Our 4 favourite PM tools
Are you a Project Manager and sometimes feel like everything needs to be actioned at the same time with the same deadline and with the same priority level?
When it comes to managing projects and making things happen, it can often feel like quite an act to keep all the plates spinning at the same time.
From keeping the team up-to-date on status, to working out a mutual time for a team meeting, yes, both are important when trying to keep things moving along in the right direction, but that’s not it. There are the additional requirements of organising your thoughts so that you can plan the project and manage timelines and when you have projects to deliver with multiple stakeholders involved such as digital developers and programmers, there is the additional requirement of reporting and discussing issues during the development phase.
Here at Indigo Ignite, we believe in keeping things as simple and streamlined as possible so we always give different tools a chance to prove themselves, to say there are many, is quite an understatement. Over time, we’ve tried a variety of tools to help manage projects and these are our favourites at the moment for each of these tasks:
- Availability for meetings
- Project planning and timelines management
- Organising your thoughts and tasks
- Reporting issues and discussion board
1. Availability for meetings
– Doodle
Doodle simplifies the process of scheduling events, whether they’re board meetings, team meetings or department meetings. This smart assistant saves time for millions of people worldwide and in the end, it brings people together. Doodle is free and doesn’t require registration by either the initiator or the participants of a meeting poll.
2. Project plans and timelines
– Smartsheet
The work collaboration tool for businesses of all sizes. Regarded for its online project management, collaboration, and file sharing features, Smartsheet’s intuitive spreadsheet-like app is used broadly to track and manage diverse types of work including: team projects and task lists, customer information, sales pipelines, event schedules, and business processes.
3. Organising your thoughts and tasks
– Trello
Trello makes it easy to organise anything with anyone. Drop the lengthy email threads, out-of-date spreadsheets, no-longer-so-sticky notes, and clunky software for managing your projects and get Trello, the easy, free, and visual way to organise your important stuff.
4. Reporting issues and discussion board
– Basecamp
An excellent tool that makes project management and collaboration easy. Accessed and managed online, so none of the software or data is actually stored on your computer. Basecamp helps you manage multiple projects with employees and freelancers with to-do lists, file sharing, and calendars.
Have you used any of these before?
Let us know we’d love to hear how you rate these and if you’ve found something better than these choice tools.
