Introduction
No matter what company you work for, there is bound to be projects that you need to manage. Large or small, you will have to juggle with people, tasks, and goals to ensure that every project is successful. Having a solution can help them keep everything organized while planning and running projects, in a way that is accurate, predictable, and profitable.
If you don’t use any project management tools or softwares, chances are you will waste a lot of time on the little things and do more work than necessary. It’s extremely difficult to keep track of who is working on what.
Because I have to manage over 100 projects a year at Sanguine, project management tools has become a necessary feature for me to efficiently plan my projects, manage available resources, respond to problems, and keep all the project stakeholders involved. Here are my favorite and top project management tools that has helped me tremendously to plan and track projects, allocate resources better, and improve team collaboration.
Top Project Management Tools
1) Trello
I use Trello everyday. It has been one of the best free collaboration tools that has worked very well with my team. It’s simple and straightforward to use.
You can create boards, lists, and cards to organize all of your tasks and projects. Each board comes with cards that you can add into different lists/categories. For example – I have multiple boards for digital marketing, content marketing, email marketing, website development, and other big projects. In each board, you can have cards that are pretty much the granular tasks and projects within the big project that needs to be done. Once a task is completed, you can drag the card into a list of completed tasks.
The beauty of a tool like Trello is in its simplicity. You can easily move cards across lists and it gives you a quick view of what’s currently being worked on and also help you quickly see where bottlenecks are happening. I would highly recommend Trello for any individuals or small teams and small companies.
2) Asana
Asana is the second runner up for me. It has a depth of features and customizable views which makes it a great option for larger companies where visibility into project details is key.
Asana offers a lot for productivity and collaboration. They even have workflows that automate recurring tasks and build custom rules. There is a larger learning curve for Asana than Trello, but it is honestly very similar. Asana just has a lot more features that I typically do not utilize on my day to day, but I would still recommend this tool for those that have a lot of projects to manage.
3) Smartsheets
Not only is Smartsheets a great data analytics tool, but it is also a great tool for project management and product roadmaps. They have tons of templates you can utilize to keep track of your projects with workflow automation and visualization of tasks in Gantt, calendar, and card views.
Team members can get notified of critical changes in real-time and the tool provides shared views, detail history, activity logs, automated alerts, reminders, and status reports to keep everyone aligned and informed.
