5 Project Management Tools
The industry is flooded with different resources created to enhance project management. To help you narrow down your search we have selected our top five favorite tools. We use these platforms to help our agency run efficiently and enhance our teams’ collaboration. Although, these recommendations are based off of our experience as creatives, they can be utilized in several different ways across multiple industries.
1. Project Planning
We work in a fast-paced environment with several moving parts so we use Basecamp to direct the traffic of our agency. It helps our accounts team successfully manage and organize project schedules with several features that we use on a daily basis. The features used most frequently are the calendar for maintaining milestones established in project plans, and messages for team collaboration and deliverable reviews.
2. Time Tracking
Because time is money in the creative industry (and most others as well), we use Harvest to manage project budgets and track our progress. It is extremely user-friendly and allows our team to submit their time with the click of a button. Harvest also provides valuable information on tasks, expenses and the duration of project deliverables through the reporting feature.
3. Team Collaboration
Our agency is full of visual creatives, so why not work within a visual platform? Marqueed allows our team to display deliverables, collaborate and discuss next steps prior to presenting our work to clients. It is also a great tool to communicate client feedback in an efficient and easy way after a presentation.
4. Project Status Updates
Each week our team gets together for department meets to review the status of each project and discuss upcoming milestones. We use ProjectFlow as a tool to track projects in each phase of our process. ProjectFlow assists us with the management of traffic by looking at the big picture, from on-boarding projects to launching projects.
5. Brainstorming
During the discover phase of each project our creative team will focus on brainstorming and research. Popplet is a great tool to use because it compiles all of our thoughts, ideas and inspiration in a visual format that allows us to organize and record brainstorming sessions.
Tags: brainstorming, project management tools, project planning, team collaboration, time trackingCategorized in: Articles