Translation project management program wish list
Masked translator has a good post in which he outlines what he wants in a translation-project management application.
There's a genuine unmet need for project-management software for freelance translators and small translation shops. All we have available now are big, unwieldy "general purpose" solutions that don't do everything we need but lots of things we don't, or bare-bones alternatives like Excel or pen & paper.
I know of one translation PM application — Translation Office 3000 — but the last time I tried it, it was too full of bugs and limited in functionality.
Here are 10 features that I would want out of a translation PM program.
- Manage files associated with the project (e.g. source files, translation files, glossaries, translation memories, and references) together with the project.
- Manage emails from clients together with their associated projects.
- Let me specify email, invoice, and other templates on a per-client/coordinator basis. Use the templates to create emails, PDFs, HTML, and other formats.
- Let me bill in any currency I choose.
- Let me bill in any unit I choose (word, character (with/without spaces), Asian character, line, etc.), either by source or by translation.
- Automatically perform word/character counts, and use them to create estimates, invoices, etc.
- Include a calendar listing my schedule. Color-code the calendar by capacity (e.g. red for capacity full, yellow for 25% free, green for 50%+ free).
- Should be dead-simple to use. All I should need to do is drag an email onto the application to open up a new project and start working. I should be able to fill in information as needed and as I prefer. No massive wizards playing 20 questions before I can even get started.
- Let me automate tasks, like sending emails and creating invoices. For example, clicking the "project done" button would email the translations to the client (based on the email template I specify), perform word/character counts on all the relevant files, create an invoice/add the job to a monthly invoice, add a task to send the invoice, and change the status of the project from "open" to "delivered & pending invoice."
- Let me specify automated reminders, such as jobs due, invoices due, and invoices outstanding.
Cross-platform would be a bonus, but it's not a deal-breaker for me (I would probably want to manage my projects on the same platform I translate them on). Network support also isn't a biggie for me, but I can see how a translation agency/small group of translators would want that.
How about you? Do you want a translation PM application? What kinds of features would you want in it?
Oddly enough, I blogged about this myself recently. I was taking a slightly more general approach, and my administrative requirements are a little simpler, but I can get behind most of this.
Thanks for pointing me to your blog post, Adam. Looks like lots of people are thinking about translation PM software these days.
Reading your post, I realize that charging by time should be another option that this dream program should give us.
We should definitely be able to register multiple contacts per client as well.
I use Excel with some custom macros. It doesn’t satisfy all my needs, but it looks like the best variant available.
>Manage files associated with the project
How do you need to manage them — just linking to files on disk? That’s easy in Excel.
>Manage emails from clients
Difficult in Excel/WindowsXP (easier in Excel/Vista). I really lack this feature.
>Let me specify email, invoice,
Easily done in Excel.
>Use the templates to create emails, PDFs
Possible with additional plugins.
>Let me bill in any currency I choose. Let me bill in any unit I choose.
Easily done in Excel.
>Automatically perform word/character counts
Not needed for me. My clients usually count words themselves.
>Include a calendar listing my schedule
Can be done in Excel.
>Should be dead-simple to use
It never takes me more than a minute to fill in all the project info.
Excel is rather user-friendly
>Let me automate tasks, like sending emails
Sounds too dangerous for me — it’s too easy to automatically send something to the wrong address. I wouldn’t use this feature even if it were implemented.
>Let me specify automated reminders
Can be done in Excel.
To summarize: it looks like Excel meets 7 of your 10 requirements — worth trying?
@Maxim
Thanks for the comment! I actually use a combination of Microsoft Outlook and Excel for my project management and invoicing now, but I feel a lot of limitations to this technique. Yes, with extensive add-in and macro programming, I could probably cobble together something better, but I’d rather pay somebody $30 to make a program for me
Maybe someone could make a program consisting of add-ins for Outlook (maybe Excel as well) — if it had the functionality I’m after, I’d buy it.
Thanks for the shout-out, and I say “amen” to all the things you suggest on your wish list. I have flirted at times with paying a computer science major at one of the universities in town to develop some Microsoft Office macros for me that do these things, but I think that even macros in Office have too many limitations (as Maxim points out).
What’s sad is that if someone were to develop a spiffy translator-specific product, they’d probably charge, like, $500 for it because everything marketed at freelancers is way, way, way overpriced.