If your office is as busy as ours is, then you need ways to stay organized. At our Blueprint Duluth office, our employees thrive when it gets busy in the office. Most of what we do is on a project basis. However, it is easy when doing a large project that requires work from multiple departments, for something to get overlooked or lost somewhere along the way. Maybe, that graphic for the new client’s website was completed yesterday. How do you keep track of your office? If you want another way to stay organized, here is a quick and easy project to undertake.

Things You Will Need:

1-2 Large Dry Erase Boards (Home Depot)
Measuring Tape (Any, but easier with a flat, cloth one)
1/4” black art tape (Staples or Office Depot)
1/8” black art tape (Staples or Office Depot)
Dry Erase Markers

The Project

In the past, our office has used several techniques to stay organized and on top of things. Each of our clients had a space on this Excel spreadsheet with all our departments and the progress each department makes and finally, what percentage is complete. This is how the organization in our office ran. Not too long ago, our office acquired SharePoint. Employees are able to keep track of their tasks in SharePoint and easily manage them. These tasks, once entered into SharePoint, can even prioritize on a scale of 1-10 by importance. The scale is one being low and ten being high while five is normal priority.

However, recently, I started on this white board project. This consisted of making two different white boards that are just a huge version of the Excel spreadsheet. I started with dry erase marker and a tape measure to set up the layout.

Dry Erase v. Black Art Tape

We decided that the dry erase markers were good for the initial set up, but we needed something that would last. Once the initial layout was established, I purchased a bunch of Black Art Tape in two sizes from Office Depot and Staples. The tape creates the layout instead of dry erase markers, so as the list changes the layout is not erased. These boards contain large tables of information. To make things visually easier, I used the 1/4” tape to make the columns and the table headings so they could easily be differentiated. Across the board, the smaller columns within the major columns and the rows down the board (individual clients) are separated by the 1/8” tape.

Even though we now have multiple processes of keeping projects organized, and even though someone has to go update the new white board, the ability to visualize these projects on the white board helps everyone from each department come together. Yes, we could easily click through SharePoint, but with the white board, everything is in one place.

By: Kara