First Time Speaking on Project Management

Organizing and managing tasks (todos) has been a passion of mine for a long time – I was already making lists in my early teens, I’ve always derived satisfaction from crossing things off lists, whether that be chores, groceries or a set of school / business tasks.

As part of my position at SatelliteWP, I’ve grown into a role where an important part of my workday is managing projects and client expectations. We routinely have more than 100 projects of various scopes and complexity open at the same time.

Over the years working with clients across different industries and company size, I’ve managed hundreds of projects. And to do this efficiently, I’ve tried many project managements tools and approaches.

Actually, as far back as I can remember, I’ve never really used a spreadsheet to manage my business projects. While I know Excel very well, pivot tables and VBA scripting to add some interactivity to spreadsheets, I always felt it lacked the ability to view data from different perspectives, be it timelines, resources or milestones.

It’s for this reason that I’ve been using Project Management software for so long and that as I joined SatelliteWP, one of my initial responsibility was to put in place a system that would allow us to manage our workload, provide each person with a view of their work, while letting management get an overview of all projects.

The software we use now, Teamwork Projects, fills in all of our requirements, and then some. It lets us work in waterfall approach and get Gantt charts, provides Kanban boards for the Agile method, offers some workload management capabilities and even provides us with Project Portfolio Management capabilities, something you need when managing dozens of projects at a time. But this choice is the culmination of years of using other smaller, less expensive software packages that served their purpose and

But back to the presentation I’ll be giving at WordCamp Ottawa, it’s not why we at SatelliteWP have settled on a specific piece of software, but it’s really about the fact that you NEED to choose an approach or a software that works for you… but you have to choose something! Not being organized is a recipe for disaster and stress.