How to choose a task manager for your project?
Today, I will share you an experience about working in several task management tools and you will try to choose one for yourself.
For today there are many task management tools that people can use in everyday life, work or school. Task managers helping us to be more disciplined, organized and teach us to manage our time.
As a project managers we need to control hours of our team, external developers and ourselves. Perfect time management — it’s a main goal of all PM’s and Top-managers. In this article, I will not teach you how to manage your own time but help you to manage your team. For a managing own time management, I recommend you to read this book: Stephen Kovey: First Things First.
1. Basecamp 3
Basecamp — it is one of the most popular systems for task tracking. In Basecamp development process was born Ruby on Rails Framework that we know today. I said “one of the most popular”, because they have a 2,5 millions of signed up accounts.
Inside you project, you can manage some activities like “To Do” lists, Schedule, Files and other staff.
Automatic Check-ins — very useful function for a young startup team or a big project with many stakeholders. Create a questions, schedule questions to needed team members, check answers ad get statistics.
Message board — good tool for sharing news or new actions inside the team.
About Reports — here we have a simple reports mostly by Activity and Overdue. You havent ability to check Burndown Charts or Time Tracking information.
Here is no any Roadmap Building Tools and any other tools for make a Project Plans, but it is still good task managers for Small and Medium teams.
Price: 30-days Trial/99$ per month, Unlimited Users
For who: Small/Medium Teams
Positive: Simple Regitsration, Free Trial up to 30 days, Built-in Chat, To Do lists, Common Message Board, Scheduling Polls, Desktop and Mobile Applications
Negative: Burndown charts and other useful reports is unavailable, a lack of built-in Timetracking tools, doesnt exist for managin Largescale projects, Non-optimized web-version
2. Google Sheets
It’s is our old good Excel documents, there are migrated to Google Online Documents, named Google Spreadsheets.
Google Sheets — the most customizable tool that we ever seen, because all workflow and workprocesses you can manage by yourself. You can decide that you need a Change Log or you need a custom Project Plan. And you can do all of it with this sheets, just start to make a tables :)
Price: Free
For who: Small/Medium Teams
Positive: Full customization, easy to share with others, easy editing
Negative: Without reports, without notifications, without assignment, without statistic
You can download used Google Sheet here. More Google Sheets Templates.
3. Trello
Trello — one of the best management tools that I ever used. It’s so much simple and customizable system. In Trello you’re able to create a “To Do” boards (like Kanban boards).
It’s easy to manage issues, make a notifications, schedule due date for each issue. Also, Trello have a many integrations like Slack, Bitbucket, Jira, Hip Chat etc. This system haven’t native Reports, Charts, Callendars and others useful built-in tools, but you can search some plugins for that.
Price: Several Plans (Free included)
For who: All
Positive: Easy Kanban Board, Due date, Notifications, Files Attachments
Negative: Missed Reports and any statistic tools
4. Jira Software
One of the first task managers that is used all over the world. So, I think this is the best task manager for a medium and big teams, who using Scrum, Agile, CI, TDD and other methodologies for deliver and develop. In 2015 Jira Software has added a workflow templates like: Sales processes, Recruitment & HR processes, Kanban Development, Scrum Development, Waterfall development etc.
In Jira Software you can find a many features, like organizing team roles, manage access levels, share projects to clients, manage project budget (Hawk Budget pug-in).
Price: Pay for User
For who: All
Positive: Customizing, scalable, Reports, Timetracking, Roadmaps, Sprints Planning
Negative: None
