A world-class project management software can make a huge impact on your team’s performance and effectiveness. The world’s greatest companies are investing many resources in finding the best project management tool, but know how to choose the best fit project management software to align with your team’s capabilities and needs is not an easy task.
For startups, the evaluation and the decision making process is the hardest thing to do. By choosing the right project management software startups can scale their operations from day one with a clear aim of saving both time and money for their team’s and for their customers.
In this post, we’ll cover some helpful pointers for understanding your project management needs and 7 best tips that we’ve gathered to assist early-stage startups choose the most suitable project management software for their business.
According to a recent study conducted by Forrester, companies who uses project management software saves more time for both their employees and customers, reduces potential errors and pitfalls, and most importantly increases both collaboration and efficiency.
We’ve decided to break it down as follows:
Project management is all about saving time. The right Project Management Software can save a business money by presenting a swift and relatively easy way for the company employees to collect the data they need per specific project. The Project Management Software provides a clear vision and a time line of what has already achieved with the intended project and also presents what still needs to be done in relation to the intended project.
When everyone on the company can see everyone else’s work, you essentially create more chances for feedback and a culture of openness and transparency. More clarity means more opportunities for amazing ideas from your employees, which means a better company culture that is based on clarity and transparency all along the way. The right Project Management Software automatically makes it easy to see any current and future issues, suggest appropriate solutions, and notify all team members of any relevant changes to the project.
Integration and APIs are two things that leads to the same end result, APIs are about more than just integration. Integration is just about making the interaction between two systems over a network, whereas API acts as an interface between two applications. That being said, the right Project Management Software should provide with both options so you can benefit from one click integration, simple and easy process when you link one or more of your existing software to the new software with just one click, while with an open API you have more options to customize based on your current business and team’s needs.
The best project management software is self-explanatory, and it should serve as the ultimate training tool for your team’s. This obviously saves lots of money that otherwise would spent on professionals or on salaries of existing employees to train the new employees. The new project management software should educate your employees on how the company handles and manages different projects and the variety of tasks that go into each of the projects. It also showcase which employees are good planners and are organized and the ones who are not, this is a very strong indicators in many levels for the company’s stakeholders.
Besides important elements such as ease of use, great user interface, features, and integrations, you must first understand your challenges.
In most cases it’s difficult for your employees to know exactly what they need from a project management software. But the main challenge is that they can point out exactly what is missing or what issue should be addressed and how.
The first thing you would want to do, is to sit down with your team members and map out how different processes in a project are currently being done and by that to figure out where the pitfalls and bottlenecks are.
Is the process even exist? Or are the challenges accrued because of the lack of a well formulated process? Does your team members know where to look for specific sets of data or who they should go to for any questions or to receive the appropriate customer service?
Only after you managed to understand the existing challenges, you can more clearly determine the specifications for your next project management software features that should best help you in achieving your goals and increase your entire company productivity.
The first thing you should look at is to make sure that the intended project management software can keep up with your future growing team while still answering all your current and future needs. You should look for software with different user roles, various access permissions, and the overall ability to be resilient enough as your business grow.
The second thing you should be doing is to check whether the project management software vendor provides any support portal, email or phone support, a helpful set-up guide and live or recorded demos. It is always highly recommended to set up a demo session before committing to the purchasing of any software out there.
Most project management software tare handle sensitive data, therefore, security should be one of your main concerns especially as your early stage startup is intended to grow rapidly. This specific information cannot usually be found on the software website, however you should either email the vendor and find out more about their processes to control infrastructure access and access to any sensitive customer information and or data.
Asana is one of the world’s leading web and mobile application that serve as a project management software and designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.
From small stuff to the bigger and more complex projects, Asana organizes the entire working process so teams know what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.
Another popular project management software used by millions worldwide.
Trello is a team collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards (in similar to Monday.com). Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process for a complete visibility and management of your ongoing tasks.
Monday.com, is a Cloud-based platform that allows businesses to create their own applications and work management software. Trusted by over 125k customers worldwide monday.com makes the perfect solution for early stage start ups that are looking for a fully featured and scalable solution to grow with them.
Airtable is a leader in cloud collaboration services. Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. Airtable allow full orchestration and powerful business solutions with a single source of truth, which makes your life much easier when looking to manage your projects through one place.
Workzone is an easy to use project management software that offers document management, project collaboration, customizable reporting, resource and task management and time tracking.
Workzone is cloud-based (like the majority of the solutions within this category) and offers automated emailed reports with up to date project status information.
Individuals across the globe uses ClickUp to manage their calendars, timelines, and Gantt charts to plan tasks, schedule with their teams, and sync in real-time with Google, Outlook, and Apple.
You can also view your daily tasks, reminders, and Google Calendar events all in one place.
Freedcamp is a web, mobile and desktop project management and collaboration software for teams of all sizes. What we like the most about Freedcamp is, that is free for an unlimited number of users, files, and projects.
One of the most expensive investments is the one that your team doesn’t make a use of. Therefore, choosing your next project management software is all about the functionality, usability, and efficiency you can get of using it.
While there are several worthy project management tools out there, we prepared a list of 7 best tips you should be using before taking a decision regarding your next project management software.
If you don’t end up choosing a project management software that’s easy for your team to use and for your IT team to implement and use, you’ll end up trying to solve the same challenges you already face.
There are many things one should consider when choosing their ideal project management software. However, understand your exact business requirements can prevent it from becoming an overwhelming process and helping in making a more educated decision about your next tool.
Moreover, it is better that you go for a project management software that offers you the most value for your lean early stage startup budget. In other words, your next tool should offers you the most powerful features in one place at a budget point that won’t empty your pockets. The new software should also be easy to use so your team members can easily get started with it without any learning curve or unwanted complications
