Project Management for Designers

The reason we built Allworkedup was simple – we were frustrated with the design process, inparticular a couple of elements of it:

• Managing client feedback
• Managing design versions
• Presenting designs quickly and consistently to clients

When we built the system initially it was hard coded – a page of designs with a simple navigation – but this became hard to manage so we saw the need to have an internal system that worked for us and for our clients. Allworkedup has grown out of our need to provide our clients with a consistent, easy to use interface for leaving feedback, managing design versions and bringing a project together.

There are other systems out there – but in our experience they don’t really achieve the aims of a designer or design agency effectively. We know that Allworkedup works, we have used it in one guise or another for many years and so we decided to release it to the design community at large.

The system is still growing, there are many functions that we want to add to enhance the experience, but we are happy that it will make the day to day life of any designer easier and will give your clients confidence in what they are looking at.

Go ahead and get started with a free account and feel free to leave feedback – we do actually listen!

Naturally, if you subscribe to Allworkedup and you are a design agency with multiple project managers and designers, you’ll want the facility to grant relevant permissions to the relevant users. This post takes you through this process and provides a quick reference point to those who want to set up their account in this way.

Firstly let’s deal with account managers/project managers. The users that need to add projects, manage projects and who will be some of the most active uses on the system. After all – it may turn out that as the subscriber you have little contact with the system if you have a team of project managers and designers working for you. So in the case of account managers and project managers we need to give them the ability to add projects on your account. Here’s how to do it:

1. Purchase a subscription
2. Log in to your new account and set up the first project
3. Add some members to this project (you might want to set up multiple projects and add the relevant project managers to each)
4. Go to your profile drop down (top right of screen) and select ‘Account Managers’
5. Select the users that you want to nominate as account managers from the list (users have to be members of your projects to show up in the list) and submit the form
6. Now you have nominated your account managers these users will be able to add projects (and manage those projects) from your account. They cannot see any subscription info or change the account settings, but they can to all intents and purposes manage the account as you would.
   Note: Account managers are not automatically introduced as members of all your projects – just the ones that they create or that they are members of. Unless account managers have added projects themselves their project permissions work in exactly the same way as normal. The benefit of nominating account managers is focused upon allowing them to add projects on your account.

Secondly you want to add in your team of creatives so that they can upload and manage their designs on the system.

1. Go to the relevant project (ie – a project which the designer you are adding is working on)
2. Add the designer as a member (remember to specify them as a Designer when creating their account)
3. This user is now in the system and can be added to any project
4. They will always assume ‘Designer’ status in each project they are added to by default – however this can of course be changed in the project permissions

We thought it might be useful to give you some pointers when starting out with your Allworkedup subscription so we’ve devised a number of  blog posts which will be published over a number of weeks to document some of the most important steps in using the system successfully. The first will be entitled ‘Setting up account managers’ and will be published tomorrow.