Project management 101: Five tools to set your team up for success

Deliver ambitious projects on time and within budget

Big ideas become reality with the right processes, but project management can be bewildering. It's fraught with competing ideas, shifting production timeframes, and growing expenses – but it’s worth investing in to give your business the edge.

Effective project management can help you deliver more value by streamlining processes, improving collaboration, and reducing distractions that can lead to wasted time, money, and resources. Failing to account for those critical tasks puts profitability and customer relationships at risk.

Today, the task of managing projects is even more complex. New patterns of working have made it harder to deliver high-quality results on time and within budget. So, coordinating dispersed teams and getting a complete view of ongoing activity now requires new tools and techniques.

Fortunately, project management software is up to the task.

What does project management software do?

Project management software can help you plan, organise, and manage teamwork on a single platform.

That way, everyone knows what they're working on at any given moment. No more wasted time.

Also, with cloud-based technology that brings together people and processes, productivity increases because work can happen anywhere, anytime.

Which software is right for you?

There’s a huge selection of tools and technology available on the market but the ‘right solution’ will depend on your team and how it works.

First, consider the size of your team and their willingness to accept new technology. Then, identify where they need the most help. Which tasks need immediate administrative support? What can be automated?

To help you decide, we’ve reviewed a few platforms that come highly recommended.

Asana

Want to keep track of every moving piece of each project? Asana might be right for you. Teams can avoid using confusing spreadsheets and get ahead of looming deadlines by creating a detailed schedule of their projects from start to finish, assigning ownership, and managing deadlines. You can also see ongoing tasks in three different formats – timelines (Gantt charts), boards (Kanban cards), or in a calendar view. The platform also offers automation, so you can reduce delays and save time.

Smartsheet

Looking for a scalable solution? As a project portfolio management (PPM) tool, Smartsheet can scale from a single project to end-to-end work management. It offers a cloud-based platform that doesn’t require any coding or knowledge of programming language, where anyone can create the solution they need – fully protected by the control and security IT requires. Smartsheet’s capabilities include data capture with forms and detailed workflow automation. You can also instantly create and share dashboards and reports.

Wrike

If a hyper-tailored experience would help your business, Wrike offers customisable dashboards, shared calendars, and multiple options to organise information across spaces, folders, projects, and more. It also integrates with over 400 third-party tools, so you can build automations that span multiple business tools with its workflow builder. Another useful feature is Wrike's Work Intelligence™ technology, which predicts and minimises delays, reducing manual efforts with "the power of data, AI, and machine learning".

Monday.com

Could real-time collaboration be useful? Monday work management helps teams stay on top of deadlines, priorities, and changes as they happen. Gantt and Kanban allow full project visibility, and dashboards give you a clear picture of where progress stands. An unusual feature the platform offers is the ability to invite external project collaborators or clients, allowing users to communicate directly within the context of the exact project they are working on.

Kissflow

If you’re looking for a workflow automation platform designed to work with minimum tracking, Kissflow could be the tool for you. The platform offers task management, contextual collaboration, insightful reports and data security features. Managers particularly like that it helps set up complex processes quickly and even non-technically-minded users can create productive applications with little fuss.

Start achieving more

Modern software project management software can bring order to chaos, since it creates happier teams and more competitive businesses.

Dynamic platforms (like the ones we've recommended here) can help you encourage better, closer collaboration across your team, and deliver projects at a high standard every single time.

Plus, by tracking it all online, you'll start to see trends – from opportunities for better time management to cost savings – which means by looking into the progress of projects, there are only better decisions to be made.

After all, with the right processes in place, you can make every big idea a reality.