Team project management software

December 9, 2020 11:04 AM

My work has shifted things around and we're gonna have a lot projects happening in 2021, almost weekly, with different, but sometimes overlapping deadlines. We'll need to track who's doing what and when. What do you suggest for a team of roughly 20 people? We've been pretty small and not used to project management, if that matters. Most of these people aren't going to be tech savvy.
posted by Brandon Blatcher to Technology (13 answers total)

Monday.com. It's very visually easy to grasp, and I'm a big convert. I used to always advocate for Asana but I think for non-tech savvy people, Monday.com is the way to go.
posted by seemoorglass at 11:05 AM on December 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Trello is probably the simplest.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:09 AM on December 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

Basecamp might be a good choice. You can get a personal account and test drive it.
posted by pyro979 at 11:17 AM on December 9, 2020

Another vote for Basecamp.
posted by sideshow at 11:25 AM on December 9, 2020

Response by poster: Oh, the sales staff actually uses Trello for posting what they're ads need. It seems somewhat limited for longer or larger projects though.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:31 AM on December 9, 2020

how do you communicate and plan stuff now? most of the communication and planning features of everything are all found in Office, as much as I hate to say that...chats, files, kanban boards, everything all the semi-freeware apps have.

what software can never do is fix a process though--so think process before you buy software. Do you need a bulletin board? a slick way to facilitate agile/scrum methodology?

and, most importantly, work as a team on that process, and adoption, and involve the people most likely to be opinionated and complain--otherwise people won't use/like it/feel like it helps them.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:38 AM on December 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: how do you communicate and plan stuff now?

Just by email and/or meeting, with the sales team using Trello for their client's projects. Essentially it's four departments, with Production, Sales, Editorial, and Administration. The latter three usually start any projects, while production services all three departments.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:42 AM on December 9, 2020

Monday.com would work well.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:55 AM on December 9, 2020

Do you already use Harvest? Do you need to see people's individual work allocation, or do you need to make tickets to organize work to be done?
posted by Medieval Maven at 12:09 PM on December 9, 2020

Our team, almost exactly the same size, uses a combination of (1) narrative project plans in shared-edit cloud documents and (2) Gantt charts in shared-edit cloud Excel spreadsheets to specify ownership, milestones, and the flow of responsibilities that are described in those project plan documents.

Trello proved useless to us, as did every other targeted planning and coordination software.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 2:23 PM on December 9, 2020

I looked at a whole bunch of different task and project management tools, and Teamwork was the one that met the most of my requirements. I think we're approaching two years of using it, and I'm still really happy with it. It seemd to be able to manage our particular combination of project tasks and non-project tasks (many of them recurring) better than all the others.
posted by FishBike at 2:45 PM on December 9, 2020

Another vote for Teamwork, we're a team of ~20 doing software development and it fits our needs pretty well.
posted by each day we work at 10:55 PM on December 9, 2020

I liked Harvest and Monday.com the most with my small team.
posted by Kitchen Witch at 12:07 AM on December 10, 2020