[omniinmo]

Originally Posted by lennie

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