You have started a software business with a small team of 10. Let’s say you build custom software solutions for your foreign clients and always need to ensure timely deliveries. What would be your primary concern?
Definitely, you want to stay on track and organized. Or else timely delivery of product becomes difficult. One of the major problems that are faced by small software companies is the lack of organization in scheduling work and keeping track of project timelines. This also includes miscommunication.
Having a transparent lifecycle of product development is very critical for a smooth and successful operation of your business. This can be achieved through metrics, automated processes, automated reporting, and interactive dashboards. When this is done, engineers can spend less time reporting and doing other repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Instead, they can spend more time coding, developing, and testing the product.
So, how do you achieve such organized automation that will help your small business achieve productivity, accountability and transparency? From our own experience, we have come up with some crucial steps for your business:-
Task Assigning and Tracking
Software development is a demanding job with tight deadlines that are prone to system bottlenecks, repetition, and getting lost in the flow as a consequence. It all boils down to creating procedures and clearly identify who will be doing what within the company.
A competitive and good project manager helps to streamline your software project from its initial stages to testing and deploying stages.
- A to-do list is the backbone of your project management:-
- Within a project, you can create unlimited to-do lists to host your project tasks
- You can assign unlimited team members
- To-do lists can also be tagged with milestones for setting mini-goals and targets within each of your tasks
- Helpful other features, like Gantt Charts (show progress of tasks) and Kanban board (categorize tasks in drag and drop-style boards)
Collaborative Discussion & Announcement Board
Often it gets tough to catch the obstacles and difficulties that your engineers may be facing, especially when they are working in a robotic way. Sometimes they might not be able to identify themselves the problems in the processes that are delaying their work. The problem multiplies when you have both in-house and remote engineers collaborating with each other and depending on each other.
For this reason, communicating and building a relationship with your team workers is extremely important because it ensures that the initial requirements of the project, any issues, and the in-betweens are communicated.
With project manager features like Discussions and Announcements:
- You can discuss anything online with your co-workers
- Ask a question from the task page for clarification
- Whether you want to message a member privately or notify all team members with an announcement, you can do it all with just checking on or off a few boxes
- You and other members can also attach files or have an open discussion with other members
- Make announcements to the entire project team members and send daily digests
Recruitment and HR management
You also need something to hire new people and manage existing ones!
Strong HRMs will allow you to:
- Self check-in and check-out of a well-built attendance system that also generates reports of monthly attendance
- Easily create job vacancies on your dashboard and post recruitment on your website
- Create and take online exams onsite. So you don’t even have to spend a dime to take physical exams of your candidates. You can keep it all paperless!
- You can also track the workflow and change candidate status for each recruitment according to the hiring stage they are in
- With detailed employee profiles, you can create and manage designations, departments, performance reviews, attendance and files for each employee
Salary Disbursement & Expense Reporting
An automated system that smoothly and correctly pays your employees is another essential that will make handling your software team easier.
HRM Features like Payroll allow you to:
- Create dynamic weekly, bi-weekly or monthly pay calendars.
- You can set basic pay or salary including different fixed amount payments for your employees.
- Besides that, you can set up Tax and other relevant payment information to their profile.
File Management & Transferring
The more technologically advanced a company gets, the more dependent it becomes on technology also. And you would want to stay paperless to be hassle-free and organized!
Project manager features like files manager:
- See all of your project files at one place
- Upload files of any type here and restrict access to yourself or other admins
Performance Analytics
HR managers will also let you rate and review your employees with performance reports:-
- Save yourself from the hassle of paperwork and from having to keep a huge bundle of employee information under different files and documents.
- A good HR manager will let you keep it all in a single page
- Not just that- you can also create Performance Reports, set Goals and add Comments
Customer Prospecting & Relationship Management
Obviously, you are developing software for your clients. So you need agents that manage sales and customers. But with a small team of 10, you don’t really need solidly defined departments of people. What you need more is a handful of employees who can act both as customer agents and project managers. For this too you need metrics and automated processes so you are better able to serve your clients and prospects.
Both your engineers and support staff will need precise customer data in order to work efficiently and for the company to run smoothly. Engineers will need customer feedback and sales data to know what kind of products they should develop, how, and what is working for your clients and what is not.
A good CRM lets you track and follow your clients throughout the entire lifecycle, from lead generation to conversion and sales. It’s the most handy thing for your marketing fellows in the team. So what are the things your team can achieve with it? :-
- View customer status and activity logging and respond appropriately
- Prioritize responses based on customer status to be more efficient
- Schedule a meeting or a call with customers and representatives
- Make company profiles
- Group your customers their interests-wise
- Handle multiple deals with multiple customers together
You want a system that lets you serve your clients consistently every time, lets you stay customer-focused, keep the existing clients happy and also gain new leads. A good CRM platform lets you do this seamlessly – acquire new customers, enhance the profitability of existing ones and retain profitable customers, and gain a competitive advantage in the long term.
Cash Flow Management
Having a small team doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have any expenses to run your team. Unless you are completely working remotely, which is unlikely for a software development team that relies highly on collaboration and team work.
And when you have an office space, you will also have to bear the rent, the resources (like electricity, food and water), and physical assets of the company, such as laptops, stationary, and furniture. But you don’t want to waste much time managing these overhead costs. As you already have a small team of 10 members, there are not many people you can allocate to handle only office management, though it can be a difficult and daunting task.
Perhaps, as the primary manager or owner, you might have to handle it all on your own.
So how do you do it? Simply with a system that lets you handle your company finances and the cash flows in and out. Such a manager would allow you to:-
- prepare sales invoices and check reports at every stage
- keep detailed track of company’s expenses with associated accounts and vendor profiles
- receive payments and payment vouchers to pay vendors directly and make complicated transactions
How WP ERP is an All-In-One Solution for You
To get all these solutions, you don’t have to resort to different and expensive software solutions. You can get your HR, CR, and Accounting management all together under WP ERP, the pioneer ERP plugin for WordPress. WP ERP comes with all these features and more advanced ones. It also comes with WP Project Manager integration with all the essential features to let you execute a project successfully.
In fact, WP ERP has been built keeping in mind small and medium sized enterprises, and that is why it combines just the tools you need and use them with ease without expert knowledge. The user interface is so intuitive that you can be an amateur with ERPs and still be able to run your HRM, CRM, and Accounting modules effortlessly.
WP ERP brings to you the automation that is so much needed in a software developer team. It improves the internal operations cycle. Removing bottlenecks and accelerating delivery of products are two of the most important functions that you will be able to perform with WP ERP. WP ERP ensures to optimize processes so that it improves control over your teams, team collaboration, productivity, and quality of products, leading to better business outcomes.
