For those of you who don't read the 3.7 Blog, we have recently released a WordPress plugin for managing projects.

The following excerpt from the unveiling post explains our inspiration for the plugin.

Anytime you experience the same situation a several times there is an opportunity to improve on it. My inspiration was a common occurrence of clients inquiring about the status of their project. This often happened despite setting dates, outlining milestones and creating schedules. To me, this illustrated two issues. Most importantly, clients shouldn’t have to proactively contact me to get an update. Secondarily the materials I delivered were too cumbersome to sort through and reference.

There are plenty of project management tools available, my company uses Basecamp for project management. While I still use it today, it’s use is primarily for internal communication. The problem with these systems is they are designed for the agencies, not clients. Most clients dread the idea of logging into a foreign system and the information provided is not what they are looking for anyways. In my experience, those who try these systems inevitably give up and resorting to e-mail by the time the project is over.

Most clients don’t care about what tasks we are performing or what the key milestones are. They  just want a general idea of how far along their project is, what they are responsible for and an expected completion date. Everything else is noise or irrelevant. Being that I haven’t come across a system that easily does this I went ahead and created one.

This creation is called “Project Status.” It’s a simple WordPress plugin for service based businesses and freelancers. It’s primary function is to give clients a visual indicator of the project status. More specifically it lets you define four key phases of a project, currently activities and client responsibilities. Rather than requiring logins, clients can access their project status through a custom URL.

And that’s just the beginning.

Plugin Features

This plugin is a simple way to give clients that information while providing you with a high level overview of open projects and their standpoint. It gives you the ability to:

• Create and manage unlimited projects
• Track levels of completion
• Track current tasks
• Identify client responsibilities and project holds
• Identify four major milestones (20%/40%/60%/80%)
• Send clients to a page containing the above information

Projects are displayed in a responsive template so clients can access and monitor their project from any device.

Screenshots

Download the Plugin

You can download the plugin through the WordPress plugin screen, just search for "project status." Or download it directly here.

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