Causeit, Inc. work with the teams and tech that make world-changing innovation possible. More here.
Tue, March 22, 2011 at 12:42PM At Causeit, we understand how difficult it can be to create sustainability amid the inevitable chaos of running a business. For example, what happens when someone in your company gets sick or needs to leave work for a period of time? Can you still do payroll? Do you have the resources to train a new front-line worker unexpectedly? How can you better manage those one-time processes that never seem to get remembered? Don’t panic! The solution to all your project management breakdowns and confusions is what we like to call a process document! A process doc (we’ve shortened it for efficiency’s sake) is a written resource that explains all the steps in a given project so that you don’t have to.
Writing a process doc does not have to be painful. In fact, they can prevent unnecessary grief in the future. With a strong template and a commitment to keeping it updated, a process doc can act as a living, breathing contribution to your organization.
Here are some tips for creating a strong process document:
A process doc can be made for any project or task in order to increase efficiency and flow. Step-by-step instructions are easy to follow even for someone who has never done the job before. A process doc can be a lot of help, but it is only useful if its content is relevant. Remember to keep your process docs up to date. So write it up, review it often, and make your life a little bit easier!
Fri, November 12, 2010 at 10:13AM Spot Color Studio is looking for a full time developer to join our creative agency. Most of our custom-designed sites use CMS, specifically WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Many include shopping carts, databases and/or animation.
Responsibilities
Soft Skills
As a small –but rapidly growing– agency, we wear a lot of hats. The ideal candidate will be flexible, positive, friendly and have an excellent attitude. We pride ourselves on completing work on time, so the ability to manage multiple projects and swiftly shift gears from one client/project to another is essential, so you must be well-organized and detail-oriented…with a great memory! We’re looking for a:
Hard Skills
Experience Requirements
Pay depends on experience. This is a full time job with benefits and a lot of growth potential. Please email your resume, cover letter and examples of work and salary to jobs@spotcolorstudio.com.
Looking forward to meeting you!
Tue, September 14, 2010 at 5:43PM One of Causeit, Inc.'s clients is in need of an amazing operations assistant/rockstar. You would work closely with Causeit's amazing team (in our Southeast Portland, Oregon office) to remotely support one of our clients in building their business. Our client creates innovative, participatory brands for major companies and organizations. If you are interested in being on the leading edge of social media, online interaction, and brands which have more value than just hawking wares, this might be the job for you. You should possess the following:
Contact pmrockstar at causeit dot org for more info.
Mon, January 25, 2010 at 10:59AM When does it make sense to bring a project manager into your small business?
People have different roles for project managers within their business. In my business, I have about eight hours of meetings with project managers per month. In those meetings, I process the tasks in my inbox and triage them into Remember the Milk, have conversations with the project manager about the feasibility of the commitments I have taken on/will be taking on/would like to take on, and start to get in communication with anyone I need to repromise to, revoke promises to or reschedule with. I also have higher-level conversations about processes for efficiency, total workload capacity and balance between different types of work.
For some small business people, the project manager also does a bit of cat-herding—checking in on tasklists and duedates, especially those which are past due. When they spot something which is lagging behind or flat-out has not been done—especially if there is a recurring theme of delay on that type of task—they have a conversation with the team member to see what they need to be effective. Sometimes that conversation looks like coaching to uncover any emotional or contextual roadblocks, and sometimes it is a process conversation to see what would make it easier to complete that task consistently.
Project managers also are likely to assist in the scoping/estimating process of bids to make sure that time conflicts, logjams and cost overruns are prevented wherever possible. For example, Causeit worked with one of our project managers in the process of constructing a bid for a large flat-priced graphic design project to ensure we met a minimum hourly pay rate and, thus, profitability.
In a smaller business, the project management accountability often falls on the business owner, general manager or an account manager. First steps for additional project management support, with a generally effective team who sometimes get overwhelmed (rather than a team with systemic problems around accountability, self-discipline and communication) are to implement some simple, low-cost solutions centering around reminding people of the promises they made. Technology solutions like Remember the Milk automate some of this process, and work particularly well when paired with a meeting with an outsider or other strictly-accountable team member who gently causes the conversation to come up on a regular basis (once or twice a week is best) and to stay on track.
In short, project managers serve to make sure the actions of your games get moved forward by ensuring actionable promises are made, recorded and managed. Contact us to have us facilitate an introduction to some of our favorite project managers, like Jodi Sweetman and Amye Scavarda!
Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:25PM 
Remember the Milk (or RTM for short) is a powerful, flexible and simple tool for managing tasks. Small business owners (and busy folk everywhere) know that having a mere to-do list is insufficient. Remember the Milk works by helping you quickly enter and triage your tasks so that you can get back to doing whatever it is that you do best without worrying about, well, how to remember to get the milk. And, like so many great web apps these days, it's a free service.
Remember the Milk works as a great tool for implementing productivity guru David Allen's excellent methodologies, as articulated in Getting Things Done. The core of his practice involves sorting tasks into a couple of cross-referenced criteria, such as project (e.g. 'creating a new website'), context (e.g. tools or locations such as 'phone,' 'grocery store,' or 'office') or duration (five minutes, 30 minutes, etc.). In a traditional paper to-do list or a mish-mash of different task management tools, it can be difficult to sort your the work at hand, or, say, find out what five-minutes tasks you can do between clients. Remember the Milk makes implementing a cross-referenced set of lists easy.
Remember the milk accomplishes sorting of tasks through a number of criteria:
Fri, March 6, 2009 at 12:16PM How many times have you wanted to work on a simple document with a friend or colleague, only to be stopped by problems constantly sending files back and forth? Or needed to share a spreadsheet with a client, only to find their copy of Excel won't open your file? As part of our series on web applications for small business, we'll take a look at Google Docs as a way to save you money.
Google Docs is a free service which allows you to work on basic documents (word processing, spreadsheets and presentations) in your browser. At a basic level, it provides the most commonly used functions of programs likes Microsoft Office for free. Your files are stored online, instead of on your computer—which means that crashes and viruses don't affect them, but your ability to access the web does (for example, if your cable modem goes out, you can't access your documents until you find another internet connection). This sort of online file storage is referred to as 'the cloud' in Web 2.0 parlance.
Sat, January 31, 2009 at 2:25PM If you've ever checked your free e-mail account from a friend's computer without paying a dime, you've experienced of glimpse of web apps. Most small business owners don't know that everything from accounting to conference calls can be achieved online for low or no cost, so we've chosen to write a series on small business savings via web apps. We'll evaluate the benefits, utility and cost of a number of applications. Since Causeit, Inc. is in the process of converting many of our desktop documents into web-capable systems, many of these trials will be supported by our own experience or those of our clients. Here are some of the potential topics [please suggest more!]: