In today's fast-paced business environment, companies face the challenge of managing multiple projects simultaneously while ensuring effective collaboration, organization, and timely delivery.
How can you keep everything organized? This is where project management tools come into play. When utilizing the correct organizational tools, you can improve time management by 38%.
Let's dive into the benefits of having a project management tool, how it can help enhance your team's productivity, and a few of the top project management tools available to help get your team organized. ⬇️
What are the benefits of using a project management tool?
A project management tool is a software system that helps project managers and team members focus on planning, organizing, and managing their projects efficiently and effectively.
But what are the top benefits companies receive from using a project management system? 🤔 Here are four things you can expect.
1. Enhanced Communication and Collaboration
Project management tools encourage collaboration by providing a shared workspace where team members can communicate, share files, and collaborate on tasks in real-time.
By leaving comments, sharing files, and receiving real-time notifications, you can optimize your team’s collaboration. This process can help eliminate confusion caused by long email chains to ensure that everyone is on the same page and has the correct, most recent information.
This can also help with document and file management which is essential for storing and sharing project-related documents and files with team members (Skip to reason number 3 for more information!).
2. Improved Efficiency
Using a project management system, you can typically automate repetitive tasks, streamline workflows, and provide notifications with reminders to enhance overall efficiency.
At 1 Bold Step, we utilize several templated tasks that are set up for common marketing initiatives like blogs, webinars, events, and more. This helps our team members know what the process is for completing the task. Having pre-set-up tasks for common initiatives is also important so you don't have to spend time setting them up again.
Project management systems are also designed to enhance efficiency among team members by allowing you to organize tasks by due date, owner, priority, and more.
3. Effective Resource Allocation
Another great benefit to using project management tools is that they help showcase your team’s availability, workload distribution, and skill sets.
Project managers are able to create and assign tasks to the right team members based on their availability and expertise. This can also help with document and file management which is essential for storing and sharing project-related documents and files with team members. Management in these areas helps to ensure that all team members know where a document is housed, which stage it’s in, and what still needs to be added. This develops a collaborative environment and helps projects to move along in a more timely manner.
4. Progress Reporting
Many project management systems also have the ability to create progress reports. Reports allow you to consistently monitor your project scope, time, budget, and progress at any time.
Utilizing reports can help align your team and stakeholders with a common view of projects in order to effectively identify problems and communicate the status of projects and tasks.
Stakeholders can also quickly interpret the reports they’re given, no matter which project they’re looking at. This is beneficial for effective decision-making, prevention of project delays, and accountability.
Top Project Management Software:
Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of these software systems, let’s take a look at some of the top project management platforms for your company. ⬇️
1. Asana
Asana is a project management tool that provides teams with the ability to track their upcoming tasks, receive status updates on their projects, and execute work in real-time. That’s why at 1 Bold Step, we utilize Asana to manage both our client's projects and our own workload.
Asana lets us know who is doing what, and by when. Communication is focused and actionable and we always know the status of work across the team.
Asana also offers features such as remote work, strategic planning, organization, task management, to-do lists, team and project calendars, team communication, and more. The pricing ranges from Basic at $0 to Business at $24.99/month.
2. Monday
Monday integrates with various third-party applications and tools which allow team members to connect their existing software. This platform offers a unique feature that has pre-built integrations with popular apps like Slack and Google Drive.
This software provides customization options to accommodate specific needs, customizable boards, automated workflows, visualizations for effective task and project management, and more.
3. Basecamp
Basecamp is an all-in-one solution with an emphasis on communication and client collaboration. Because of its comprehensive features, the software eliminates the need for multiple tools.
The platform facilitates transparent communication and collaboration where they offer features for task management, team messaging, and file sharing. There are also useful features like built-in group chat with the members of your team.
4. Airtable
Airtable offers a flexible and customizable interface for teams to organize and manage their data, projects, and workflows.
This platform allows users to create custom databases and provides a user-friendly experience. It combines the functionalities of a spreadsheet and a database, allowing teams to manage projects, track tasks, and collaborate in a flexible and visual manner.
These are just four of the top project management systems available. There are others in the marketplace as well. Whenever looking into a project management system, make sure to get a demo to help determine the features that would work best for your team.
The struggle is over!
Embracing a project management tool is crucial for companies aiming to enhance collaboration, efficiency, and organization. But perhaps even more important is your process for using the tool that you purchase. Just adding software never made anyone more efficient. You have to use it! We recommend Agile Marketing (and agile in general). Check out our other blogs on that topic for more information:
- What is Agile Marketing?
- How 1 Bold Step Executes Our Marketing Plans
- Maximizing Your Investment in Marketing: Habits For Continuous Improvement
Ready to get your marketing organized? Feel free to contact us and we'd be happy to help!
