For your agency to be on the right track to success, organization is key. From scheduling meetings to planning tasks, it’s essential to adopt a cohesive method to keep everything in line. This means that you will always be prepared to change schedules at short notice and accommodate potential last-minute urgent tasks.
As your organization is growing, your team is expanding and your clients are increasing, you might find yourself trying to juggle several things at once and getting nowhere. This overwhelming urgency to complete tasks can often leave people feeling stuck and unproductive. Sometimes you may get to the end of your day and still have a whole list of tasks to complete, trust me, we’ve been there. Instead of being hard on yourself, check out some project management tools you can utilize to maximize your productivity.
But where?
To save you hours of scrolling online, here are 7 of the best project management tools that could make the world of difference to your agency.
Slack
Let’s start simple. As every business owner is aware, communication is the best free tool we can all use, whether it’s keeping clients in the loop or discussing projects with team members. A tried and tested cult favorite to keep that discourse flowing is Slack.
Slack is a messaging program designed specifically for the workplace as it allows you to share large files, create group channels and automate messages to your employees such as reminding them to update a spreadsheet. Another useful feature on slack is ‘Huddle’, which allows you to call your colleagues at the click of a button when you need a quick 5 minutes to discuss a task. Through this, you can save time instead of switching to another platform for the sake of a short conversation. Slack can help your team stay in sync and coordinate work seamlessly.
Calendly
At any position in a company, your day-to-day plan will inevitably include at least one meeting. Imagine how much easier it would be to manage your time if you could schedule calls with one email. Meet Calendly, a free appointment scheduling platform that allows others to see your availability with a single click. Calendly may also be linked to your Google, Outlook, Office 365, or iCloud calendar to automatically sync and track your existing appointments. Instead of emailing back and forth and scouring through calendars, you can send your availability alongside a Calendly link to your client so they can book a meeting with you.
Workboard
Whilst using Slack is essential for communicating, you still need a platform to host all of your tasks in one place. Workboard is a tool for increasing strategic planning, cooperation, and communication, as well as tracking team objectives and performance. This platform offers a wide range of features from tracking objectives and key results to assigning action items to your colleagues. The user interface also allows you to view your weekly, daily, and monthly task list alongside any scheduled meetings. Through Workboard you can track every movement on projects to ensure it is ready to meet the given deadlines. Incomplete to-do lists will soon be a thing of the past!
Monday
If you’re looking for a versatile project planning tool, here it is. Monday.com can be used to manage projects but also operates as a CRM to manage your advertising campaigns, check for bugs, handle customer projects, and oversee video creation. Furthermore, this platform permits the user to track development progress for projects and resource allocation. To make Monday.com a perfect fit for your company, the dashboard can be personalized to produce a clear overview of what’s going on. This customizability helps you get what you both want and need from Monday.com.
ActiveCollab
Do you ever find yourself about to assign a task that needs several sub-tasks? ActiveCollab is the answer to organizing this. This project management solution allows you to create parent and child tasks to maintain a methodological approach to projects. Tasks can be filtered by the due date, assigned users, or custom labels so you can find and track task progress within seconds. Regarding overwhelming to-do lists, you can create weekly sprints on ActiveCollab that are reviewed weekly to prevent backlog.
Teamwork
Clients. They are a huge part of the success of your agency, so as expected managing all of their tasks is a priority. Everything you need to operate your client services is in Teamwork, from billing to time tracking to unrestricted client access. Often clients are investing both large amounts of time and money into projects, therefore Teamwork is the best project management tool to grant them access to the progress of their projects. The Gantt chart on each project illustrates a clear image of how many hours have been spent on each task and the progress made. Often having a visual helps team members stay on track at a glance.
Paymo
Working online can easily lead you to lose track of time. Without knowing it, you might spend hours on one task at a time, reducing your productive output and creating a build-up of work. Paymo can help you to track your hours throughout the day according to each task. Though instant communication can be useful, it can also prove to be a huge distraction, especially when dealing with complicated tasks. With the comment section of each task, you can asynchronously keep your team members, or those involved in certain projects, up to date without expecting immediate replies. Paymo also uses emojis to react to messages to help you secure approval in one click.
Overall, organizing yourself can only lead to success for both your business and your clients. These 7 platforms are just a handful of free project management tools available online to help your agency thrive.
Remember to let us know how much of a difference organization and project management have made to your business, we can’t wait to hear!