Written by iValue, a loyal customer from Belgium
Jacob is my name and I am a productivity geek. I love technology and apps. As a project manager, we have used many tools available. ActiveCollab has gotten through all the challenges and tests I have thrown at it. We are a digital agency. Our core business is built around web development and online marketing campaigns. These processes are well supported by ActiveCollab. We can use it for all projects, both internal and external, because of its flexibility. Importantly, all parties are on board: suppliers, clients, employees. In his recommendation, Ryan Masuga discusses some of the most important features of AC. Structure, commenting, and email are my three favorite features. ActiveCollab’s structure is “Project > Milestone> Task > Subtask”. This structure has many benefits. This structure is flexible and can be used by users. We assign projects to each domain or website that we work on. Milestones are groups that include services such as web design, development, inbound marketing and advertising, social media marketing and so on. For every aspect of the job, tasks and subtasks are created. Tasks are the overall actions while sub-tasks support the task. We have found that structuring websites and campaigns with over 100 tasks works well for us. AC allows you to comment on everything, milestones, tasks, files and discussions. I haven’t seen any other platform that supports this philosophy as well. Collab is a result of this. After testing a few other tools, we noticed it’s probably ‘commenting’ that really fires our team collaboration.Everyone is up-to-date on all projects. They know as much information as they need. Our business developer and account managers especially love the fact that they are always up to date on all projects. They assign tasks to specialists for questions, research, and so on. Specialists re-assign completed tasks to the originator based on our flow. There is no room for error. Everything gets done. I can keep track of multiple projects with the emails. Google Apps for Business is my preferred choice, thanks to the powerful Gmail UI. ActiveCollab emails are well-structured. This allows me to automatically filter AC email from my inbox into designated folders. This allows me to dive in quickly. Project managers and other responsible roles can create reports to track time, expense, and activity. The permissions and roles can be adjusted at the project level, so it’s easy to see who is responsible for what. AC has too many benefits to mention here. AC has “sales” as well. This is why I love it so much. They keep track of the progress of leads and sales through the funnel. One project “sales” was created. Milestones are stages in the sales pipeline. Tasks can be either leads or prospects. Subtasks are actions that service these prospects. We constantly keep an eye on the funnel, which shows a number leads at each stage. Comments are a record of all communications. We move the task (which is the lead), to its own project when sales are won. The history of that task is also kept. This is a great example of how flexible AC can work.
