Running massive projects with a huge team can be a proper nightmare. Sure, if they were all in your office, you could have a massive whiteboard in the middle of the room with everyone’s name written on it, but what do you do when your team is scattered across the world?
Well, in that case, your best bet is to start using a project management tool. Here’s what these tools bring to the table and why picking one and migrating your entire project there is such a good idea.
Project management tools can help you coordinate a team across the world and different time zones and make it easy for them to work on the same project. The platform provides a common workspace for everyone, which creates an opportunity for a quick exchange of ideas.
Managing your project is a lot easier when you have a centralized platform storing all the interactions and documents. You can insist on this becoming an official channel where all the communication regarding tasks and projects must take place (instead of it being scattered across various tools and personal DMs).
With the majority of project management tools, you can actually restrict access to people by selectively adding them to different boards. This means that you can segment the project based on one’s role.
This is especially important because some of your employees are working remotely. You have no idea who’s logging in from unsecured networks or from suspicious devices. This way, you’re compartmentalizing, and you’ll keep any problem secure. In other words, it’s a great way to improve your cyber security.
With a project management tool, everyone can see what’s on their plate for the current day, week, and month. When more people are participating in the same project, everyone can check the status of the project and the files.
The most important thing about this is that people on the same card/project have insight into other people’s work. Everything on these platforms leaves a digital footprint, which means that it’s easy to diagnose and perform version checks.
Project management tools are mobile-friendly and have an amazing system of real-time updates and notifications. This means that your team can receive a notification regarding any comment, update, status change, or upload on a platform.
Most importantly, you can integrate the majority of these tools with other tools, as well. This means that you will also receive an email notification, potentially even a notification on Slack or any other platform you use.
Project management tools are made to be flexible. You see, neither Basecamp, Trello, nor Monday are made to work for a single industry or business type. They’re popular in a wide variety of industries and can be quite useful even for offline businesses and organizations.
As for scalability, it’s better to have it all centralized before your business outgrows its current organizational needs. You can always start more projects or boards, which would allow you to compartmentalize things and make it easier to keep an eye on everything. The fact that these platforms are simpler means that onboarding is shorter, which further encourages bringing in more people.
Ultimately, the best project management platforms are merely empty canvases for you to organize the way you want. Or, the way your project requires. The UI for the majority of these platforms is simple, which means that it doesn’t take that long to get used to them. Moreover, the tools in question are easy to integrate with other tools. Thus, ensuring they’ll fit any business model and organization.
