Recently, almost every day there is some kind of new service for organizing teamwork. If you try to study them yourself, it will probably take years.



We have been engaged in the last six months by trying to optimize all our internal processes and to minimize the costs of management. It seems to me that we have achieved quite good results in this regard, it's time to tell the community about it.



Our team has several programmers, designers and only one manager who is responsible for controlling the processes.



Most studios are faced with the fact that the work turns into confusion, as soon as the team has to support 3-4 projects at the same time. Failure to meet deadlines, non-fulfillment of promises and the like. That is why customers are afraid to do any major IT-related projects. What provokes the view that the development is unrealistic to meet the deadlines and their obligations.

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Production - minimum bureaucracy, maximum attention

Organization of production in studios is a rather big problem that many are trying to solve. Someone is better, someone worse.



What is the problem?



The problem is finding the perfect balance between the amount of bureaucracy and control, as well as freedom in the collective. On the one hand, we can force all of our employees to write off working hours in any time tracking system, demand full accountability for each slave minute. time and get employees who are not focused on the result, and to write-off hours.



That is why we initially decided that we will not measure the amount of work a person has in hours, but we will evaluate the result.



How did we try to do this?



At first we tried to use Trello, but his capabilities quickly became lacking. Yes, Trello is a convenient and easy-to-understand tool, but as soon as 10 people appear on one project, including both our employees and interested parties on the part of the customer, real chaos begins on the board.



After a long search, we stopped at Teamwork. The reasons were as follows:

1) We can easily set the end date for any group of tasks, or the entire project as a whole.

2) The employee at any time knows what he needs to do and for what project

3) The manager sees which tasks are completed on time and which ones sag



We also like the ability to store various project documentation in the Teamwork project, as it supports storing document versions, comments, and the like.

Sales - collect all information

Sales - probably the second most important process in the studio, after production.



We use domestic amoCRM, because it is really simple and convenient. Well, also, because they themselves had a hand in the development of mobile applications for colleagues, so we know how everything works inside.



Any client who comes to us, no matter what channel: by phone, by Skype or writing to the post office - gets into the CRM system and gets its own profile, where we are already doing all the work with it. Why is it convenient for everyone? Because we always know what and when they promised to do, when to send an estimate, when a contract and so on.

Support

User support is a routine process that is no less important than the ones described earlier.



In this regard, we have everything simple, there is a zendesk, which is tied to our mail, facebook and twitter, as well as to the amoCRM account.



The ticket gets to the support service staff who already qualify it, ask leading questions and send it as a development task.

A little bit about the office

Many people think that an office is simply necessary for effective work, but in our case we were able to refuse it completely. This helps us to sufficiently reduce fixed costs, and thanks to an effective and almost fully automated team management system, we do not lose in productivity.



It is also a big plus that such a distributed system is that any member of our team can say at any time: “Guys, I wanted to warm my legs”, - take your laptop, pack your things and go to work in Thailand. Employees love freedom, but at the same time our clients do not suffer, because we initially built an effective system, both for joint and for remote work.

Summarizing

I would like to say that at this point in order to compete on the development market to order, it is necessary to think about optimizing all the internal and external processes of the company. The less money we spend on side processes, the more money we can spend on creating cool products, the salary of excellent developers and designers. After all, we provide a highly professional service, because it is the creation of products that is our goal, and not the bureaucracy, the costs of processes that are not really needed.