Does anyone know of any resources that outline how best to use Daylite for managing projects for a design agency?

Thanks for any info.

Hi Andre

What kind of resources are you after? We run Daylite to track projects by simply adding each project as it comes and linking all the people involved to it. You can also set up a specific 'Pipeline' to track the project's progress.

Hi,

I'm constantly tweaking how I use DL. Still think I have some way to go until using DL to it's fullest potential.

I reccommend spending a bit of time outlining your intended use of DL, since late-tweaking can be a bit bothersome.

For example, I have 2 extra-fields I don't need anymore, since I found out a better way to do it. These were "who asked for the job" and "what company". When I found out how to put persons, roles and organizations into reports these became redundant.

I have a feeling the extra field "Print quote" will be out as soon as I learn how to put forms into reports.

I'll be more helpful when I feel my tweaking days are coming to a full stop.

quote:

Originally posted by Thorri:
Hi,

I'm constantly tweaking how I use DL. Still think I have some way to go until using DL to it's fullest potential.

I reccommend spending a bit of time outlining your intended use of DL, since late-tweaking can be a bit bothersome.

For example, I have 2 extra-fields I don't need anymore, since I found out a better way to do it. These were "who asked for the job" and "what company". When I found out how to put persons, roles and organizations into reports these became redundant.

I have a feeling the extra field "Print quote" will be out as soon as I learn how to put forms into reports.
[Edit: I've meddled a bit, and it's very straight forward. Now, I've just to work the forms into my workflow ]

I'll be more helpful when I feel my tweaking days are coming to a full stop.

Hello...

I am currently trying (20 days left on trial) if DayLite & Billings is right for me as a freelance designer (1 user, no employees, just some subs and vendors whom will not have access to this). For managing small to large projects with Design (in house web site, logo, ads, stationary, etc) Printing (out sourced), copywriting (out sourced) photography (me or out sourced) Hosting & Domain Names (annual renewal) etc.

I have been "playing with it" but it is very overwhelming. I noticed the DIgital Photography "template" info AJ posted and was hoping that someone here, or even AJ could help me with to get started. I very much appreciate any help you can provide.

Here is the post I was referring to, something like that would be perfect!!!!
http://forums.marketcircle.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/3261001833/m/5401099473

Thank you!!!!!

Hello...

I am running out of time here. Anyone have an ideas, I really don't know where to start.

AJ...anyone...

Thank you...
Gette

Hi Gette

I would be happy to help you out here. But I have a couple of questions:

1) How do you acquire new business? What kinds of clients do you have?

2) How many projects do you tend to work on at once?

3) What is your project workflow? What different kinds of projects do you work on?

4) How often do you have to communicate with outsourced service providers? With your clients?

5) What other software do you use in your workflow?


Thx!

Adam...

Great. Thanks for the help. My trial is about to run out, DL and Billings looks pretty powerful. Though the more I look into it, the more I am un sure about the best way to set things up.

Small self-employed graphic designer. Possibly adding another designer in the near future. What I do is:
Web Site Design, Web Site Programing (sometimes sub-contracted out), Hosting, Domain Reg/Renewals, Graphic Design (logos, bcards, letterheads, brochures, ads, etc.), Illustration (sub-contracted out) Printing (print vendors online and local maybe 6 -8), signage design (and also sign vendor for application), photography (myself on-location or sub-contractored out).

To answer your questions:

1a - Most is all existing clients. And some is referrals from existing. I do not have the need to do cold calling, or run ads, etc.
1b - Not sure what you mean by kinds. But most are small-medium businesses with 1-3 or so main contacts that typically order everything that has to do w/ design/printing/marketing from me on an onging basis.

2 - Geez. Too many! Honestly I can have anywhere from 1 - 10 or more at once at various stages. Basically I think I need projects/tasks broken down to sub-projects/tasks. Most of which each have a specific order. And I usually will complete 1 or 2 subprojects/subtask for a few different projects/tasks on a given day.

Eg. Brochure Design Project/Task:
1 - Determine Clients Needs
2 - Aquire Clients Deliverables (photos/logos)
3 - Have Copywriter Subcontractor Interview and Creat First Draft
4 - Research Stockphotos (online web site(s)
5 - Photoshoot on location (just me, or me art directing a local photographer)
6 - Design first draft
7 - Send over first draft to client
8 - Get Pvarious Printing Quotes
9 - Send Client over printing quote
10 - Changes and second draft
11 - Third etc...
12 - Final Clinet approval
13 - Package for printer
14 - Pickup on certain date
15 - deliver to client
16 - Invoice

Now these will vary and I am nto sure if I want ot be more detailed (more steps) or less detailed (steps). There are basic ones for every brochure/businesscard/leterhead/ad, etc ; Determine, Design, Print, Deliver, Invoice. Yet some will need me to use sub-contractor Copywriter. Some will need stock photos, other a photoshoot, some even both. Some will have no revisions, others multiple. Same goes for web sites. Besides the copywriting and photos, some will be static and others will need various programing (either in-house or sub-contractor or both) which will then have database design, programming, testing, etc. Photoshoots would be Determine needs, address, contact info to access property, travel arragements and expenses, assistant if needed, actual shooting time, usually 1/2 or full day, then various hours of photo editing, then it usually goes back to that part of the project (Brochure or web site design, etc).

3 - I think I gave you a decent ideas above

4 - Daily. Usually via e-mail as much as possible. Clients usually e-mail or call me with their initial wants/needs and then most of the rest of the way is 75% e-mail send proofs and estimates back and forth. Vendors is usually online research, phone or e-mail mainly to get prices and then upload, send/deliver job to printer or whatever, then to pick it up and give them payment (actually usually upfront or 50/50).

5 - As far as things similar or related to DL and Billings nothing really. Latest Mac OSX Mail. And currently use QuickBooks Pro on PC for Estimates/Invoices (I don't use the Tax features) but I am trying to use Billings (I need to Estimate and Invoice via Time/Hours (Design, Programming, COnsultation, etc) Deliverables (Printing, Photos, Signs, T-Shirts, etc) Shipping Charges, Sales Tax on some items, etc.

As far as software in general pretty much the typical Graphic Designer stuff; Full Adobe Suite, Dreamweaver, I have Mac Office, etc.

Some other info. I started looking in GTD stuff. I am not far along in it at all so not sure what elements I may want to adopt/use. I am just overwhelmed and need to be mush more efficient and organized, but also do not have then time to spend to setup each project/task as each one comes in. Needs to me simple, yet extremely effective, etc. Whatever works.

I need to be able to use a Timer on my projects/tasks, and/or sub-projects/sub-tasks. And they do have to "pause" if I get a phone call or a client walks in. I have read this was an issue and saw that someone made an addon that helps in this area (I believe it creats a bunch of sub-tasks when you hit stop/start and the adds them up, when task is complete.

As far as estimating or invoicing it's usually not borken down too much. Basically have Design = $1000, Printing = $3000, Photoshoot or Stockphotos = $300, Shipping or Delivery = $100, Sales Tax (on certian items if needed) etc.

I need to be able to set deadlines for projects/tasks and/or sub-spojects/sub-tasks. Basically I need to coem in the office and see all of the things I need to do today, and all the things that are late that I didn't finish yesterday or the day before, etc. And basically when jobs come in it is first come first serve, but hard for me to pin-point and block out exact time frames so I have to guess and adjust along the way, but be good to alos view when that project was given to me and/or started as well.

I'd also like to keep track of in-house projects/tasks (clean office, redesign and order Business Cards, Update Web Site, etc)
And my personal appts. and home projects/tasks (redo the siding on my house = pick colors, get estimates, get approval from town, hire/schedule contracters, pay them, finish job, etc).

I'd also like to link to the various files on my local mac and/or network file server (proofs, final print packaged files, etc., estimates, invoices (Billings).

Sorry for such a long reply. I wanted to give you as much info as possible. PLEASE feel free to ask me specific questions to help you help me (and anyone else out there). We may want to do this via Private Messages as to not litter this forum w/ unimportant stuff at this point. Other viewers/users will be interested in the final conclusion.

Thank you very, very much Adam!!!!
Gette

Thanks for all the info, it is extremely helpful

So, let's start with the basics.

TOP-DOWN ARRANGEMENT
Daylite essentially works top-down from projects and opportunities. While other software may focus on contact management or calendaring or note-taking, all of these things are considered "part of" doing business with Daylite. And doing business means selling or acquiring clients (opportunities) and actually getting work done (projects).

Thus the most important thing to figure out first is how the business workflow you have can fit in with opportunities and projects, and everything else flows from that. I didn't quite get a sense for how you acquire new business (I understand not through cold calling, but I'm curious if you have to compete at all? If so, opportunities would be good for that...) so let's focus on projects.

PROJECTS
Projects would form the basis of your workflow in Daylite, both professional (say, brochure design projects) and personal (redo siding on house). What will happen is, any contacts and organizations, email and other correspondence, appointments, tasks, and notes, will be linked to the project. In fact, the best practice is extensive and regular linking of things to one another, if they are related, so that their relevance will be increased and you'll have access to the right information at any time. For instance, if you have a task to do for Brochure XYZ, and the person you need to work with is John Doe and ACME, the task can be linked to all three--project, contact, and organization--so that when you are looking at the task, you'll have instant access to John Doe and ACME's information, plus the project details. Or when you look at what's coming up in the project, you'll see that task. Or when you see the next activity that's coming up for either John Doe or ACME, you'll see your task.

PIPELINES
Pipelines represent the processes you follow to complete projects or win opportunities for new business, and help you keep track of your progress. Each distinct process should have its own pipeline, which identifies the milestones or stages that are part of the process.

For instance, you outlined a possible pipeline above. It was a bit long--pipelines generally should be shorter, if the major stages or milestones can be broken down (in your case, it seems like some of the items were a bit more like tasks that might be part of a general 'preproduction' stage, etc.)--but otherwise a good analysis of a project process. If you do three or four different kinds of projects, you should have three or four different project pipelines. Not all projects will require a pipeline, but using them is extremely useful: We have reports that help you see how many projects you have in each stage of a pipeline, and you can visually track where you are by looking at them, etc.

One extremely important use of the pipeline is to generate smart lists that show you, for example, projects in the INVOICE stage of a particular pipeline, so you can "check up" on those. Once you've got the pipeline set up, and the projects on the go, with those pipelines, you can use tools like reporting and smart lists to prevent things from falling through the cracks.

ROLES and RELATIONSHIPS
a.k.a. Linking people to...

So one of the big things you'll have to do is keep track of the people you work with or for, and how they fit into things. This is done by linking them to each other, to the organizations they work for (as in, three contacts who work at organization XYZ), and to the projects and opportunities they are part of.

When two contacts or two organizations are linked together, they are connected by a relationship. For example:

Jane Doe is the parent of Junior Doe / Junior Doe is the child of Jane Doe

Relationships are especially useful to track connections between people that help you understand your business. For instance, relationships that describe referrals, family connections, friendships, and professional links can be tracked in Daylite. Then, you can make smart lists and take advantage of reports that show who's connected to whom, and how. So these should be customized according to the kinds of relationships between people or between companies that matter to you.

More relevant, and more widely used, are roles. When contacts are linked to organizations, opportunities, or projects, they are connected by a role. Just as you would describe the kinds of work or function that someone has in a company or project, so does Daylite describe the same connections. For example:

"Jane Doe is the Chief Design Architect at ACME Design—that describes her job title and who she works for—but in reality, she plays specific roles that her job title doesn't convey:

- Management at ACME Design
- Project Coordinator in the Website Design project
- Decision Maker in a new business opportunity"

Roles help you keep track of the functions people and companies perform, from your business perspective. For instance, if you are a company who sells products, it's important to know who makes the final purchasing decision, but less important what their job title is. If you work with outside contractors and vendors on projects, it's important to know generally what roles they play in each individual project—one company might be an advisor to one project, but the service provider for another.

In the case of your business, with each company you would want to link the appropriate contacts, but before doing that, have created roles that make sense. In other words, if from your perspective one person is the "big cheese" who you need to deal with, that can be a role. That's in the organization... but on a per-project basis, you can specify project roles. Like, "Creative Director" or "Project Lead" or "Content Contributor" that can be played by any contact in Daylite. So you could drag an external contractor, or someone from the client company, or your own record, to link to the project, and choose the roles that make sense. So, at a glance, you can see who's involved and what they do. You can even link someone twice or more, each time specifying a different role, if someone is playing more than one role and you want to track that.

Customizing roles is key to getting the most out of Daylite. So you can think about these and customize them before you get going, and also add or change them as you go.

CLASSIFYING THINGS
a.k.a. categories, keywords, organization types/industries, etc.

A very key component of organizing with Daylite is classifying things--contacts, projects, tasks, etc. This is done primarily with features like categories and keywords, but also with other methods in specific cases.

CATEGORIES
Categories classify and divide things in your database, from appointments to projects to contacts. They generally describe what "kind" an item is—for contacts, categories like Customer, Competitor, Family, Friend, and Employee are common. With properly customized categories, you can take advantage of many of Daylite's powerful Smart List and Report features.

Generally, categories are mutually exclusive: For example, each contact can only have one category. Generally you only need a handful of categories, and they shouldn't overlap. To determine which categories you need, ask questions like "What kinds of people do I know?" and "What kinds of projects do I have?" and figure out the biggest "groups" in which you would put those items.

Categories describe what kind of contacts you know, what kinds of projects you do, the kinds of tasks you have to do—for instance, Personal and Work might be useful categories for tasks—and appointments—and other similar information. They generally don't describe jobs, industries, or geographical information, and shouldn't be used to classify things if you find that you need to use more than one at a time. In that case, keywords are a better way of describing things in more detail.

In your case, categories for contacts might be "Contractor," "Client," perhaps even "Competitor" and maybe "Vendor" or "Supplier," etc. Task categories might include GTD ideas like context, or maybe simpler things that help you identify what general kind of work the task involves--"Customer Service," "Design," "Research," etc. Project categories might be "Personal," "Web," "Print," etc. and you could use keywords to further narrow or define projects.

KEYWORDS
Keywords allow detailed classification of contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects. They can be used to tag these objects with descriptive words or phrases that will help you find the right data more easily. They work in tandem to take advantage of many of Daylite's powerful Smart List and Report features.

Unlike categories, keywords are not mutually exclusive, and you may have a long list of keywords that apply to objects. For instance, they may be used to describe things like skills, interests, or characteristics of contacts, while the category describes which kind of people they are. Take the following example:

"Jane Doe is a contact with the category of Customer, who has the following keywords: Expert, Loyal, Musician, Product A User, Product B User, Volleyball Fan."

In the example, the keywords enhance or provide further detail of what kind of Customer Jane Doe is.

In your case, it would probably be most useful to use keywords with projects, to help identify the specifics of the project. Indeed, they can be used to capture some of the basic "specs"--things that are general but may vary from project to project. For instance, imagine that we had a "Print" category for projects. You could then set up project keywords like "Poster, "Brochure," "Short Run," "Full Colour," etc. to keep good tabs on the project. Again, this is incredibly useful for reporting and also staying on top of things.

ORGANIZATION TYPE ETC.
As you put organizations in your database, you can classify them with additional fields like Type and Industry. This may not be too useful for you, but like the other fields, they are completely customizable and might help you track what kinds of clients you generally have and thus who you might want to target in the future, or perhaps avoid, etc.

ACTIVITIES
a.k.a. Tasks, Appointments, Notes, Email, and other correspondence

This is something we consider at the "bottom" of the top-down hierarchy. Project and opps first, then people and companies, then the little things you do on a day to day basis. Doesn't mean that we don't have flexible and powerful features, it just means that we want to 'approach' these -through- projects and then contacts, etc. Which is why we want to set up good pipelines, categories and keywords, roles and relationships etc., before we get into the nitty gritty of managing tasks and appointments, etc.

Really, you will use these tools all the time. We don't have the concept of sub-projects, but we do have tasks and sub-tasks, so they will help you 'get work done.' Naturally, we have meetings and appointments, we have notes and email, and we have letter merges and so on, but the focus tends to be on notes and email as far as correspondence goes.

Let's deal with correspondence and notes actually, since those are fairly common. The bottom line with these is, link link link to the appropriate contacts, projects, and so on.

NOTES
These are handy documents in which you can style text, paste graphics, etc. and they are a good place to keep random thoughts together, or procedures, etc. Good categories are helpful for these, but most importantly, just be sure that they are linked to the right people and projects, etc.

EMAILS (DMI)
With Daylite Mail Integration (DMI), emails that you send or receive can automatically be linked to the right contacts, organizations, projects, and opportunities. That means, when you look at the contact, the org, or the project, you get a complete history of email. You can choose to exclude items from the linking if it doesn't make sense in a particular case. That way, you might have a lot more emails linked to a contact than you do to a project, but in both cases you see the relevant ones. Emails are considered a special kind of note.

Until you've used this, you have not seen how amazingly useful it is. For instance, when you send an invoice by email with Billings, it automatically can be linked to the contact, org, and project in Daylite, so you have, within Daylite, full access to what you said and the PDF that was sent, immediately, whether you are looking at your daily projects, or checking up on the client record, or just going through your past emails, etc. REALLY handy.

APPOINTMENTS
These are just like their counterparts in other applications. Drag them out, categorize them, add an agenda, etc. And note that they can be linked to the projects and people and orgs, too. Again, so you always have quick access to the right information, and a complete history of meetings etc. And in fact, if you charge for time, you can block it out on your Daylite calendar, link it to the project, and even send them to Billings for invoicing. They can even be combined in Billings into one giant line item, whatever works for you.

TASKS and SUBTASKS
Basically tasks work as I think you'd expect them to. There are different types, and you link them like anything else. What's interesting is that you can make subtasks, so that you can group things that should be kept together. Complex projects might have several sets of tasks with subtasks.

ACTIVITY SETS
The real power of tasks for you might actually come with Activity Sets. An activity set is a template of tasks and appointments which tend to be repeated frequently and in the same way—court proceedings, house closings, film shoots, and step-by-step sales tasks, for instance. It consists of activities that are completed in a specific order, and either starts or ends on a specific date. Whhen you customize an activity set, you specify relative dates; when you actually use an activity set in your work, the relative dates are replaced with real dates.

With activity sets, attorneys can plan activities in the run-up to a trial date, creative professionals can better plan their storyboards and location shoots, and other similar results can be obtained by defining sets of commonly repeated tasks and appointments.

These are separate from pipelines, which define general project stages and milestones, but you might have one activity set per stage or something (that's fairly common). Think of things you do often and in a similar way, but that might be done for different people or projects. Those are good candidates for activity sets. For instance, if invoicing is always a five step process, I can make an "Invoicing" activity set that applies to projects or organizations or whatever the case may be. In fact, if you figure out a bunch of activity sets that are generally useful for all projects, you can tell Daylite to automatically set them up when you make new projects, and it'll do the due dates in relative terms, etc.

Great stuff Adam.

This stuff ought to be a ‘read me’ file packaged with the application, if it isn’t already.

I think a lot of conceptual questions that get asked here would be answered by these posts being part of the app, as well as giving a potential new user an idea of Daylite’s strengths and feature-set.