First, let's not confuse a "project" (assignment, book, shoot, booking) with day-to-day operations (i.e. running your photo business).
A project has an end... you can fit it into a "box" where you can describe the boundaries (hopefully).

Project Management techniques are very useful for photography. For example, as already mentioned, "Risk." What can happen? What can happen that you can't anticipated ("Unknown unknowns")? And it's not always "bad" risk... you could end up with a VERY BIG assignment... are you ready?

I look forward to this series, and I'll plan on putting in my "two cents."

I will be looking forward to all the articles in this series.

Jira is a commercial product intended for serious software business projects, but it has a free version as well. It utilizes the concept of a workflow to track progress on tasks (or bugs in the software world).

I set up a Jira project for Photography Business and customized Jira to use "jobs" instead of "tasks" or "bugs". For my workflow I created different stages of a job such as First Contact, Consultation Scheduled, Estimate Sent, ..., Session Scheduled, Proofs Sent, and Post Processing for example.

With new requests for photo sessions, I create a new "job" in Jira, then add comments and move it through the workflow as different stages are reached. I can attach documents scanned to PDF like estimates, model releases, invoices, and such. I can raise priorities as needed too.

To facilitate an efficient view of all photography jobs, I take advantage of custom Jira dashboards where I can layout a collection of little gadgets that show me all open jobs and their current stage, sorted by priority or stage as I desire. Other gadgets on my dashboard include charts showing the distribution of job types (retail, corporate, editorial, etc), calendars showing job due dates, and other nifty gadgets to give me a quick visual sense of where things are.

While I love BlinkBid to create estimates and invoices for non-retail work, and I like that I can set reminders to follow up on usage expirations, but I find that the concept of tracking jobs through the workflow stages in Jira helps keep me focused and organized.

Jira is a geek's delight, but will be a challenge to set up and customize for those not comfortable with dealing with the guts of software apps. If anyone knows of a comprehensive workflow application that's intended for use by non-techies, please let me know. Jira does exactly what I need, but I would hesitate to recommend it based on difficulty of initial configuration.