When designing for clients it is important that we use tools to make our process as quick and efficient as possible. This can include presenting the client with a ‘north star’ which is a video or slide deck which explains your idea and the concept behind it, normally a first impression of your idea for the client. Also we can create other resources such as a visual grammar, imaginary infomercials and minimal viable products.
When creating a product for a client it is important to break it down into smart milestones and goals, smart stands for - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. This ensures that the goals set are manageable and show your progress throughout the project.
Time wise we need to impose an order on it, ensuring that there is a prioritised list and we aren’t just ‘doing things’, we need to have a plan, track our time and keep checking in with ourselves to ensure jobs are getting done. It is important that we know how long we spend on projects, and not tracking our time can lose money. Questions we should be asking ourselves include how long each part of the project took, how long did it take for the entire project, this way we can note time and pricing, therefore being able to offer more accurate quotes.
Some tools that can keep us on track with our project are the emergent task planner to keep us focussed or compact calendar which is good to block out chunks of time both by David Seah or another tool is Kanban which is a system to manage and improve working within teams. Finally, a good tool to keep everyone in a team accountable for their productivity is a Daily Standup - what did you do yesterday? what are u planning today? allows teams to track goals, successes and losses easily.
These are all tools i can look to incorporate over the remainder of this year and future years.