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For an example illustration of what I mean, see this thread.
 
Ahh, says I. needles and whpalmer you are now unearthing the the cause of my frustrations and fears. I will review the provided illustration hoping it will enlighten me further.
 
I like what I see (in the other thread) but, I wonder if this is the direction I should take. The ultimate goal is to grow the business so that each department is run by different people, each having their group of projects and tasks. That being said, I am open to some criticism on the present setup of projects/departments. In summary:

Sales Team: handles new leads, meeting prospective clients, selling jobs, biding projects.

Service Teams: handles job scheduling, material purchases, recording when, where, how much, etc. (they get the job done).

Finance Team: handles AP/AR, works in concert with each department manager to set budgets, and each supervisor to correctly enter daily expenses, time and materials.

HR: they have their tasks already established outside of client related tasks.

Potentially, what I am seeing is that the sales person could stay with the project up to and including invoicing, or potentially the service manager could create the invoices and hand over collections to finance.

A bit picky but I am hoping to set up these systems both in the business and in OF so that they 1. match, and 2. are easily picked up by any person who joins us.
 
Ultimately it sounds like you'll need some sort of project app that can share a project with a team . You might check out the products at 37signals.com I think someone on the forum did some apple script that allows for tasks to be exported from those products to OF.

It shouldn't be hard to maanage the " team " view in basecamp etc and then have each unit manage their individual tasks in omni focus.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Don1 View Post
I like what I see (in the other thread) but, I wonder if this is the direction I should take. The ultimate goal is to grow the business so that each department is run by different people, each having their group of projects and tasks. That being said, I am open to some criticism on the present setup of projects/departments.
I think the bit you're missing here is the fact that if you have everything grouped on one place, you're defining the process and the interactions your departments will have in the future.

To remember: a Project is a collection of actionable items, and Context (in GTD) is a set of minimal requirements you need to have the actionable item done i.e. to Call someone you need your phone, thus the Phone Context; to search something on Google you need to be Online; to drop something in the Post Office you need to go there in the first place, and so on.

Hope this helps.
 
Don
You may want to sit down and detail you business process workflow. Define each step of your process and define responsibility; You can do this in omnigraffle for a graphic representation, omnioutliner if an outline approach is more your style, or even in word or other text program.
You can build templates for each department in OF and as your business grows assign the templates to new departments. To be sure a project is not dropped between departments create a task to notify the next department of the handoff (e.g. Service finishes job have a task to notify finance to initiate billing).
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by lennie View Post
Don
You may want to sit down and detail you business process workflow. Define each step of your process and define responsibility; You can do this in omnigraffle for a graphic representation, omnioutliner if an outline approach is more your style, or even in word or other text program.
You can build templates for each department in OF and as your business grows assign the templates to new departments. To be sure a project is not dropped between departments create a task to notify the next department of the handoff (e.g. Service finishes job have a task to notify finance to initiate billing).
This last suggestion seems right on point but it brings the notion of modifying your setup as your company grows. It's probably a very good idea to think of your work processes but you probably want to stay lean as you avoid conceptual overhead. Departments usually emerge naturally as needed to facilitate processing of larger volumes of information in larger organizations but they are by no means the only way of organizing processing of data. Departments are one way of thinking about how to get things done. For now you can set yourself up to what works to get rolling on a smaller setup (and it may not involve thinking about departmental segregation so much) so that you can cleanly accomplish all your tasks while keeping the company afloat. As the company grows, chunks of your work processes can be migrated over to different departments as/if applicable.

omniinmo
 
 


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