Zen, not just for devs

I used Zen (www.agilezen.com) a couple weekends ago on a project for the Ann Arbor GiveCamp. Prior to GiveCamp I didn’t see a need for Zen in my life and to be honest I’m a structured kind of guy. However I used Zen to manage this project and it helped keep the flow going, even at 3 am in the morning. I knew what needed to be done, what was being worked on and what was completed. So I had good sense of where I was and if I was going to finish on time. This was a lot easier than using post-it notes and paper.

After the event I kept thinking, “Is Zen a good fit for the list of projects in my life?”. The magic 8 ball said, “Ask again later”.

Well, my brain didn’t stop churning, I wondered where Lean and Zen could be applied to other parts of my small business.

A little background. My wife and I have a process where she identifies contract leads, I follow up on the lead and hopefully get a contract out of it. We (I), have been struggling with how to track lead status and make sure 100% of them are either contacted or processed in some way. Currently it’s in Outlook with no real way for me to keep my wife in the loop. I know there is Exchange and others, but I want something simple, with some basic performance metrics.

While eating lunch thinking about process and work flow stuff, somehow the lead tracking issue and Zen came together. Must be the fast food.

After looking through Zen and the ability to customize the work flow through phases (Click Process at the top), I realized this would be an awesome way to track sales leads. I will have the ease of managing leads and my wife will have the ability to track my “performance”. Another useful feature for tracking leads, is the ability to mark one as blocked and being able to give a reason. That way someone else will know what’s going on and help move it along.

I think I’m going to use a customized light version of the sales process listed on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_process

It would be great to be able to create projects based on process templates. *wink* *wink*

If this works out as well as I think it will, then I just need to integrate it with Freshbooks and I’ll be rockin’.

Now I just have to convince someone we need another monthly expense.