Why Breeze is like growth hacking for project management

Growth hacking for good!

Just before we get going with this blog, we think it’s worthwhile clarifying that we are talking about the benefits of growth hacking rather than the downside!

As a process for accelerating the development of a business, growth hacking is sound in principle. But in practice, it can have some detrimental side-effects which can be counter-productive to the longer-term mission of making any growth gains that are achieved stick. Now we’ve got that straight, here’s what we actually mean…

The essential idea of why we suggest Breeze is like ‘growth hacking for project management’ is because the software helps to fast track development projects for all types of businesses.

Whether you are managing simple or complex projects, and adopt a formal or more casual approach, Breeze is based on Kanban principles. This lets you apply project management processes that are suited to the way we all have to work today.

Everywhere we look change is all around us

Today’s world is in a state of constant change. All of us are involved in a continual process of observing what’s going on around us, processing information and changing what we do and how we behave to keep in step.

For example, continual research means medical science makes new breakthroughs and discoveries all the time. The results sometimes find their way handed down as advice and practice from nutritionists, doctors, healthcare experts.

So, new information emerges all the time about how we might want to live our personal lives. This might be making lifestyle choices to support our wellbeing, like eating more healthily.

Conventional project management can be too restrictive

In our professional lives, lots of us find conventional approaches to project management are too restrictive. They are rigid and inflexible making it difficult for a project to be adjusted to keep in step with change.

As we work on our projects, new information comes in. Clients change their minds or move the goalposts by repeatedly saying, “Oh and one more thing…!”. There’s a new version of a third-party tool that we need to think about. Or there’s some new compliance change that needs to be thought about too. (What the heck is this GDPR thing anyway?)

Some of it has no impact on the workflow of what we are doing. But some of it needs to be taken into consideration and integrated as part of our decision-making process. This might change existing tasks or create new ones.

Breeze lets us take our fast moving and changing world into account and break out of the conventional approach to managing projects. Breeze lets you growth hack your projects so that you reach key milestones quickly.

One of the things that might derail a project being managed by conventional means is the rigid way that projects are set up at the very start. Take something like ‘defined requirements’, for instance.

Frequently, this sets up objectives for the project that are immovable. But with Breeze you don’t get restricted with immovable objectives. You can change them easily. You can adapt the outputs of your project to take into account any new information that arises.

You might need to add or change a feature of a product, a piece of software or a project with a soft output. Breeze enables you to run your projects very effectively and rapidly adapt to changing requests, tasks and environments.

All of this is possible because of a simple agile project board based on Kanban principles. It works seamlessly, and you don't need to know anything about Kanban or agile.

Tracking time across all your team and projects

One of the main areas where change can have a major impact is on the amount of time you need to spend on a project across you and your team.

Breeze is great for any environment where you need to growth hack, that is fast track, your projects. Simply use the built-in timer to track your work on any kind of project. Simply click the play button and the clock starts running, tracking your time.

You might want to avoid being seen as too ‘Big Brother’ by tracking everyone doing everything and then being able to compare the performance of every member of your team. (You know how some people get upset by things like that??)

In that case, you can go easy on them by letting them use manual entry to key their time information into the project. This works just great too if they just happen to forget to start the timer.

We all know that some of the time spent on a project might not be billable, like if we have made a mistake and caused ourselves extra work. In Breeze this is no problem because across a whole project or for each separate entry time can be set as billable or not billable.

This really important. Your team might be working hard. But if the time is unbillable, that doesn’t necessarily equate to productivity. Breeze lets you see where your business is getting it wrong as well as getting it right, so you can promote more of the good and rectify the bad.

Reporting that lets you make better choices

To help you get at all the intelligence that is held within Breeze, we’ve got some really nice reporting capabilities. You can run reports grouped by project and tasks to show you where your team’s time and energy is being spent.

Key report types that rapidly let you see what's happening across your projects include:

• Time tracking
• Tasks
• Tasks due
• Task completion
• Project totals

Of course, we know you might want to get at the raw data to manipulate it in other software tools, so we provide the functionality to let you export it as CSV formatted data.

Growth hack project development with Breeze today

Breeze is ready to help you fast track your projects, so what are you waiting for?

Get started today. You can try it for free for 14 days and we don’t want your credit card details. There’s nothing to install because it’s all in the cloud, you just access it through all up to date browsers. But of course, we’ve got a mobile app!

All the help you need is online, and you can e-mail or tweet us to get more help from our team.