3 ways to manage large scale projects more efficiently with Ziggu

Managing large scale projects is a challenge for every property developer, whether you have a team of 3 or a team of 20, but particularly so for small developers. We’ll explore three ways you can make the most out of your limited time and how Ziggu can help you better manage your new residential projects.

Focus on one project at a time

A great way to know what requires your attention is going through all the new notifications you’ve received. However, a long list of notifications can be a daunting task to start on, much like that todo list that keeps on growing... You know the one 😉 ).

Going through the notification list from newest to oldest will not be the fastest way of completing them if you manage multiple projects.

Constantly switching between different contexts and different tasks puts a real strain on our attention. Just focussing on 1 project at a time will already help you work more efficiently. The ‘project’ filter in the notifications sidebar will help you with this.
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But there are more ways to refine your notification list. To really know how much work you’ve got ahead of you, there’s also the ‘unread only’ filter for your notifications. You’ll be able to handle your tasks and see your todo list shrink in real time, and really, what is more satisfying than that? (perhaps donuts? But truthfully, Ziggu Snacks might be a long way off)

When you filter on a project, you’ll also be able to filter on a particular unit, in case you have, uh... very “prolific” users of your platform. Lastly, you can filter on specific decisions of a project. This one will definitely help you out once the decision deadlines are approaching.

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Don’t create the same proposals over and over again

A lot of new residential projects being developed nowadays give the customer a high degree of customizability. In countries such as Belgium, it’s even expected by homebuyers! Of course, this makes large projects a lot more difficult to manage. Every option you offer the homebuyer means another proposal to write and more things to check off with vendors. What a nightmare!

A lot of the options you offer can be standardised. With proposal templates you’ll only have to create proposals for your standard options once. From this template, you can easily create new proposals for other units later on. If you need to make a change to the proposal, simply edit the template and it will update all the proposals that were derived from it.

Creating these proposals in bulk is already a huge timesaver, but it doesn’t take away any flexibility should you need it. You can still customise the proposals you’ve made from a template if the situation requires it. Be mindful that by breaking away from the mould, that proposal won’t be updated with any future edits to the template though.
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Divide and conquer together

One thing that can throw a wrench in your well-oiled machine of Awesome Customer Care is bad communication. As your team grows it will become harder to know who is doing what. There’s nothing worse than starting on a big new task only to find out later that your colleague worked on the exact same thing. Keeping everyone in the loop on what you’re doing is not the most scalable solution. Checking in at the start or end of every day could work, but what about new issues that come up during the day? Just shout it across the whole office or embrace the chaotic group chat?

Our solution is to show, rather than tell. A lot of features on the Ziggu platform allow you to assign someone responsible for completing them. Take ‘Conversations’ as an example: if a customer starts a new conversation, you’ll be assigned as the ‘responsible’ when you respond to the message, letting your team know you’ve got it handled. Or in case you take turns handling incoming messages, you can also manually assign someone to a conversation. The added benefit of this is that you can filter conversations more effectively: showing only your own conversations, conversations you haven’t responded to yet, etc...

Other functionalities with a ‘responsible’ include ‘Tasks’, allowing you to organise work as a more traditional todo-list, or ‘Decisions’. Our latest feature with ‘responsibles’ is ‘Aftercare’, where the responsibility for fixing problems after delivery can be either for someone on your team or one of your partners (vendors, contractors etc.)

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Want to hear from one of our customers? Read DCA’s story here and learn how Mieke manages twice as many housing units as before on her own (+- 170). 

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