4 Ways to Automate Project Management

I've seen quite a few of my clients use process and automation to remove project management labor. This might mean either removing full time positions that were previously just project management, or reducing the amount of time an existing team member is spending on project management by setting up automations and different things that just make life easier. I've seen many of my clients use the same strategies over and over again to get these results, so I figured I'd just share some of them here so you can find some more ways to automate your project management. Just keep in mind that each of the strategies we're going through, which are for today, are not intended to dehumanize your process. In fact, everything we're talking about today, all this automation and process stuff, is intended to humanize your process by allowing your human to do things only a human can do and leaving an automation or robot to do things that are better served by a robot. If you are or know of a project manager who just spends their entire day reminding other people about due dates and changing due dates, and reminding people about due dates and changing due dates, you need to send them this video. Yeah. Thank me later. Okay, to vote long today, today you're just going to need three ingredients. Number one, a free work management software. I'm going to be using SmartSuite today because it makes all of these use cases very easy to set up and it's free, but feel free to use whichever tool you want to use. Number two, we're going to need some kind of automation tool to basically supercharge our work management tool. This one can also be free and for today I'm going to be using Zapier, but feel free to use whichever one you prefer. Last but not least, our third ingredient is our most important and that is a positive attitude because we're going to be learning some new skills together today. And I know as adults learning things can feel scary and like we're not good enough and then it's too, you know, impossible to go through. It's not everything I'm showing you today can be done in $0 and by following the steps in this video. If you don't have go to ingredients that satisfy these requirements, you can find links to all of them below, except for the Optimism piece which you will need to supply. Bring your own optimism byo. Oh yeah. For all of our examples today I'm going to be clicking around inside an agency marketing showcase, which is a solution template inside of SmartSuite. So if you're looking at this and you're thinking wow, this looks really cool. I want to have all my stuff this organized so I can start practicing some of this process magic. Just know that if you sign up for SmartSuite using the link in the description below, you can actually get this exact solution. All of the structures all pre made for you heading into your account, clicking right here and all you need to do is install the template called Agency Marketing Showcase and you can click along with me and see everything I'm also seeing in my own account. Really cool reason to sign up for SmartSuite who by the way is the sponsor of today's video. So thank you SmartSuite and let's dive into our first example of how we can automate some of that manual project management. Our first example is a simple one. Let's take the situation where we are in our slack or messaging or emailing or whatsapping our team and we realize that a client has a problem with one of their deliverables. They need some revisions. Normally in a marketing agency, for example, the project manager would have to look at all of the threads and emails and so on, identify the task and put it in the task management system assigned to the right person so it actually gets done. That copy and pasting is not a very human task and something that yes we can automate. Let's start there to fix this. What I want us to do is start using email from our work management software which is now supported in most tools out there. I'm going to go to work requests and and rather than manually trying to bridge the gap between email and my task tool, I'm going to bring them together by using the email from SmartSuite feature. This again is in most tools, but if your tool does not have an email feature, well here's your invitation. You're signed to maybe consider switching. Let's go back here and now we can go to the email tab and email our clients directly from SmartSuite and the response from that client shows up in SmartSuite as well. So we no longer need a project manager copying and pasting all when a client gets back to us with an approval and we're able to move more quickly because we're not waiting on that human being to be a copy and paste machine. That's not necessary. It's all automatic. For more on this particular feature, you can watch this video up above. But this is one great way to automate this email nightmare. Now this is the first way I would solve this. If you for some reason don't want to use this email tool, Maybe you don't have the option inside of your software. The second way to solve the same problem would be by creating some kind of forwarding system where you can turn an email into into a task very, very quickly. This second option is perfect if you happen to forget to use your built in email feature and you need to retroactively take an email and turn it into something you can find in your work management software again automatically. To do this, what we're going to do is create an automation now inside of SmartSuite. Anyone who's a SmartSuite user has a shortcut here. Because inside the Automations feature in SmartSuite you can actually have when an email is received as a trigger to a smartsuite automation. In other words, you can do all of the things I'm about to show you directly in SmartSuite, but let's pretend you don't use Google Gmail or you're not yet in SmartSuite. We'll fix that over time, don't worry. But let's just show you how you would do that if you didn't have a SmartSuite account. In those cases you would use a tool like zapier. I mentioned this one earlier on. This is an integration and automation tool. We're going to need the free plan of this and all we're going to do is log in or sign up with our affiliate link below. And once we're inside zapier, we can either spell out what we want to have happen or just click Create Zap and create it from scratch. I'm going to click Zap because I feel pretty confident I can figure this out. What I'm going to start off with is email. So in this case I'm going to say zap your email right here. Email, New inbound email. All this means is when an email is sent to this particular email address, do this magical thing. All right? Nothing crazy so far. Click Continue. Once you go beyond that, it's going to ask you to set an email address. My suggestion? Make something that makes sense to your brain, such as turn email into record. That kind of makes sense because it tells me exactly what's going to happen. Then I can click Continue and we're listening. What this means is Zapier now has this email address sitting and waiting. If you ever forward an email to this email address when your Zap is on, which we'll do in a second, it'll automatically do whatever your action is. And what is that action? Well, we already said it. It's the thing the project manager would otherwise be manually doing, which is creating a task. So, so let's do it for us. What we're going to do here is click SmartSuite, select it from here and if you're not using SmartSuite, you can use whatever your tool is as long as it connects with zapier, which almost everything does. Inside here we need to choose the event. What do we want to automate again? We already talked about this. We want a creation of a record which represents a task. Once we click this, we're going to need to click continue and tell Zapier what kind of record do we want? In the very next step, it's going to ask you to connect your SmartSuite account. If you need help on connecting this, we've shown this in another video up ahead. You can also just google the name of your software and Zapier and there's usually a step by step guide, but SmartSuite users video up above where we walk through that. Continuing. The next question is just where do you want this record created? Very simple. Just look through the dropdown and you'll see all of the stuff inside your account. And you just need to tell Zapier where do you want your new task to be created. In this case I'm going to choose my agency marketing area and I'm going to choose the app, the section of my account. Again, just choosing from the dropdown of the of work requests because I know if I'm forwarding to this area, it means it's a task, it's a work that we need to do. From here I can choose to fill in a bunch of different information. I might choose to always have the task assigned to me. I might choose to always have the status be not started. And I can also create things dynamically, which means pull information from the email and put it in the task itself. Bonus points if you mix and match. To make sure my data comes in properly, I'm going to email this fake email address, a test email so I can get everything set up properly. So to do this, I'm going to copy and paste my email from Zapier and say test task. This is an email that is a task and I'm going to just send the email out. Once I send that email, we should be able to test and see if it receives properly inside of Zapier. So let's go in here. We're going to click test trigger to see if it's actually working and getting emails freshing, refreshing and after about 30 seconds or so this popped in. It says, hey, we got a new email and information came in, which is awesome to see. So now all I need to do is switch over to the next step and map this information. Say, what in the email do I want in my record? In this case, I'm going to say email task. I'm just going to type it in because I want it to be the same every time. And I'm going to take the subject line of the email and put that as the task name. Scrolling down. I can fill in any other fields either by typing information or by mapping information, such as looking at who the person we sent to was and putting their information into SmartSuite. I can also pull in things like attachments, the body of the email, and so on, and map that in to the actual SmartSuite record. Continue. Now, I can conduct a quick test just to confirm, but what we should see is anytime I forward an email manually or automatically to my special Zapier email address, it'll create a new record in SmartSuite. With the fields that I've outlined here, I'm going to give this a descriptive name and just hit publish and we are ready to go. If I head into SmartSuite, I can see that my test task indeed showed up. And here is exactly what it looks like. Email test task. It pulled in all of my information from the email itself into the body. And these are two separate ways we can turn emails into tasks automagically. The second scenario I want to automate is what I'm going to call badgering hour. You know that routine task that project managers often have to just go and nudge people on their due dates because, you know, people don't do things by their due dates. As great as this routine can be for making sure a project actually happens, and then we treat our due dates seriously. Although there are more techniques up here that might be a little bit more useful, it's not exactly a task that screams human ingenuity. Maybe at some point, but in general, just reminding people about due dates, that's a job for software. By automating the actual badgering, we can then free up the human to help prevent things from getting overdue, or help do tasks that are getting overdue, or help distribute tasks that are getting overdue, rather than just spending all of their time copy and pasting reminder your task is late. Like, no, that's not a human task. Let's automate it this time because we're looking at a fairly simple use case. We can actually make this happen directly inside our work management software. Almost every tool out there has features like what I'm going to show you today. SmartSuites are some of the most powerful on the market. So if your tool doesn't have this, might be worth evaluating a switch. Or you can do a workaround using zapier to get a similar effect to what I'm about to go through. But SmartSuite users, I'll go through the step by step, just as a demo. For anyone else out there inside of SmartSuite though, what we want to do is go into our SmartSuite area, go to automations. In this case, we want to go to wherever we want to have things automated. In this case, what we want to do is say when a record matches a condition in our work requests area, which is where all of our tasks are. In this case we want to notify people when the due date is today to remind them, hey, make sure you get this done today. But we only want to do that if the status of the project is not equal to complete. Because if they've already done it, we don't need to worry about it. So we can do something like this and then trigger an action. Essentially our goal here is just to recreate whatever you're already doing manually. So if you normally just look at things that are due today and not complete, perfect. But if maybe you only worry about things that are due in the past, you want to change this to reflect whatever your normal process is, whatever it is, we want to then create an action that mirrors what the human would have done manually. In this case. Maybe you're in the habit of always emailing your team if something is close or approaching the deadline to just check in to see if they need any help. In that case, you might want to choose something like right here, say email whoever it's assigned to and say overdue task reminder. Then using the Magic plus button on the right side, we can pull information from SmartSuite. We could have overdue request reminder with the request title. Then we could have some kind of message. Whatever we would normally send somebody manually, we would just paste it in here with maybe a little P.S. saying this is an automatic message, but if you need any help, I am a real human here and happy to help you. You know, with love, your project manager, whatever it is here, you can do that right inside here. And once we have this email matching whatever we would send manually, maybe with a little bit of modification we can click Add automation. Once you turn it on, it's on. And anytime a due date becomes overdue or whatever your requirements are, this will trigger and send an email out to the relevant person. This ensures that they get notified, but you're not the one in charge necessarily of reminding them of every due date. For our next example here, I'm going to go through the unpleasant situation of someone screws up, they're using your work management system. They try to mark a task complete and the project manager is there to say no, you can't box this order until you put the tissue paper in. No, you can't send the proof until it's been peer reviewed. You know, whatever your process is, project managers are the police. They make sure that that process gets followed. Bless project managers everywhere because y' all are amazing at that. But project managers should not be the only people on the front line. In fact, bigger companies already do this by setting up things like enterprise resource planning tools that force people into a certain procedure. This has to be done before that has to be done before that has to be done. No variation. Small businesses, we're usually so flexible and small that that doesn't make sense for us. We need a little bit of flexibility but we don't need it to be the wild west. So instead we can use automations to help encourage people to do things in the correct order so that it's not just the project manager who's sitting there policing and trying to herd all the cats. You know, come to think of it, I'm really mixing metaphors here. Cowboys and herding cats. Let's move on and demonstrate how to automate this. What we're going to do is go into our tool of choice, go into the area we're looking to add some enforcement to go into the automations window, wherever that is. In this case in SmartSuite it's up at the solution level and we're going to click add automation. I know I'm a broken record by now, but if your tool does not have these automations available, you can work around that by using something like Zapier or upgrade to a tool that has those powers. In this case what we're going to do is have this automation trigger by a human activity. In this case when a record is updated. In this case we're looking at when the status field changes. There it is changes from anything. We don't care what it was before to complete and the approved by client is is equal to no. Okay, does that make sense? If someone tries to mark this complete but it's not approved by the client, that's going to Kick off our robot enforcer. And what does that enforcer going to do exactly? Well, it's up to us. It could alert us, it could yell at the person, it could pop confetti, it could do a lot of different things. But in this case, I'm going to have it update the record. So right here I'm going to go back in here and I'm going to say when a record is updated and it triggers this whole thing off, this is what shows up by default when you choose the update record part here. In this case, I'm going to update the field of status right here and I'm actually going to change it back to in process because I don't know what status it actually is, but it cannot be complete if the client has not approved it. So I'm changing it back. If I want to take it a step further, I could add a notification here where I either email the project manager or the person who did the action or the send a notification in SmartSuite, likely both saying, hey, this mistake happened. The robot automatically switched it back, just letting you know exactly as a human would do, but again, done automatically. To create this, you just want to observe the common situations where your human manager is stepping in and catching errors and take those exact situations and turn them into conditions just like this. For the beginning of an automation. Just like this, you might need to create two of these automations or ten of these automations. The more you create, the more you're automating. But you want to observe your own behaviors and the manual work you're doing before you start automating to make sure whatever you do is actually going to solve a real challenge in the business. And you're not just automating for the sake of automating. If you're not sure if you're ready to automate. By the way, there's a video up here you might want to check out. Now, before I share the most impactful way to automate your project management, which is taking things up yet one more notch. I think we have a quick message. If you're enjoying this free video and you like the fact that it's free and available for you when you want it, you should be thanking our sponsor of today's video, SmartSuite, who allowed us to not only play with this software for free, but they paid for this video, so you get it for free. Without them, this video wouldn't exist. So if you'd like to support them and support this channel at the same time, use the affiliate link Below to try out their software. It's a great way to give back to this channel and it doesn't cost you a dime while you're down there. You can also like and subscribe, which is also free, but just want to remind you of that before we move on, which I guess we're about time to do. Now for our last example, I want to do kind of the most painful one. Let's picture we are in a stand up a daily meeting with our company where we just go over what's going on. The common scrum questions you'll hear a stand up question would be something like what have you done? What are you doing? And is anything in your way? So often with new managers and just teams in general, most of the time is spent on the first question, what have you done? This is an enormous waste of time, not only for the project manager, but for every other person in the room. For example, let's say It's a feature 30 minute daily meeting with your company. 15 of those minutes are reporting on what you've already done. But there's four people in the meeting. That means it's 15 minutes times four equals 60 wasted minutes. Just repeating what you did yesterday. The reason I say it's wasted time and the worst possible use of a meeting is because you can get that same exact information instantaneously without the time it takes to talk by just using your work management software, essentially automating it for almost no work. So if you take nothing else out of this video, please stop spending your stand ups talking about what you have already done. Instead, just read it before the meeting and move on so your time together is truly spent together, not just talking to one another. With that, let me show you how to automate it. Whatever your work management software is, the one that you should have had in our ingredients list from earlier on, I want you to go to IT and find a list of all of your work. In this case in SmartSuite, I'm looking at work requests. I'm managing this marketing agency and so all of my tasks are in this work requests area. Now what I want you to do is go into your Views area. Almost every task management tool has a views area, except for maybe Trello. And even still, you guys got a board, I'll count that. And what I want you to do is find a view that either exists or you can create and name it Scrum View. All right? Or Daily Standup View, or Daily Meeting View, whatever you want to call it. Then I want you to favorite it or Add it to your bookmarks in your browser. I'm going to make mine a little bit pretty here by adding like my signature fields and some due dates and so on. And maybe I'll add a little spotlight that just highlights anything where the due date is today. Because why not? Once you have this view, if at all possible, I want you to filter this view to just look at things where status is complete, meaning the task is done and then I want you to sort it by the due date. Okay. If your tool doesn't allow you to do this, you can also just sort them by due dates. That's usually possible in all tools, but ideally we can do both here. Then if you want to be an overachiever, you can even group it by assignee and collapse them because it just looks really nice. If you have a bunch of people. In this case, I'm going to assign one of these to another person just so you can get a better visual. Here we go. Doesn't that look beautiful? Now once you have this set up inside your tool and you've favorited this view so you can easily get to it with very few clicks, or maybe you've even added it to your meeting agenda, you have solved the problem we just talked about by automating it. Now, when you start that meeting, here's how it's going to go. Welcome to the morning Scrum call. Looks like these are the most recent tasks completed. Oh, good job Layla. Good job Monica. Good job Susie. Great. Anyone have anything to add? No? Okay, moving on to the next item. Just like that, 45 minutes of rehashing every action you did in the last 24 hours or seven work days or whatever your interval of meetings are has been solved. You no longer have to remember what you did. You no longer have to type what you did, it's just there. Now, to do this, you do need to have that work management software. But considering this is free and it saves you 45 minutes every meeting or however long your Scrums normally take, it is a no brainer that if you are someone who wants to report on what your team has done, it is better to have the reporting done automatically than to just make people retype it every single day, every single week. The beautiful thing about this is because it's dynamic, meaning it's looking at whatever's complete, is that if other tasks become complete even in real time, even while you're on that call, if something becomes complete or all of a sudden it will show up, it's all happening in real time with no extra work or manual project management effort needed to be done in order to make that dynamic report. If you want to send this report to other people, you can share it with outside stakeholders or even take a screenshot if that's more your jam. And most importantly, you save those 45 minutes for every single meeting to actually spend time talking to one another, rather than just being robots who report on what you have done in the past. You don't need to do that. Let the tool do that for you. Now, I know this may seem like a particularly if you've never automated project management before, but in just about 30 minutes, we've set up four different automations that allow us to take things that used to take say two hours a week and have them happen automatically. If you compound that by automating more activities, the returns are really, really amazing. Especially when you consider these tools are free. The only time you would be paying for these if you want fancier features or you want more cool quantity. And if you are using so many automations that save you time, yeah, you probably want to pay for that because it's so worth it in all the time and headache you save. So what do you think? We went through four different strategies today. Four different ways you can automate project management. Hopefully what you're seeing by some of these examples is not only how you can take 40 hours of project management and shrink it down to maybe 20 hours, but also the difference in just these examples of a beginner project manager versus an experienced one. The beginner project manager would spend all of their time on the things that we are right now talking about automating. They would spend 40 hours a week reminding people about dates, reiterating where things are at, and doing all of these things that are really robot tasks simply because it's how they know to do them. And then this novice project manager is surprised when their manager is looking at them, thinking, what are you doing all day? Right? It's a sticky spot to be in. Meanwhile, the experienced project manager is looking at the very same system, the same projects, the same things that they do, and looking for opportunities to make that whole system of work operate more independently of them. They're observing ways that they could automate, they're finding ways that they can become less integral, while the novice project manager believes that the more they remind people, the more effective they are. The experienced project manager realizes that the stronger the system that they build, the less they're going to need to remind people and they're going to be the ones advocating for these systems like the ones you've seen here. Again, this is just four examples. There are so many more. If you'd like to see a part two to this video, just leave me a comment below. I'd be happy to make one, but otherwise be sure to also head down below and check out the description of this video where you can find the links to SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video, try out the agency marketing template I featured in this, and also start automating your own workflows, whether it's in Zapier or to make life even easier directly inside of SmartSuite. And you know what? Before we go, I'm going to leave you with one bonus tip. One bonus way to automate your workflow just because you guys stayed till the end. Awesome. The fifth way that you could go about automating your project management is to actually cut out the middleman when it comes to your clients. I see a lot of folks view project management as an internal interaction, but if you are serving customers of any kind of there's usually some kind of back and forth that happens with that customer. Maybe you're copying and pasting work requests, maybe you're answering the phone and typing things in. There is some kind of interaction with that customer that sometimes goes through a middleman before it reaches the team, right? Well, your fifth tip to automate that project management is to simply have your clients automate that information getting to your team on your behalf. A common way to do this would be to implement some some sort of client portal, some kind of form or ticketing system that your clients can submit information to if they are so inclined, and it goes right to your team for priority access. If you'd like to learn More about this fifth strategy for building a client portal inside a SmartSuite, with a little bit of help from a third party tool, check out the video here on the end where we can build a beautiful branded client portal. And until next time, enjoy the process.