At Method we are advocates of technology, and strong believers that our industry would greatly benefit from the modern systems and procedures already prevalent in other sectors. We use a number of tools to efficiently plan and manage our workflow, which allows us to remain nimble and responsive across multiple projects. In this article we share a few of our favourites, each of which benefits our operation in a different capacity.

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Spark

Email continues to be the predominant communication method for our industry, which can make for a chaotic inbox when managing multiple projects. Using an unconventional email client has completely changed the way we communicate both internally, and with clients and suppliers. Spark (developed by Readdle) is a beautifully designed email app that works seamlessly across our devices, and comes armed with some incredibly useful features. Our staples include collaborative tools such as the ability to co-draft emails and discuss threads without generating internal emails, heaps of UI customization options to mirror our workflow, and snooze and reminder functions that allow us to quickly triage during busy periods. Our overall aim is to eliminate internal emails and distracting inbox noise to focus attention on project progression and decision making.

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Slack

Slack is our preferred channel for discussing projects internally. We have experienced the pitfalls of overwhelming internal email traffic during busy periods, and made the decision early on to separate communication within our team to a dedicated platform. Slack is great for this as it encourages short, precise correspondence and swift actions. The ability to manage multiple teams and control visibility with a hierarchy of permissions reflects the way we resource our projects, and enables topics and decisions to be easily searched for and referenced. The prevalence of Slack means it plugs neatly into the rest of our productivity toolkit with some smart integrations to make sure progress is tracked and recorded.

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ClickUp

The effective assigning of tasks, targets and deadlines is crucial to our operation, and there is a plethora of solutions available to tackle the challenge. We previously shared our office with a friendly young developer working remotely on a new productivity tool for a Californian start-up called ClickUp. He showed us the platform and we were immediately sold. One year on, having recently raised a $100m Series B on a $1bn valuation, ClickUp is a force to be reckoned with, and the platform is improving at a rapid pace. At its core it is a project management tool for the scheduling and assigning of tasks, but the complex customisation options and recent expansions have brought a wider set of tools to the platform so that whole workflows can be completed inside the product. We're still catching up with the new features, and expect to utilise more as our company grows and the team expands.

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Brixx

We take the same pride in our administrative procedures and company housekeeping as we do in our client work. Business resilience and continual growth are key facets of this; we have always paid very close attention to our cashflow forecast. Brixx is a neat little tool for financial forecasting, and allows us to model various scenarios when looking at the year ahead. The intuitive interface and easily digestible graphs often take centre stage at our directors' meetings, and it has become our preferred method for reviewing the health of the company. When we first started using the platform it was more suited to start-ups and fledgling companies who don't have historic accounting data to build forecasts around, focussing instead on top-line projections for sales and operating costs. However, recent integrations with popular accounting software have unlocked new capabilities, which will allow us to continue using the platform as our company matures.