Project Management Tools
An overview of some of the latest Project Management tools
Last updated on December 5th, 2020
Good project management is about listening to opinions, understanding problems, asking questions, motivating team members and working out solutions. No technology can replace those core skills, but there are a whole range of tools available that can make managing a project easier and more efficient.
I’ve tried out a fair few tools during my project management career and stuck with some of the best. Here is an overview of the tools I use with my teams during the project lifecycle.
Smartsheet
A couple of years ago I used MS Project to build project plans. It was somewhat clunky. Every time a small detail on the plan changed the entire timeline had to be exported as an excel doc, formatted and then resent to the client.
Luckily with Smartsheet all of that manual process is a distant nightmare. The programme is web-based so when you update the timelines your client can see the effect of any changes in real-time. Team members can also collaborate on Smartsheet which is very useful if you have more than one DPM on a project or providing holiday cover etc.
The learning curve with Smartsheet is straightforward, although there are one or two quirks that still need working on.
Trello
There comes a time in every project where a Digital Project Manager needs to get very granular with tasks to push the project over the finishing line. When that time comes Trello is the tool I turn to. Tasks are listed out on cards and each card can be assigned to a team member with a due date and attachments added. When tasks are completed cards can be moved to a different list (e.g. ‘For QA’) or archived. The user interface is super simple and a Trello app is available for IOS and Android.
Slack
Slack is a project communication tool that is fast becoming the main method of communication in many organisations (overtaking even email in some).
Slack users can join project specific channels or have one-on-one conversations. Dedicated automated channels can be set-up that integrate with issues raised on JIRA boards and development build pipelines. It also has video calling and screen sharing functionality.
While Slack works brilliantly for team communication, it can still be more useful/effective to send more formal project updates via email. That way you can more directive about who needs to read it.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a tracking application that provides visual overviews of users interaction with a website. The main views are heat map; showing where users click, and scroll map; showing which parts of the page users spend the most time on. You can set-up separate snapshots for desktop, tablet and mobile.
Heat maps are particularly useful when doing UX reviews and design refreshes, as they can highlight where ‘mistakes’ were made in the initial design. We always include a review of the Crazy Egg data when briefing in design teams.
The downside of crazy egg is that it can’t really track websites that use tabs, carousels or parallax scrolling very well. Hopefully there will be an upgrade to this somewhere in the near future.
Azure Boards
Microsoft Azure Boards is a planning and tracking tool for software development teams. The product can be configured for any project set-up and comes with built-in scrum boards. Team members can create user stories, bugs and epics with all the usual fields including tags, story points, iterations (e.g. sprint 3) and related work.
For projects that have multiple work items the built in ‘queries’ function allows an easy way to filter specific views. For example a user can set-up a query which shows just work items that have a specific tag e.g. ‘UI Design required’.
Azure Boards also have multiple extensions that can be added. We have been using the retrospective and calendar extensions.