IDEAS Launches New Project Tracking Ticket System

Goal: Better work flow internally and for clients.

Solution: Tracking System…. Now in place.

As we approach the Holidays and business starts to get really crazy for everyone, we’ve been scrambling as well to get a system in place that offers some great support to our clients and our team internally. As I’m sure many of you know, if you get tons of email, that utilizing the inbox as a to-do list is pretty sloppy and cumbersome. Email is great, but its difficult to track if you get a few hundred a day.

So, we have a new ticket system that will track clients, projects, requests, approvals, etc. It’s really quite robust and pretty darn easy to use, too. It is designed to track a work request, then the quote, the approval of the quote, the phases of development (wireframes, comps, staging addresses, finals, etc) and the approvals of those phases. All located in one neat place. Any scope change requests can requested, quoted and approved or declined right in that same ticket flow. At the end of a project (or during as a project may require) we can invoice off of those approvals that are tracked and visible by everyone involved in the project. What that alleviates is a lot of hassle for projects that grow and grow after they are started, and then having some invoices that do not match the initial quote, obviously because there was project growth. Historically, we would all have to go back thru a few hundred emails and then find where the quotes and approvals happened and then use those to match up to invoices. Which was time-consuming for both my team and my clients.

I’ve been using this system for testing for a few weeks and am very happy with how it works. I’m looking forward to all our clients, both present and future adopting this system for a much better workflow for all of us. Turn around times should increase, efficiency should increase, and over all communication should be stellar from this point on.

Speaking of communication, this system also keeps all members of the team notified at the same time when a client posts information. For example, let’s say we are waiting on content. When the client uploads a word file with content on it, the whole team gets a notice that something has been amended to the ticket system. Right now, that content is typically emailed to me, and then I have to disperse it to the right people. As busy as I am, I can tend to bottleneck that distribution. That is no longer an issue as we will all have access to the files, all get notice that they are there, and it will have a historical tracking of what has been done.

And last but certainly not least, actually one of my favorite components to this….. the tickler. Ya gotta love a good tickle, right? So this system will send out reminders in intervals (usually of a few days) to those whose actions are required. So let’s say we are waiting on a few pieces of content, or server access information. Until that ticket is responded to, the client will get a reminder that we are waiting. Or If we’ve uploaded comps and are waiting on approval or edits, it will remind until that is done. Keeping us all on track, on budget and on time. And it does all this automatically with no need for a human to have to remember everything for everyone.

As an existing client, if we have any projects currently in progress, or in quote stage, you will be getting an email with log in credentials to access your ticket system. You will also be able to access it via a link that will be in the bottom left of our footer.

The login link will take you to here: http://www.ideasdesigninc.com/support/

If you forget your password, you can just have it sent over to you.

I would also suggest that you add “ideasdesigninc.com” as a safe sender in your email spam filter settings.

I’m also very interested in hearing any feedback you have on this new system. As with anything like this, it will be a work in progress and constantly growing as our needs change and as our clients needs change. If you have any good ideas, or suggestions or complaints about the system, we are very open to your feedback. I will have a feedback email link set up in there shortly but for the time being, you can email modus@ideasdesigninc.com with your thoughts.