Project management headache!

[shifty_uk]

Hi guys, not sure which section this should be in. I'm hoping to pick your brains as a lot of you will work in technology, IT, software, services, I thought I'd pose the question to the community how do you or your company manage your workflow?

I've grown my company now to over 10 members of staff with 30+ clients and reached a stage where I'm struggling with internal project management.

We use 2 separate paid for web services, one project management tool and one ticketing system for logging support.

Right now all support requests come through the ticketing system as they should however, where the issue lies is we have a number of larger clients who we do ongoing work for across all disciplines. Each of these clients have different departments, franchises etc who all have team members. These team members are emailing my team members directly for task requests of varying urgencies. So, for example one client has 5 departments with 2 points of contact each, each of these then requires a mixture of support, feature request, creative, marketing, etc etc so my talented team have became glorified receptionists answering emails all day!

If we switch to solely a ticketing system then I can't manage the workload for the whole team! I can't say, this programmer should be working on this project, this feature request etc on a particular day and can't prioritise.

I'm losing the will to live!

What are you guys using in your companies/businesses?

 

[shifty_uk]

sort of similar situation where i work - our parent company are rolling out new intercompany software, previously if we came across any bugs/problems etc we would just send a skype message or email to the relevant person. that has recently been stopped as the dev/IT team were getting pulled from pillar to post and often the wrong person was having email/skype requests land at their toes and it got to the point they didn't what to work on and when (multiple subsiduaries worldwide all skyping and emailing so understandable that it became unmanageable)

was all moved over to jira, we raise a ticket and decide ourselves the priority (it requires a degree of honesty on the person raising the jira ticket that they aren't classing a 'nice to have feature' as urgent) then someone at the other end assigns the ticket to the correct person and depending on the level of urgency indicates how quickly it is dealt with. it's only once the ticket is raised and assigned that communication between the person that raised the ticket and the assignee begins (initaited by the assignee only if further coms are needed)

no idea if that would work for you but it has made a world of difference here. issues get fixed quicker and from chatting with the dev/IT at our HQ they are a shedload less stressed and seem to be able to respond quicker, generally.

Sounds familiar, I presume this is all internal? I've had a look at Jira and for the size of our business and the way we manage things, on a client basis rather than strictly project basis, it seems a bit too much. We are currently using Wrike and Zendesk. Even Wrike is a bit too much for what we need on that side of things.

Hire a proper project manager to deal with this for you

I thought I had one

I think that if you've allocated a member of staff to work with a particular customer on a current project then it's fine for them to communicate directly about that project.

But anything else should be a ticket. Tickets are not just for traditional support they are for any request for service that doesn't relate to a current open project.

So you'd have your clients coming directly to named members of staff in relation to authorised/funded current projects, if the (internal) staff need help to prioritise this work then you may need someone on a project management role.

Meanwhile all new / unrelated / independent service requests are raised as tickets and prioritised and dealt with accordingly. It's up to you whether you assign priority internally or allow the customer to do it, but this would be documented in your SLAs and you'd need to do something to dissuade every service request from being flagged as critical/urgent.

The hardest thing about this is getting your front line staff to say "No I'm sorry, I'm assigned to something else, you'll need to open a ticket". We all know how easy it is to drop a quick mail asking for a favour here and there when you've got a named contact but this under the radar stuff can become a real drain on resources.

Edit: Jira, Trello, Confluence are the better tools I've used if you want to compare them to what you've currently got.

Some do communicate directly but I don't like it, the team are more efficient away from emails. A single point of contact for clients is the right way in my mind. I agree with you, tickets should be more. Unfortunately that's just the way the business has grown, ticketing was done through support system and job requests came through director level then management level.

As above, we're running Wrike and Zen.

Time tracking is another mess I won't bore you with

It's good to hear everyones point of views though

 

[shifty_uk]

How are they directly emailing your team? Your role as a PM is to protect your team, clients shouldn't have direct access full stop.

My role is the company owner, not the PM. I have a PM who takes 80% of the requests but it's very disjointed at the moment because of the varying disciplines in the team hence trying to solve this issue before it gets any worse. My PM is also getting emails, phone calls, support tickets etc etc. I need everything in the one place with the ability to manage workloads off the back of it because my team need to look at what they have scheduled for the day/week.

I'm putting in place a help desk for all requests regardless of nature.

Thanks for the suggestions, I've looked at Jira a couple of times but never been sold. How does it link up to the likes of Zendesk and Teamwork Desk?

I'm thinking of moving my PM system away from Wrike and over to Asana with zapier linking Teamwork Desk to and from. It's the product sync/integration I require the most, I need these platforms to be communicating.