The Hive - Beetext's monthly newsletter

It’s no secret that Project Managers are important to any translation agency or corporate translation department. They can make or break projects and accounts, which is sometimes a scary thought to an owner or department manager. Sometimes we’re lucky and we find a gem and get a project manager who truly understands that a good part of their responsibilities are communication based.

Depending on the structure of your agency, you may be like many and not necessarily have a sales force driving your sales. In this case, project managers who upsell and understand the complete extent of your service offering are essential to your company’s growth and smooth running.

Your project managers should be upselling into existing accounts. “A translation order with a side of DTP... may I supersize your QA? Thank you, that’ll be a grand total of... more than before”. It’s a concept which borders upselling but is more strategic in nature, called “selling into the hole” and is typically a good practice for agency owners/sales persons/project managers to run through from time to time. Which clients are receiving which services and more importantly, are there other services we “could” offer that would complement what they currently receive?

One crucial element to upselling and selling into the hole is; do your project managers have time and understand how?

As a good owner or departmental manager, is it your responsibility to ensure that you have done all you can to allow the progress of your company or department.

Introducing project managers to this notion is as easy as giving them a book or online reference material. It only makes you stronger as a unit.

Also are they using their time efficiently enough to even try out this option? Perhaps a Computer Aided Management (CAM) tool could be of some help?

Check out Beetext Flow, enabling the efficient use of time.

Life after Project Managers

Here’s the deal, you’re living a utopian existence in relation to your agency, you’re growing and overall things are great. You come to the office Monday morning ready for a day of cool running when you receive it. Your most important or worst still, your only project manager has resigned effective immediately... and they’re not coming back.

Once you get your heart of out of your throat, sneak a sip of “milk” from your desk drawer like some sort of movie executive – you come to the very... very scary realization that you really don’t know everything they were taking care of, which clients were they dealing with, their contacts and more pressing, what projects are currently underway or have to be delivered. 1 point for micro-management.

You find yourself staring at the 4 mapped network drives (W:, X:, U:, Q.:).You’re pretty sure that at some point each letter has some sort of significance... while each drive contains an infinite number of folders. After some rummaging around, you come up with the benevolent excel file the project manager had been using to track their projects. That wasn’t that hard.

You open up the excel file to find a palette of colours resembling something from Claude Monet. You stare in awe, scratch your head and figure out that the off-purple shade found in most of the cells have nothing to do with project management, but rather the project manager simply “liked the colour”...

take me to the top of the
second column to continue reading this article

Where do you go from here? You have yourself a colourful cell array which in essence is simply a list of projects. Better than nothing. You know which projects are in progress... you think.

You can start contacting clients, to inform them that your project manager has left and you’ll be the main point of contact... ensuring that your sprachgefuhl is well thought out as delays may occur as a result of your project manager's departure.

Only if you had something that transferred knowledge seamlessly from one Project Manager to another (or to you...) in case something like this happened. The answer is a Project Efficiency Solution such as a Computer-Aided Management (CAM) tool.

At the risk of sounding like a subtle sales pitch, solutions such as (cue sales pitch here) Beetext Flow, enable project managers to exchange information and visualize accounts with items in progress while providing a full status view of the workflow steps applied to each document within each translation request.

In essence what agencies or corporate translation departments should be utilizing are methodologies that enable easy transition or centralization of information. It is these employed methodologies that can avoid severe pratfalls.

Why are so many people talking about these Project Workflow and Project Efficiency Solution systems? The simple answer is that many people are trying to avoid the aforementioned situation and find themselves reaping the additional benefits of these solutions in the process. The benefits are numerous; such as quicker time-to-market, continuous project flow, centralized document versioning, per file per project profit loss calculation, reporting and the list goes on.

One of the elements which make these solutions so attractive is how efficient your whole process becomes, from request reception, processing and delivery. Project Managers simply do not have to fuss with sending files. All they have to do is check the workload of the service provider and assign them to the workflow. The real pros for choosing to go with a tool provider is that they have the benefit of having development as their sole or core competency and have no other responsibilities other than ensuring that they can compete on a market with increasing competition (which is great for you), market demand and functionality while satisfying their clientele.

Why not let the tool providers alleviate the potential pain one may suffer by developing their own in-house tool or investing into your competitors who also make technology. Another point is that “off the shelf” solutions typically have lower recurring fees than either hiring human resource or taking on the addition internal cost of development while usually helping you keep the aspirin in the medicine cabinet.

If one morning you find yourself 1 project manager less, log in to your CAM and search for all accounts managed by them... seamless data transfer from them to you with status as well all service providers associated to the project. And the cherry on top is you'll always have your client's contact information associated to the project.

That’s basically it, the process runs smoothly from start to finish. It’s all about safeguarding your translation processes by using a PES CAM.

If you are not currently using a PES CAM tool. Please look into it for the benefit for your agency or department by contacting us for more information. If you are currently using Beetext Flow, "Congratulations on having chosen the best PES CAM!".

Tips and Tricks for Beetext Flow

Did you know that in Beetext Flow is it possible to double the use of your Signature found in your “My Flow” profile? Typically signatures are used to simply define different types of signatures you may like to use periodically when sending manual mails in Flow.

As this signature area is essentially a white board where you can store any text based message you like up until 4 294 967 296 characters, it should be enough for any terms and conditions or generic repetitive email.

Go into the My Flow found on the main menu. You should notice a Signature tab.

To create a new signature (or email template)

Click the new button found on the lower left hand side
Provide a name to your signature template
Complete the text for your template (best if formatting is left simple)
To confirm your signature, click save.

To use a signature (or email template)

When sending a mail via Flow (resending documents, quotes or invoices)
You can select the signature from a list
If it was made default – it should automatically appear

Why is this useful? Most project managers write so many emails which are so similar they may as well be the same. Why not template a variety of emails and pick and choose the one you need at that time.

I’d like to have more training
Send to a friend using Flow

COMPANY SPOTLIGHT: TRADUCTA

Traducta offers quick, quality translations in numerous fields through a network of qualified translators.

Our commitment is to ensure delivery of top-quality translations while preserving and improving the image of our clientele.

Moreover, every translated document goes through a strict workflow whereby two distinct review steps are performed to ensure that the final product is truly a high quality deliverable production.

As TRADUCTA has diverse specializations and clientele, it allows for extreme request flexibility. To ensure our flexibility, we’ve elected to use Beetext Flow, enabling us to have our clients use online request forms, which streamlines the incoming requests and allows us to become more organized and automated.

We use the benefits of Flow to help create strong relationships with our customers.

If you would like to discuss our services or how we utilize Beetext Flow, please feel free to contact us at traducta@traducta.com