Three simple online tools to boost your project management in no time
How to be more productive in managing new and accomplishing already started projects? Here are three project management apps that I use, which take no time to learn. They have boosted my operational efficiency by 100%. These tools make project management easy.
Trello
Trello really saved my life when I was recently working with a web-designer on a rather complicated website for my PR-consultancy business. Trello is a simple task sorting system, which will make both a project manager and other team members happy.
In Trello you can start a Board for each particular project and create cards for each task. The To Do cards are placed in one column. The tool offers two more columns: Doing and Done, but you can create as many columns as you prefer to organize your work.
Personally for me this app is great as I can always see the progress of the work, and add new tasks on the go, without distracting my web-designer or web-developer. And it’s so rewarding to see how much you and your team have accomplished, while moving the task card from the Doing column to Done. No task is ever being lost or forgotten.
Project Canvas
Project Canvas is an excellent project management app, which allows all the team members to get a project overview and keep everyone on the same page throughout its implementation from the very beginning.
It is basically made as a large offline or an online canvas, which is divided into several sections, placed in a convenient and logical order: Purpose, Scope, Success Criteria, Outcome, Team, Stakeholders, Users, Resources, Constraints, Risks, Milestones and Actions. The tool was inspired by the popular Business Model Canvas.
You can involve your team members in setting the milestones of your project and define the actions, which will lead you to the reached milestones. The current free online version of this project managment tool allows you to set responsible people and deadlines for each action, so that the purpose is accomplished in due time.
First time I used Project Canvas was in the offline form. The Project Canvas helped me to see my team’s progress as we were ticking off the reached milestones and actions. When we saw that some actions could be done earlier, and some only accomplished later, we just moved them around, still having the whole picture of the project and its progress in front of us.
There is an opinion that Project Canvas makes anyone a great project manager and works best for groups of 4 to 8 members. I would be happy to get your opinion on this.
Podio
Podio reminds me of an easy-to-organize office space. Each employee has an account and can run separate projects, assign task to other employees, set deadlines, manage the calendar, upload and share files, and fulfill other essential project management activities.
The system allows a lot of freedom for customization. And this makes it both an easy tool for those who just quickly want to increase their teamwork productivity, and a helpful one for those who want to organize all their office operations online.
Let’s say you have a project Conference. You can start a New Organization and add all the people who are connected with the project. After that let your team members, responsible for particular areas connected with the project, create sub-projects, such as Speaker Support, Marketing, Administration, Participants Liason, Media Relations and so on.
There is an activity board showing what is going on in your projects, and a comment function, which both add a social touch to the tool and make you feel like you are using a social network.
If you use one or some of these tools or know someone who does, I would be happy to have your impression in the comments to the post or to my e-mail at olga (at) projectcanvas.dk and feature most interesting project management cases in this blog.
Which other simple project management tools do you know and use? Please share your experience with us.
Yours, Olga
Digital Marketer, Project Canvas
olga(at)projectcanvas.dk