One of the top questions I get asked is “how to you manage your projects?” It’s something that has been evolving as Biscardi Creative Media has grown. Heck in the beginning I didn’t even assign job numbers to the projects because it was just me, myself and I doing maybe 2 projects per month.
A few years ago we went with a custom database that lays onto Filemaker Pro from David Jahns whom I met via CreativeCow.net. This allows us to set job numbers and track artist hours per project. It has a few other features too, but these are the primary functions that we use. For the very first job number we created I purposely made the number 00001 because that means we can create 99,999 projects before we’d have to start over.
Two years ago we added Studio Suite from AlterMedia which is another custom database that sits on top of Filemaker Pro. This is a much more comprehensive tool that not only creates new jobs and tracks artist hours, but can also generate invoices and schedule rooms / artists. The scheduling part of it is very clunky and not very easy to adjust / modify so we don’t use it. It’s fairly epensive per seat so we have the artists continue to use David’s database to track the hours and then our Production manager brings that into Studio Suite.
A few months ago our new Director of Marketing found a product called Function Pointthat brings everything together in a nice, easy to use package that’s reasonably priced so we can have everyone using one tool. It brings together the entire company workflow from Marketing leads to completion of job. Best of all, it ties into Quickbooks Pro bringing invoicing and banking together as well. We’ll be launching this system in June and it definitely looks promising.
So there you have it, the short answer to “what we use for project management.”