4 Tools Every Project Manager Should Know About

… And One We Made Ourselves

We’ve been taking a long, hard look at the tools we use to manage projects and trawling the internet for the best software out there. But when there are so many products to choose from, how do you know which to go for?

Being a creative agency, we needed to strike a balance between implementing process to improve efficiency, while allowing people the freedom to explore creatively. And with 3 offices across the UK and Asia, we had a pretty demanding list of requirements.

“We found that the more generalist tools that promised to do everything did some things well, but other things weren’t flexible to our needs”

We found that the more generalist tools that promised to do everything did some things well, but other things weren’t flexible to our needs.

Instead, we decided to select a suite of tools that each focused on doing one thing and doing it well, and made sure that each tool we selected had an API so we could add custom features and link everything together.

Ultimately, our aim is to create a scalable, flexible project management system that can grow with us as we expand. Here’s our guide to the best tech out there for productivity and project management.

The best for to-do lists: To-doist

It took a lot to persuade me that good-old-fashioned pen and paper wasn’t the most effective way to keep on top of my to-do list. Many laughed as they walked past my desk covered in post-it notes. But then I downloaded todoist and saved myself hours of writing out to-do lists. Why is it so useful?

· Beautiful design — means you actually want to use it and makes even the most chaotic to-do lists look sleek and under control

· Flexible and multi-featured — you can organise tasks by project, set reminders, add sub-tasks and schedule recurring jobs

· You even get Karma points based on how much you complete

Goodbye post-it notes; your time is done.

The best for collaborative task management: Trello

Keeping track of all the tasks for every team member on a project can be a daunting task. Too many times I’ve seen people sifting through thousands of emails trying to find that one comment they remember being made… by they’re-not-sure-who, not-sure-when. Feedback gets lost and actions are missed because no one has a clear list of who’s responsible for what. Trello streamlines the whole process and makes it much easier for everyone involved. Here are the features we find most useful:

· Central hub — takes away the need for so many emails and holds all the information on a project

· Card view — conversations around a particular feature are all held in one view which makes things easy for everyone to find

· Shared ownership — everyone in the team can manage their own tasks and workflow

The way we work with Trello is to open a board for each project, with a few standard lists covering tasks in discussion, a prioritised backlog, work in progress, items in testing and — last but not least — the holy grail of satisfaction, our ‘done’ list.

Sign up here with your team and start feeling on top of your tasks.

The best for timelines: Tom’s planner

Gantt charts are every Project Manager’s best friend and worst enemy. All too often those hours spent perfecting your timeline in excel end up wasted when the project kicks off 2 weeks late and the scope changes 3 times before you start. The tool we use for our gantt charts at Mohawk is called Tom’s Planner.

· It makes it easy to create a visually pleasing gantt chart — no need for everyone to understand complex excel formulas to create their own timeline

· Quick to create a professional-looking PDF to share with clients

· Simple to update when you need to change dates and deliverables

· Very intuitive and easy to use

Check it out here and say goodbye to (some of) your excel headaches.

The best for scheduling: Float

One of the biggest points of contention in any agency is who is working on what. The schedule is something that everyone in the agency needs to be able to tap in to — so we knew that whatever tool we chose, it had to be something simple and easy to use, that didn’t take hours of training to roll out.

We chose Float as our scheduling tool because it focused on doing one thing, and doing that one thing very well — scheduling resource.

· Quick for our Head of Creative Services (who manages the agency-wide schedule and is in charge of approving/rejecting all resource bookings) to update

· Different detail for different users — from developers who want to focus solely on their own tasks, to Project Managers who need a global overview

· Very intuitive to use — simple and slick UI which, for us, put it ahead of competitors such as Resource guru and Hub planner

· Quick data entry — the information you have to input is minimal and there are no barriers to requesting resource — this is where other tools such as 10000ft fell down as they had a more convoluted set of steps

· Has an API — this lets us tie Float into our other tools and build on its functionality — which made Float a clear winner compared to tools such as Forecast

The best for joining up all the dots: Tipi

While Float is great, it doesn’t do everything. When a team of Project Managers all have access to edit the schedule, it can quickly turn into a messy business. Projects get moved around, resource is under or over-booked and everyone prioritises their own projects.

We needed a gate keeper system that allowed Project Managers to request time but only allowed our Head of Creative Services the power to accept (and schedule) or decline requests. So we decided to build our own bespoke layer on to Float — a tool we call Tipi.

It’s a simple and flexible layer that will tie in with all the other tools we use and provide a holistic overview of our entire agency ecosystem. For now, we’ve focused on tying this in with Float, adding a forecast view that gives a long term indication of resource availability.

The big idea is to link this up with our sign off and estimating tools very soon, joining up all the dots to make sure there’s no duplication of work for our Project team and ensure that it’s easy for everyone to understand what’s happening on each project.

Watch this space for more details on Tipi — we’ll be sharing a sneak preview shortly.

We’d love to hear your comments and thoughts — are there any tools out there which have revolutionised how you manage projects? Let us know in the comments section below.

Alison Retz is Senior Project Manager at Mohawk