The Top Floor Flat

Photo Credit – HeartHandmadeUK

Although many startups can be hectic, busy places, over time roles become more differentiated and things become more organised, something I found after a few years at Spoonfed. But now that I am back in a very small company (only four people) I have been thrown back into the truly hectic start-up pace and I have found that it’s very easy to lose track of some of the important things to keep track of day to day.

Fortunately there are many services out there to help companies keep themselves and key tasks organised. But which services do you use, and which things are most important to spend extra resources organising? Because, of course, it is time consuming to set up the systems that help you keep projects, people, stats, customers and admin work organised. Here are a few of the things that I think benefit the most from using third-party and additional organisation systems to help manage the day-to-day work.

Support Requests

As a small company, I didn’t necessarily think that managing support requests with a fully developed ticketing system or knowledge base would be necessary. But once we passed 20,000 users, it started to become apparent that the number of emails we received on a weekly basis asking for information about the product, asking how-to questions, or giving us ideas and feedback was growing every week. While we tried to take the time to answer these questions right away, sometimes questions that came in overnight, or during a particularly busy time would be left for a few hours and, would potentially get lost among the next wave of emails.

At this stage in the company every single question and piece of feedback is insanely helpful therefore it is incredibly important that we make sure we are responding to all of these emails, and why I set up a ticketing system to help manage these requests. By using a third party system we can see all of our previous requests in one place, make sure we answer all in-coming questions, review all topics popular amongst are users, track feedback and even have a knowledgebase to provide answers and guides users before they even have a question. While it was time-consuming to set this up, the benefit of being able to see all of these questions in one place and ensuring that we are not losing out on answering any questions from users is a definite bonus and something that was well worth the time.

Bug Fixes and Product Updates

One of the amazing things about the company that I work for is how quickly we release changes to our product. We are adding new features all the time and improving old ones constantly. Everyday new changes are being made to the website.

However we have so many ideas of features to add and things to change that sometimes we lose track of what’s been added from one release to the next. One of my tasks is to test the site between each release to make sure nothing has broken and make sure all of the new features are working correctly. This can be very difficult if I don’t actually know what has changed. That’s why we decided to use a third party system to help us manage the projects that were working on, the new features are adding, the bugs we are fixing and the stage of development it’s in.

This not only adds visibility so that everyone in the team keep track of what is being work done and how close it is to being finished, but it also means that we don’t forget about bugs that we want to fix. I can add information about bugs to our development tracking system and then I can watch as they move through our development, staging and release stages.

Ongoing Projects

While much of the work in our start up is about “now now now! what can we get out the door this week?” there are a number of things that need to sit on the back burner, or take a long time to develop fully. This could be a feature that we want to add some day the product, a partnership or a relatively low priority but important review of things like advertising creatives or email copy. With so much going on each day it’s very easy to lose track of these things. This is especially problematic with things like partnerships where if you don’t keep the conversation going with the other person, you wont actually make any progress on the project and you can pick it up at a later date.

I have found that using a very basic project management tool that allows me to see all of the different things I am working on has been very helpful and ensuring that things don’t fall off the radar. This is not an involved gant chart or very detailed list of every aspect of every project, but a consistent way to make a list of all of the things that I am working on, want to be working on, or I have finished working on.

What I’m Not Using Tools To Organise

These tools are meant to help us keep track of day-to-day activity and be more effective in running a start-up however there are some things that we don’t need to spend time worrying about organising.

HR – There are fantastic human resources organisational tools out there however in a company four people, being able to log into a centralised system to see when people have days off is probably unnecessary seen as we all have each other’s calendars and have a pretty good idea of each other schedules. Also, formalising things like feedback and reviews is again unnecessary because this is part of the constant day-to-day conversation that we have with each other sitting in the same office. Obviously having well-kept Staff records and information about employees is incredibly important but having a full system to manage all traditional HR activity is probably less so.

Content Review

At larger companies it is important that the brand message is very consistent and therefore things like blog content or Twitter messages need to be signed off by supervisor. In a small company however the brand message is still being developed and there’s an opportunity to experiment with different tones, voices and styles of writing. Although I have an intern who is doing a lot of our Twitter and blogging work, I don’t request that she have all the content signed off because I know how important it is that we experiment with these different styles, And how time-consuming it is to have every piece of content checked twice when what we really need to be doing is trying to get the word out about the company.

Instead of using a content management system with lots of authorisation rules, I have created a brand guidelines checklist that has information about how we want to be saying things, and what we want to be saying. The rest is left up to the writer. Of course we need to constantly be reviewing what is working and what is not in our content marketing strategy however checking every piece of work before it gets sent would be an unnecessary waste of time.

Organisational tools for companies are a fantastic way to help keep track of projects, users, statistics, admin, and much more. Some of them are very important in a small company while some of them can be a time-sink. These are the areas where, in my own work, I have found it most effective to take the time to set up, manage and use oranizational tools to help manage my work effectively, and have seen the benefit from doing so.