tools we use include:
- Sketch
- Pixate
- Adobe Illustrator
- Invision
- Good old pen and paper.
This daily breakdown also helps you provide clients with quotes. You can also check out our transparent Web Design process and tools.
Spreadsheets just make great trackers. For simple and semi-frequent status updates they are an easy way for everyone to see if something has been missed.
Development Automation tools we use include:
- Travis
- Hockey-App
- lint
- Cyclomatic complexity (whatever works for you)
- Chima deploy
- getsentry
This standup template is for transparency so that the entire company can see when various project meetings are. Even if you don’t need this template because your team is quite small, we strongly advise that your company has a standup meeting to recap on learnings, bottlenecks, and that day’s task list.
Oursky is a Hong Kong-based development company that has developed award-winning web and mobile apps for 7 years. We’re inspired by companies like Buffer that champion transparency, so we’re also sharing our best practices, tools and tips too! Our latest project is an open-source BaaS product called Skygear. Take a swing for free!
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