What's the easiest, fastest way to scale up creative design project management on a budget?

As you can imagine this is a vast question. The key elements are to be able to pay attention in 4 different ways simultaneously: 1. Diffuse Focus: You must keep an open mind to give you a global vision of what is happening within and outside of your business. This means keeping up with industry news but also knowing what is going on outside of your normal frame of reference. Keeping this global vision helps you take better mid & long term strategic decisions without being overwhelmed by daily pressure. 2. Narrow Focus: You must keep a very narrowly focused set of priorities and short term action points based on your mid & long term strategies. Having a precise laser focus of activities helps increase day to day performance and return on investment. This is the way to grow in a lean way as well as to manage employees successfully. Having a clear narrow focus is the key to get things done. 3. External Focus: Being able to take distance from your business and taking unemotional decisions helps you take the right strategic decisions. You must be able to step away from your baby and do what is best for the business rather than holding on to the past. It is easy to become to attached to certain aspects of our business that is detrimental to the well being of the business. Taking an external focus helps you get distance and take the right decisions. 4. Immersed Focus: By being in touch with your personal vision, values and goals, your business becomes more than simply a cash cow. Knowing why you believe that your business adds value to the world and communicating it with your employees gives a meaning to their work. The best way to inspire others and to keep motivated through the difficulties of running one's own business is to be in touch with the meaning of what you do. If you can pay attention to your business in these 4 different ways simultaneously, you will stay on top of all the moving parts. This means you will be able to simultaneously understand what is going on in your industry at a macro-level, as well as how to manage employees, deal with customers, keep track of finances, and update your strategies to maximise success.

We use Salesforce for CRM, so we implemented Financial Force PSA. This has been an excellent solution for us, but it definitely requires a lot of customization to represent your business processes (like any holistic solution would).

That would depend on what you're trying to accomplish and who you are as a manager and individual. Off the top of my head I can tell you that Podio, Asanna and Basecamp are all popular project management tools. Which one you use really depends on you and the features you want. On a personal level I use Trello which I make work for me. It has the features I want and allows me to display information that seems logical to me. I suggest that you play around with all them and find which one works best for you. If I'm off the mark and you're asking about a specific system I suggest scrum. Although scrum is most talked associated with building agile products I've successfully used it on a wide variety of projects technical and non technical. Hope this helps and best of luck!

Our team uses Basecamp and Slack. Both are very easy to use and have a lot of features out of the box. Basecamp's benefit compared to other project management software is that it is easy to use. We have used other systems with our clients like Jira and iMeet but we found both had a learning curve that was much steeper than Basecamp. Slack isn't really a project management system but it really helps us with our communication. It allows for "channels" so you could talk about different projects with the same people without confusion. It also has a lot of integrations and will definitely help out a lot. It has an unlimited free trial so there is really no reason not to try it.

I like Harvest both for time-tracking and for invoicing clients. It's simple, which I love.