Speaker 1: Hi everyone, this is Emmanuel. If you're like me and you own a solo consulting business where, you know, it's a very, very small business, just you as the owner and operator of that consulting business, it can be challenging to manage multiple projects. Of course you want multiple projects, that's a good problem to have, but as a consultant your customers are often paying you for your time and so it's really important that you manage that time properly. And of course that can be a challenge the more projects you have, and especially as those projects get bigger. And you definitely don't want your customer satisfaction to take a hit because of poor project management. So I've had to deal with this challenge over time early on with my consulting business. I didn't do such a great job. Now I feel like I have a good handle on how to manage multiple projects, and I just manage all my projects the same way. And so I will be talking about that in this video. And of course if you get some value from this video, please like and subscribe. Now before I begin telling you how I manage my projects, I want to start out by telling you a bit about my consulting business, so you can see whether or not what I'm telling you will fit well with your consulting business. So as I said, I have a solo consulting business. It's just me. I help clients use their data to answer their questions. So I will, you know, fit statistical models, do data analysis, and usually the thing that I'm giving clients is a report. It can be a short report or, you know, a report of over 100 pages with lots of tables, charts, that sort of thing. And I'm usually working on the project by myself. Occasionally the client will need some other work done, work that I am not an expert in, and so I may partner with someone else to work on that project. But it usually doesn't affect my project management, because I sort of work in a silo, more or less. I mean, with the client myself, in terms of the data-related work, by and large. And so project management, for me, doesn't usually need to loop in other people besides the client. Now in addition to reports, sometimes I'll create dashboards for customers, and or maybe write some software to do some analysis. But by and large, I'm working on reports, and I need feedback from the client, usually when I'm writing these reports. Now in terms of size, I usually have between five and eight customers at any given time that I'm managing projects for. And usually those projects are done between one month and three months, or I'm sorry, usually those projects are completed between one month and three months. There are some projects that I'll have that will extend a year, or maybe longer, if the project is like a large-scale evaluation or research project. But by and large, they tend to be shorter in that one to three month time span. Now when I first started out consulting, I didn't really have a consistent way to manage my projects. It was sort of a hodgepodge, and you may relate to this. I tracked a lot of tasks in Word documents that I would have in my clients' projects folders. And so I'd have a running document of like to-dos, and I, you know, would delete it or leave comments. Of course, sometimes the clients would shoot me emails requesting that I do certain things that I hadn't documented somewhere else, and I wouldn't necessarily pull that in. It might stay in email, or I might pull it into a Word document. I often left myself notes in Google Calendar and blocked off time to work on specific tasks. And, you know, by and large that was okay when I was starting out, and I didn't have very many clients. But as I started getting more clients, I started feeling this anxiety because I knew that it was going to be challenging to manage multiple projects the way I was doing it. And then I'll give you an example. If I were to ask myself a relatively simple question like which tasks do I need to complete this week across all of my various projects, that would have been hard to do with my previous project management model because I'd have to go into various Word documents, maybe go into emails to put that all together. And that's not a great way to manage projects at all. And so as I was getting anxious about this issue or this challenge, somebody introduced me to a project management tool named Asana. I had tried out another one called Basecamp, and that just didn't really stick. I'm not knocking Basecamp, maybe it was just me at the time. Once I got to use Asana, I liked it. And so I'll give you an overview of how I use Asana for my solo consulting business. And hopefully this is helpful to you if you're struggling with project management. And I'll just say right now, I'm not endorsing Asana. If you have other project management tools that you like, that's great. I don't want to get into a project management tool war. I don't care about that stuff. This is just something that has helped me. And if it helps you with this issue, great. And I also use the free version of Asana. And I have no affiliation with Asana other than I use the free version of the tool. So when you first start out using Asana, you get a landing page that looks like this. And you can create a new project. So you can create a new project here or create one here. And I just want to say a little something about naming projects. So the way I name a project is I try to be consistent throughout the entire project's lifecycle. So from the moment I write a proposal for a client, I give that project a name and that name is in the proposal. So you know, it'll be like proposal for, let's say there's a client who does an annual survey and it's like an annual stakeholder customer survey. So I'll just say annual customer survey. And usually I'll leave it like that. If you want to put the client's name in there, you know, that could be, that's definitely a possibility. So like client X annual customer survey. And of course, the actual project name from your proposal wouldn't have the client's name in there. And the only reason I'm pointing this out is because life becomes a lot easier when you use the same project name across multiple tools. So this is a video about project management tool. But there are also other tools that I'll use like a tool named Toggle that will keep track of the time I'm spending on projects. So it becomes really easy to invoice at the end of the month. And I'll do another video on how I use Toggle. But Toggle integrates with Asana. And so if I can use the same project names across these platforms, life gets a lot easier. I'm spending less time on this sort of mundane administrative stuff. And then I use another tool for creating proposals. And so I'll use the same project name in that tool, which of course, I can make talk to these other applications. I'm very big on trying to save as much time as possible doing this administrative stuff, while maximizing the time spent on work, client work that pays. And so, you know, I'll show you how I do it. I usually don't have the client's name, I'll have some custom project name that I will look at, and I'll know which project it is. And if anybody else looked at it, if a client looked at it, they would know that it's their project, and so forth. Now there are a few different ways to view the layout of the project. I just keep it as a list. That's what works for me. But of course, you can look at these other approaches, like the timeline. I know some people really like that. A board, you know, where like all these tasks are on the left, meaning you still have to do them, you move them over to the end progress, and then eventually over to the complete or you just kind of move them over to the right as they're done. And then of course, a calendar view. But I like lists. That just works for me. Create the project. And here, I can add tasks. So I'll, you know, write the first task's name. And here's this, what I was talking about with this integration of this tool called Toggle. It's really nice because once I've written out the tasks that I have to complete, I can just click on this button, and it'll produce a pop-up where I'll be able to hit start, and it'll adopt the name of the task. It'll allow me to associate it with the client in Toggle. And I can just come to this project management tool, Asana, every time I'm starting different tasks. And then it'll just be logged so that when I go to Toggle at the end of the month, I can export an Excel file, and I basically have my invoice for all my clients. Another thing that I'll do, you can just create broad stroke categories for my proposals, and then I'll do that also for my tasks. So usually, I always start out each project with phase one, which will be something like requirements gathering. So I don't know about you, but in my consulting business, I'll usually give clients a proposal. They want to get an idea of how much the project will cost. But at that point, when I give them the proposal, I've only talked to them, you know, for an hour, a couple of hours, over a couple of different times, and maybe an email or two. And it's really hard to come up with an accurate estimate. And then also for the customer to fully know what it is that they want even at that point, and for me to know exactly what they want. So I always make the first phase of any consulting project requirements gathering. This is the time where I'm going to really dig into what it is that they want me to do for them. And by the time I'm done with this first phase or task, I will completely know what they want, and they will know that I completely know what they want. And if there's any misunderstanding that, you know, they want me to do something that I don't do or, you know, anything that can come up, it's better to cut your losses at this phase where they've only paid for this amount of time, where you're getting on the same page, than to conclude a project and the client gets something at the end, and they're just like, oh, this is not what I was expecting. And then nobody's happy. I wouldn't be happy, and they're not happy. And so I would say that this has been one of the best things that I've ever done is adopt this first phase in every single project just to make crystal clear what I'm going to be doing for them and what they expect from me. And so this is the, you know, sort of high level, but within Asana, you can click on details and you can make subtasks. So maybe the first thing is like, you know, project kickoff meeting. I like to hold those. So, you know, once they've signed the contract, we have a project kickoff meeting and we get, you know, just high-level information. Who do I talk to about this? Who do I invoice? This is what you can expect as a client, that sort of thing. And maybe another thing here is, you know, meeting with database person. Meeting with, and you might, for your consulting business, maybe you have to have meetings with different stakeholders that'll help support your work. You know, the client has people that you need to talk to to gather relevant information, and you can add each of those as subtasks. You know, and I said that I always work on my own or pretty much always work on my own for projects. And for that reason, I don't really have to assign tasks to anybody. But if you happen to collaborate with people or even if I'm collaborating with somebody and I need them to jump in on this, then I can tag them here. So, you know, you can assign a subtask and you can invite people that are otherwise not part of this project in your Asana project here, and you can invite them. Now, you could do this for the client also, but in my experience, clients don't want to receive emails from, like, yet another platform, especially if it's their work email. So what I like to do when I'm asking clients for stuff is I'll send them an email and just summarize things. So for that, I don't use Asana. But when I'm working with somebody else and I'm collaborating with them and they're a consultant, I'll use Asana, and usually they're open to that idea. So, you know, I might have another thing, phase two, where I'm doing, like, data cleaning or something like that. And so I basically just create these categories. And usually in the proposals, I have, like, three, four phases for a project, high level, and that's the level at which I'm recording time also. In my experience, my clients don't want very detailed information about what I'm doing. Every single, you know, 15-minute block or whatever, it's sufficient for me to put them into buckets. And because I've written proposals in such a way where I've already articulated everything that needs to happen in phase one and in phase two, et cetera, they get what's happening in these phases. And so this is usually sufficient. But for more detailed information, so I can sort of check off my tasks, I can put some of these details in here. Some other features that I use, you know how I said earlier that sometimes clients will send emails to me and they'll sort of add a task? Now, of course, if clients are adding things after you've already negotiated what you're going to be doing, you'll have to deal with the change in the scope and, like, the monetary implications and all that stuff. But just from a sheer logistics of getting the request into something like Asana, Asana has this nice little feature where you can shoot an email, you can forward an email from your email into Asana. And the way you convert an email into a task in Asana is to go into this dropdown next to your project name, and then import, and then email. And you just use this email address that it gives you. So you copy that email, you take the email that you received from your client, and you just click forward, and you paste this into that address, or into the to address, and then you hit send. And that will pop it in here. And then you can change the task name. So, you know, this might say something like, you know, forward draft report ASAP, or something like that. And then when you click on it to get the details, you'll see the body of the email. But, of course, you can brush it up and make it user-friendly or whatever. But this is a pretty quick way of adding things to the project in your project management tool so that you don't have this fractured information spread out across different platforms and then risk missing something. And, you know, with each of these tasks, also, you can identify when it needs to be done. So if you need to conduct either this entire task by a particular date, you can select that. Or if you have individual subtasks that have their own dates, you can select that. And within those dates, you can also identify times, more specifically. Now, it's important to note that Asana, even the free version, has lots of features that I don't that I don't use. And I'm covering the ones that I use. So to the extent that you're consulting, your solo consulting business is similar to mine in the way that I described earlier on in this video, you might just end up using these features that I've mentioned and be fine. But I'd encourage you to go and look up some of the other features, go around, play around with it. It's free, or there's a free version. And, you know, you might find that you want to attach files and that sort of thing. I don't do that. I use Asana strictly for my project management and integration with Toggle for time tracking. But again, you know, in my project or in my Asana account for my business, I have several projects, several tasks, and it's really nice that I can just accommodate all of the things that I have to do and not worry about missing something. And so if you're struggling with project management, I encourage you to try Asana, the free version. There is a paid version or there are paid versions, and I don't know what additional features they have. I haven't even bothered to look because I don't use it beyond the features that I've described in this video. So again, I use Asana for my project management. I use Toggle for time tracking. I use the free version of Asana. And for the time tracking, I use Toggle. And I believe I pay $9 a month for that, which is a big return on investment because it makes invoicing much easier for the clients that I'm charging hourly on their projects. And I alluded to this earlier. While Asana is great for managing my own projects and doing that internally, I don't typically add my clients to it. I've tried that before with varying degrees of success. And it's hard because sometimes you need something from your client. And if you're relying on Asana to get that thing from your client by assigning them a task, that may or may not work depending on how well they respond to using some other third party platform and being assigned tasks and stuff, especially if they have some other internal tool where they manage projects or whatever. And so in my experience, it's just been easier to send an email. I usually send a weekly email to my clients, just a status update where I tell them where I've been, where the project has been, what I'm working on right now, and what I need from them. I also send a follow-up email after each of our meetings to summarize what we said because I like the paper trail and just making sure everybody is on the same page throughout because you never know. Projects sometimes stretch out for longer durations of time. Clients forget decisions that were made. And so it's just nice to have emails summarizing decisions after each meeting. And they respond to emails because it's their work email and that's how they communicate. And so that's, in my experience, it's much better to communicate with a client via email than to try to suck them into your project management tool or framework or workflow or whatever. So that's all for this video. If you run a solo consulting business and you find yourself struggling with project management, I encourage you to try a project management tool like Asana and hopefully that helps. Thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe.