Project Management Tools You Need to Know

By: Anna Cave

The top tools you need to manage your team, especially when remote work is the norm.

Slack: Slack is a great messaging tool, especially for big teams. It is easy for information to get lost in email inboxes, but not when Slack pulls everything together in one place. Slack allows you to create separate channels to organize different smaller teams or conversations. This keeps all important information together, so you don't have to sort through different platforms of communication, because when used right, everything you need to know should be on that channel. Slack also allows for messaging outside the channels, whether that is one-on-one or in other groups. Slack makes it easy to integrate different services onto their platforms, like Google Drive and Office 365 which make it incredibly easy to share different files. This is great for analytics, because it makes it simple to share data and communicate about it on a clean, organized platform.

Trello: When I think of Trello, I think of one, big to-do list for the team. Trello allows you to create boards (similar to Slack's channel feature) for different teams that feature lists and cards. Lists divide the board into sections and cards feature individual items or tasks that need to be addressed. The lists are a great way to get a big picture view at a glance, and when you click on the card you can see more details about the individual task without cluttering the full view of the board. Trello allows you to assign members of your team to cards and give each card a due date. Trello is an amazing tool for planning analytics projects that really helps people stay in the loop and on track, and it has been used by members of Live Oak Communications at Elon University to organize tasks among team members.

Asana: Asana makes it very easy to map out the details of a project in one space, and it is an incredibly visually pleasing platform. It has boards, which look very similar to Trello's platforms, to organize work tasks in columns. For people who would rather see when things need to be done, Asana's platform also allows you look at tasks in the timeline view to make sure you're hitting every deadline. Asana has a feature that allows you to create rules for some of your routine tasks so that Asana can do them for you, which can save you tons of time. This rules can be things like moving tasks to the project they belong in or setting due dates. This may not sound like a ton of work from Asana's end, but speeding up those little things can really keep you from burning out. And if you don't see a layout you like? Asana allows you to make custom templates to make sure you can best organize your team.

There are tons of project management tools out there, but these are just a few of our favorites! For a more comprehensive list of project management tools and their uses, check out Scoro's updated list for 2020.