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The common tools used to implement agile projects

Agility has emerged as one of the most popular project management methodologies in the digital age. But more often than not, an agile project can be efficiently executed only with certain supporting tools. Let’s look at the common tools that are used for agile implementation.

Velocity chart

Velocity refers to the amount of work that a development team performs in a sprint. A velocity chart, as the name suggests, quantifies the velocity of a team, so that you could estimate accurately the amount of work that could be expected to be finished in the upcoming sprints. The numeric value that you get in a velocity chart is the sum of all the finished stories in the sprint, and also the ones that are yet to be completed.

Multiple factors would influence these estimates, including the number of hours for each story and also their individual business value. It is an invaluable tool when you need to figure out how long it will possibly take for the team to finish all the sprints that make up the project. As project managers would surely know, that’s something which is crucial to know, to measure if the project could be delivered on time.

Visual Studio Team Services

Many software development projects make use of Microsoft’s Visual Studio platform. If that is true with your project as well, the Visual Studio Team Services or VSTS could be an ideal tool for you to use. For one thing, the tool integrates seamlessly with the Visual Studio platform. The ultimate agenda with the platform is to manage a software project easily. The tool is free to use for up to five users, with certain features that need to be paid for. One main reason why this tool is useful in software projects is that you could easily trace any changes that have been made in a software code, which makes identifying bugs and optimizing the code more painless.

Axosoft

Axosoft if a tool which is useful in agile projects, particularly for identifying bugs in the software that is being developed. The tool also helps create a scrum framework while planning agile projects. With its agile-centric features, the tool helps you finish projects within the allotted budget, helping you keep track of the project’s progress, so it finishes before the deadline. Of course, given how it helps keep codes bug-free, you can be sure that the end product is devoid of errors. With Axosoft, you can get a progress report for each and every stage of the project’s workflow. Each of these project reports is rather exhaustive so that you could easily assess the quality of the tasks that are executed in each phase of the workflow. This also helps you decide whether you should intervene when bottlenecks arise.

LeankitKanban

You probably know that the Kanban board is a visual tool that is commonly employed in agile tools, which gives a pictorial representation of the tasks in progress. It also gives a clear view of what tasks are yet to be started. In many cases, the Kanban board is a physical board that is fixed to a common wall which could be accessed by the entire team. LeankitKanban is a virtual card system that maps the principles of the Kanban board onto the digital realm. Aside from helping you schedule tasks to be performed, it also helps you keep track of the workflow using an easy-to-use visual interface. Another use of the tool is to optimize the workflow based on visual information pertaining to bottlenecks and other problems that you might glean from it. It also makes it easier for team members to collaborate with each other. Since everyone can see the progress of tasks at any given moment, one could see if someone is struggling with their tasks and could step in to help them if they have the resources for that. LeankitKanban can also be integrated easily with other systems, so implanting it to be a part of how your agile projects function is as easy as it gets.

Active Collab

One of the main working principles of agility is its ethos of close collaboration between the development team and the client for whom the product is being developed. In traditional project management systems, the client provides the requirements and once the development team has decided on a course to deliver the product, the client pretty much stays out of the picture. However, in agility, the client could get the chance to provide their feedback after every product iteration. This has two advantages. One is that the development team may get insights on improving the product that they may not have thought of themselves. The other is that you could be sure that the product you are developing is exactly the one that the client requires. This avoids having to rework a product after final delivery. An active Collab is a tool that particularly helps in this context. Using it, you could easily control what parts of the project’s progress different users- including clients- could view. You also get the provisions to keep the clients updated with messages and share other information that is relevant to them. But that’s not to say that the sole purpose of Active Collab is keeping your clients in the loop (important as that is). Far from it. You could, for instance, plan a project in detail using  Active Collab. Also, you can share documents and other files that could help team members finish their tasks, using the platform. The platform also enables you to track the time that team members take to finish their tasks. In fact, you could even track the expense of an ongoing project across its multiple phases. The tool also supports collaboration- you could make use of its many features to brainstorm ideas with your team members.

Smartsheet

Smarsheet is a useful tool for agile projects, especially from a collaboration perspective. Using it, you could define how exactly the team members should collaborate across the duration of a project. It’s also a handy tool to plan events related to the project. Another way in which Smartsheet becomes useful is in tracking the efficacy of marketing campaigns. You could define teams inside the Smarthsheet, and also the projects and tasks on which each team should work together.

MeisterTask

MeisterTask is yet another tool that’s used in many agile projects. It’s a task management platform which is based on the cloud. You wouldn’t have to worry about losing any of the information that you feed into it as everything will be backed up in the cloud. The tool supports projects carried out by teams of different sizes- from small to large. Like with some of the other tools that have been mentioned here, you could track the time that team members spend on tasks using this tool as well. You could also generate reports regarding the project’s progress easily using this tool. These reports give you a good idea of how the project is progressing and also can be shared with other team members so that they could also be updated with information relevant to the project.

The tool can also be seamlessly integrated with other tools including GitHub and Slack. While that’s certainly a useful feature, it also points at some limitations of the tools as it lacks all the necessary features that you may wish for holistic project management. You can get the app for free for iOS and Windows.

Binfire

Binfire is a collaboration tool which helps with agile project management. Team members could use the different features in the tool to plan a project. The planning can be done to a reasonable degree of detail. Once the project starts, you could keep track of its progress using Binfire. Also, the tool offers features that can be wielded to efficiently coordinate the different team members so that their actions lead to the completion of the project.

You could set up milestones for all projects that you are managing, Tasks could be distributed amongst the relevant team members. A list of tasks that are yet to be performed could easily be maintained, serving as a quick reference when you need to know how much more needs to be done before the product could be delivered. In almost all projects, team members would require certain reference documents and files for the efficient completion of the project. To support this, Binfire provides online file storage, so that the team members could access the relevant files whenever they want to. Another useful feature that the tool provides is the virtual whiteboard. As the name implies, this is a digital whiteboard- a space that could be used by team members during brainstorming sessions and other meetings. The tool also comes with decent set of features specifically meant to aid project management. For instance, you could not only create tasks but also sub-tasks under each task. This is a feature particularly useful in complex projects involving large numbers of tasks and sub-tasks. The tool also helps you view and manage the dependencies that each task comes with.  

DailyScrum

DailyScrum is a virtual tool that has been developed specifically to design and manage agile projects. Using the tool, you could plan for individual components of an agile project like the release of the project. One of the most useful features is sprint planning by which you could plan individual sprints in detail. Given how sprints form the centrepiece of any agile project, this is a significant feature. You could track the tasks in a project quite easily using DailyScrum. It’s also easy to review the project’s progress using the tool. You could easily arrange the tasks according to a list of priorities and see to it that the tasks are finished in the required order. If there are any bottlenecks, you could identify them easily as such scenarios would inevitably reflect in a task getting delayed, which you could monitor on DailyScrum. You could then take the relevant actions to solve the bottleneck before it delays the task by too much.

Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a project management tool that is especially suited for developing digital products. The core idea of the tool is to help developers create apps fast without sacrificing the quality of the product, that too at fewer expenses.

The tool gives you an array of features to help you meet these objectives. For instance, it comes embedded with something called ueXceler. It’s a methodology for agile projects that has theory, principles and useful tools including storyboards and user story maps. The tool also helps you create a visual model of the database using the Entity Relationship Diagram. To this end, the platform also brings you the ORM Diagram tool. Just as you can visually model the database, you could model the process too with this tool. For this, you get a set of tools including a Process map diagram and a Data flow diagram.

The platform also can create an object-relational mapping layer. This layer helps you access the DB in an object-oriented manner while you are developing the software code. Among other features, the layer contains a connection pool and transaction support. It even helps you customize SQL statements. Further, the tool also provides various document templates. You could customize many of these templates as well. This feature helps you easily document the specifications of the software products that you develop.

Sprints

A sprint is a tool that is designed to help agile teams deliver high-quality products without overshooting the deadline. The key advantage of the tool- created by Zoho sticks- is its simplicity. You could perform multiple functions related to designing and implementing an agile project from a single space using this tool. Among other things, you could create user stories and add estimates using this tool. The tool has an app version for both iOS and Android. This ensures that you can keep engaging with the project even while you are on the move.

The tool offers a high level of customizability on its scrum board. You could tweak the labels and fields on the board according to the requirements of your project. You could also easily reshuffle the priorities of the items in the scrum broad. To move a task across the board when it is finished, you just click and drag it.

It is also a handy tool to keep track of the progress of tasks in a project. You could assign task priority using the scrum backlog. You can check the progress of tasks in the scrum board and see how the tasks are progressing across time. The tool also makes it super-easy to visualize key metrics and other useful figures using burndown and charts and velocity charts. Another useful feature of Sprints enables you to set up meetings with an individual team member or a group of team members as per the requirement. To learn what tasks each team member is engaged in at any point in time, you can check out the pie charts and other graphs that the tool has. Related to this, you could also track the amount of time team members spent on a task. This feature is particularly useful if the team members are employed on a per-hour basis, and you need to know the exact time they worked to calculate their salary.

I’m Productive

While many project management and tasks management tools are available in the market, one crucial feature that’s missing in most of them is the one which helps you accurately predict the time in which you could deliver a project, based on how the project is currently progressing. You may think that with the tasks-tracking ability that many of the tools have, such a feature would be common. But the surprising truth is that it isn’t. I’m Productive, meanwhile helps me make highly accurate judgments about when the project could be delivered. In fact, the project management tool even incorporates a powerful artificial intelligence which helps you do this. You just need to click on a button to get the estimate. To ensure that the estimate is accurate, the underlying metrics are measured accurately by the system. Let’s take the number of hours each team member spends on a task as an example. I’m Productive makes sure that this metric doesn’t include the break time that someone takes while a task is yet to be finished.

But this perhaps-unique feature aside, there are plenty of other features too that make I’m Productive an ideal project management tool for agile projects. For instance, there are ample features included in the system which support the running of sprints- which are the central aspect of agile projects. As you probably know, sprints are short phases in which a set number of pre-determined tasks are performed by the team members, with a stated objective. This helps ensure that frequent updates can be made to the product. In I’m Productive, you could easily assign tasks to different team members according to the requirements. And once the scrum begins, you could easily track the progress of the task using Kanban board or other relevant tools. The task will be in the in-progress stage at this point. You have provisions to communicate individually with a team member or with the team as a whole so that you could help guide them through performing the tasks. To provide any feedback, you could comment directly on a task. If the team members require documents or other information that they need to refer to complete a task, you could share those in a common space from where all members with the required permission could access them. Once a task is finished, it can be moved into the review phase. But after the review is over, you get two options. The first is to mark it as finished if the task is completed satisfactorily. The second option lets you reassign the task to a team member if there is more to be done on it.

This latter option is particularly useful when some requirement comes mid-sprint in an agile project. That would necessitate the relevant tasks to be redefined and to be performed anew. But that’s just one among the many advantages that this project management tool has from an agility perspective.

You can learn more about how I’m Productive can help you manage your agile projects by visiting their website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Agile metrics that help improve efficiency of a project

Generally speaking, metrics refer to standards that are used for measuring something. Specific to agility, metrics are standards which enable a team to gauge the productivity of teams across sprints. Without proper metrics, it is just about impossible to measure the progress of an agile project. Also, these metrics enable you to accurately access the quality of the software product that is developed.

Pertaining to a team’s productivity, the agile metrics help you understand any issues with processes that may be pulling the team back from hitting the highest performance. For example, velocity metrics will give you a clear data-backed measurement of how productive a team is. If a team falls short in this regard, you could easily find that out using the velocity metrics.

Why are agile metrics important?

Agility works on the principle of continuous improvement or CI. However, continuous improvement cannot be forced upon a team. The different elements of continuous improvement should be embraced by the entire team. For example, you can consider self-improvement which is one element of CI. If a team doesn’t commit to the notion of relentless self-improvement, continuous improvement is impossible.

It is generally observed that teams committed to self-improvement generate better quality results compared to others. However, sustaining self-improvement in a meaningful manner is not easy. More than anything else, you need to have metrics to gauge if the improvement in question is linear and fruitful. Put this way, these metrics have a direct effect on the idea of continuous improvement on which the entire concept of agility rests.

But continuous improvement is not the sole objective of agility. You may even argue that it’s not the sole objective of the process. Agility should also deliver a quality software product as its end result. The best teams always manage to strike a balance between these two components. Without accurate metrics, you wouldn’t be able to measure either of these elements. These metrics help teams manage themselves better, and also deliver value at periodic intervals.

Which are the most important agile metrics?

There are quite a few agile metrics which give you insights about various elements of a project under progress. But some of these metrics are more important than others while some can be considered essential. Let’s look at the ones that would be most important for your project development.

Code coverage

Code coverage is a metric that gives you the total percentage of code generated in a project that is covered in testing. You could use this metric for each build of the software. This helps you give some idea of how a sprint is progressing. After all, the more percentage of code that is tested, the closer you are to the end of a sprint. However, the quality of the code is not the only thing that’s measured in testing. Code coverage doesn’t cover any of the other tests. This means that even if code coverage is high, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the overall quality of the software is high.

Sprint Burndown Report

In agile projects, the fundamental units are the scrum teams. The scrum teams arrange their work processes in such a way that they all work toward the successful completion of a sprint. A sprint is a time-bound set of activities which is designed to produce a specific result (often, the addition of new features in software). Given how a given sprint needs to be finished within a certain period of time, it’s imperative to track the progress of tasks in a sprint periodically.

This is where a sprint burndown report becomes important.

It’s a report that is used to track how the various tasks in a sprint are progressing. The amount of time left to finish the sprint and the volume of work remaining to be finished are two crucial parameters that are measured in this context. In the report, the remaining time would be marked on the X-axis. Meanwhile, you will find the amount of work that’s left to be done on the Y-axis. Typically, time is measured in either hour or in terms of the story points to be finished. At the start of every sprint, the workload is forecasted by the team’s managers. The objective then is to finish the entire workload before the sprint is over.

Quality intelligence

As the name implies, quality intelligence is a metric that helps you gauge the quality of software that is developed in an agile process. In fact, you could say it is the best metric for measuring the product’s quality. Among other things, it helps you identify changes that have been made in the code in the recent past. Sometimes, when new, untested, lines of code are added the overall quality of the software may go down. If that’s the case, then Quality Intelligence will alert you towards the same. It gives you a clear idea of when your team should focus more on testing. 

Velocity

Velocity refers to the average volume of work that a team performs in a sprint. The prevision with which one can forecast the velocity of a team is dependent on how many iterations are performed. Generally, the more the number of iterations, the higher the level of accuracy of the forecast. As in sprint burndown reports, in velocity reports too, time is measured either in hours or using story points as the basis.

Velocity also helps you figure out to what degree a team could finish the tasks in their backlogs. Velocity only increases as time moves along. To make sure that the team’s performance remains consistent across the sprints, tracking velocity is imperative. Simply put, if there is a dip in velocity, it means that something is awry.

Epic and Release burndown

Despite the presence of the word ‘burndown’ in both, epic and release breakdown is quite different from a sprint burndown. A sprint burndown is focused on tracking how an individual sprint progresses. A sprint can have multiple epics and work versions. And it is crucial to track the progress of these. Much as the whole team should be aware of how a sprint is progressing, they should also know the workflow in the epic and version. This is made possible with the Epic and Release burndown charts.

Escaped defects

Though the ideal in software development is a completely bug-free piece of code, that remains but that- an ideal. The ground reality is that every team must contend with bugs and errors in the software that they have developed. Escaped defects are a metric which helps you identify the bugs in the software that is being produced. This helps you gauge the quality of the software. Essentially, the lesser the number of bugs, the higher the quality of the software. Once you identify the bugs using escaped defects, you could take adequate measures to solve them.

Control charts

Control charts are concerned with the time that the teams take to solve a particular problem. Essentially, these charts mark the time duration that a task takes to transition from the “in progress” to “complete” status. Generally, teams that maintain similar cycle times across tasks provide deliveries at predictable times. Also, those teams which generally have shorter cycle times are able to finish more tasks during the course of a sprint. Measuring cycle times helps teams figure out if they are delivering at a reasonable pace or not. And when you introduce any changes in the way the teams function, if you note an increase in cycle times, that’s probably a sign of the newly introduced changes not working out as you hoped. Ideally, the cycle times should be both consistent and short. Control charts record the cycle times in an agile project. It helps you estimate if a team could perform their future tasks within a given time period or not.

Work item age

Work item age refers to the amount of time which passes between the beginning and the end of a specific time. The longer the work item age, the more ‘aged’ the task is considered to be. It’s a handy metric to identify the tasks that are taking unusually long to finish. You can also use it to understand how the current tasks are progressing. You can compare the average work item age in the previous sprints or projects with the current one and get an idea of how well the current iteration is progressing. The tool in agility which gives you the work item age for different tasks is a chart called the ageing work in progress chart.

Cumulative flow diagram

The cumulative flow diagram or CFD is a representation tool that is used in agile projects to ensure that the workflow remains consistent throughout the team. On the CFD, the amount of time taken by the team to perform tasks is represented on the X-axis. The number of issues that need to be tackled by the team, meanwhile, is marked on the Y-axis. If the workflow is ideal, the cumulative flow diagram would run without many deviations from left to right.

The workflow capacity is represented in bands.

If the band is wide at any point, it indicates that the workflow capacity is more than what’s needed to meet the requirement. If this is the case, you could allocate the capacity elsewhere and flatten the workflow. The CFD will give you a visual representation of where the workflow needs to be flattened. This will help you hasten the workflow by allocating capacity appropriately.

The CFD is also an excellent tool in helping you recognize the bottlenecks in the workflow. It could also help you figure out the reasons why the bottlenecks occurred. This will help you take the appropriate measures to solve them.

Lead time

Lead time refers to the time period from when a request is raised to deliver a product to when the required product is delivered. Every step that the team takes to finish product development is factored in while calculating team time. So is the time that would take time to solve bugs in the program code while developing a software product. Since it provides an accurate measure of the time that every process involved in the product’s development takes, it is one of the most useful metrics in understanding if a project is proceeding as planned or not.

 Failed deployments

Failed deployments are yet another metric that helps you measure the quality of the software that is developed in an agile process. It’s an excellent metric when it comes to judging how reliable and predictable the production ecosystem is. It also helps you measure the overall health of the testing environment. The metric also comes in handy when you need to determine just when a sprint is fit to move into production.

Throughput

Throughput refers to the average number of tasks which is finished in a given unit of time. It could also be counted in terms of the number of story points that are finished in an iteration. In the simplest terms, throughput refers to the productivity of the team. It gives you a clear picture of how workflow directly affects the team’s performance. This also helps you gain an understanding of the capacity that your team has to finish tasks, in relation to the volume of requirements that come in. One thing that it doesn’t show is when exactly a task begins being processed.

Value delivered

In this metric, project managers give value to each requirement that comes in. The higher the value assigned to a requirement, the more important it is seen to be for the project. You could represent values either in dollars or points. Once you have assigned values appropriately, the highest priority should be to implement those features with the highest values. Once the project progresses, if this metric reflects an upward trend, it means that the right requirements are executed in a timely manner. A downward trend, on the other hand, means things are not proceeding as well as they should be, and you may need to take the necessary measures to put things in order. A downward trend means that you have prioritized implementing features with lower values.

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score is a metric which helps you quantify how well a customer is likely to recommend the product you have developed to others. Typically, the net promoter score ranges from 0 to 100. As you undoubtedly know, customer loyalty is a crucial element in determining how successful a firm is. Net Promoter Score provides a useful way to measure customer loyalty.

Blocked time

Blocked time is the metric that informs you that a task has been presently ‘blocked’ from being performed due to some dependency. Once the dependency is done, you could shift the card that has been blocked to the other side of the board. To complete the tasks in progress at the earliest, you should resolve the blockers at the earliest.

As you have seen, there are different types of metrics that are used in agile projects to enable efficient project management. While the purpose of the individual metrics may differ from one another, all such metrics are meant for one purpose- which is to ensure that the project proceeds smoothly, delivering a quality product at the end.

However, while these metrics remain useful in managing agile projects, it’s hard to make use of them unless you have the right project management software. As you may have noticed, most if not all of the metrics that we discussed here are dependent on the transparency of the project’s progress. Put another way, if the project management software that you use doesn’t help you track the tasks in progress efficiently, it becomes hard to capture many of the metrics with integrity.

This is one reason why I’m Productive is an important project management software for agile projects. For one thing, you could track the progress of tasks in multiple views according to the requirements of a team. You could assign tasks to different members of the team and tweak the settings so that the relevant team members can all view the progress of tasks. You can follow the progress of a task from the production to the review and delivery stage so that you could easily see the time that it spends on each phase. In fact, the platform comes with in-built mechanisms to capture certain crucial metrics. For instance, I’m Productive accurately captures the amount of time that each team member spends on a task. This, it does while ignoring irrelevant data like the amount of time they spent on breaks while performing a task- something that not many similar tools in the market are smart enough to do.

Aside from helping you capture such important metrics; the tool also lets you easily re-assign a task if it has been found to be finished improperly and needs to be performed again. This is also useful when any new requirements have come in during the development process and so the task needs to be redefined as a result. Another possible use of the feature is when you need to push a task into a new sprint or iteration.

 Aside from capturing accurate metrics and ensuring smooth progress of tasks, another key element in ensuring hassle-free progress of a project is efficient collaboration amongst the team members. I’m Productive brings you a plethora of useful tools to help you with the same. For instance, you could comment on a task to provide instant feedback. Also, you have the provision to send a group message or message a team member in private. You could also share documents and other information that team members could refer to carry out their tasks. Such assets, you could share in a central repository of sorts from which all team members could access them whenever they want to.

But perhaps, from a project management perspective, the most unique feature that the platform brings is the one by which you could accurately predict the project delivery time. The underlying calculations for this are done by a powerful AI that is embedded in the system. You could get the estimate with just a click of a button.

These are only some of the features that make I’m Productive useful for agile and other types of projects. Read their website to learn more.

 

 

 

 

 

The benefits of using agility for project management

It’s hard to imagine anyone involved in managing software projects in the 21st century as never having heard of agility. The project management methodology is widely used. However, if you and wondering why it is so commonly used, here are the main reasons why: The benefits of using agile project management methodology.

Better quality of product

In the agile methodology, product testing is an integral part of the process. This natural leads to a better quality of the end product. Also, the client could also be a part of the development process from start to end, getting to see the progress in the product after each sprint. This helps them provide frequent feedback which could in turn help developers improve the quality of the product during the development phase.

High customer satisfaction

Agility is one project management model in which the customer is encouraged to be a part of the decision-making process about how the project should actually be executed. In fact, even when the project execution has begun, the customers have the freedom to provide feedback on the latest developments. As mentioned in the previous section, such feedback could help developers better the product even more.

Since this helps customers get just the right kind of product that they require, the level of customer satisfaction is also bound to be high.

Fast product delivery

One of the biggest benefits of following the agile methodology is the fact the go-to-market time that it affords. In many cases, this would help the product owner get the first-mover advantage in the market. From the development firm’s perspective, if the customer is provided with their product fast, they are bound to return to you for their subsequent projects. In other words, there is more chance for the relationship with your client to be long-term rather than limited to a single project.

Good control over the project

More often than not, project managers find themselves at a point where they are no more completely sure about how the different moving parts of the project are proceeding at the moment. But owing to certain elements that are integral to the agile methodology, by default, managers are bound to have greater control over how an agile project proceeds. For instance, transparency is a given in agile projects. Aside from the daily meetings that help the entire team stay updated about project progress, a visual depiction of the workflow- like a Kanban board- is ideally updated frequently and is accessible to all concerned. This means chances of losing control over a project due to a lack of awareness about project progress are negligible in agile projects.

Another relevant element is feedback. Feedback is actively sought not just from team members but also from clients at the end of every iteration. This also serves as a stock-taking exercise for the project managers. Also, they could guide the project in the proper direction based on the feedback- something that’s indicative of having good control over the project.

The process of procuring feedback and acting upon it is also linked to the aspect of ensuring the good quality of the product. A high-quality product cannot be produced by accident. It can only come about by having firm control over the product development process. Thankfully, for a manager to wield that kind of control is more than probable in agile projects

Better predictability

One aspect which fumbles many a project manager is forecasting risks and coming up with strategies to counter those risks. But opportunities to identify potential frameworks are higher in the agile methodology. For instance, in scum, you use both sprint backlogs as well as burndown charts. These tools help improve the project’s visibility among all team members as well as the project managers. Managers, in turn, could leverage this visibility to predict any potential bottlenecks that make happen in the course of the project. If the possibility of future problems is identified, the managers could then take pre-emptive actions.

Lesser risks

The agile methodology offers lesser chances of risks compared to many traditional project management systems. One main reason for this is that agile projects incorporate sprints in them. Sprints are short but rather well-defined bursts of product development phases. Each sprint ideally would have a set of features to be added to the product as its objective. A sprint by definition is of short duration. This ensures that new features get updated to the product at frequent intervals. In traditional product development models, usually, the development phase is long, with just about all the intended features developed in one go. So, if any problem pops up during the process, it may curtail the development of the product. Meanwhile, in sprints, even if something goes wrong, the damage will be limited to that sprint alone. You can just resolve the issue in the next sprint and move along.

Higher flexibility

Flexibility is one of the main advantages of agile methodology. By flexibility, what’s largely meant here is the team member's ability to respond quickly to changing requirements. In most traditional project management methods, the objective of project development and the modus operandi is decided before the project begins. Once those elements are decided, no changes are entertained in them. Whereas, in agility, constant feedback is actively encouraged throughout the project development. After a sprint, teams and other stakeholders review the progress, and if there are suggestions for improving the product, even more, they are shared with the Manager, who in turn can enlighten the team members about the same. The team can decide if the suggestions are worthy of being incorporated. If yes, they can do so in the next sprint. This, in fact, is one of the key reasons why agility has become sort of the go-to methodology for software development. The release cycles of new features are typically short in software products. One reason is that it’s important to keep users excited about a product by constantly adding new features. Also, it is common enough with software products to constantly get user feedback. If any feedback is found worth incorporating, it is to the product manufacturer’s advantage to do so at the earliest, possibly before any of their competitors do so. Given such ground realities, higher flexibility in how you can respond to new requirements is a boon for software developers.

Relentless improvements

Agility works on twelve key tenets or principles, which are the foundational aspects of this project management methodology. One of these principles mandates that the team members should continuously reflect upon the quality of the methods and processes that they follow, and whenever possible, try to improve them.

This means that ideally, each sprint should be better in quality than its predecessor- a state of affairs that’s not necessarily the case in other project management methods. Mistakes that are learned in one sprint become the basis for how to run the next one. Moreover, agile largely functions in a ‘flat hierarchy’ model. Among other things, this means that everyone in the team is encouraged to share their opinions and feedback about the processes they are involved in. Further, they are also encouraged to share their experience working on the project. This helps others in the team learn from their experience, which in turn helps improve the work processes.

Better team morale

As mentioned before, agile teams are constantly encouraged to be self-organized. Their reliance on a manager or a team leader for executing a sprint is minimal. By giving them more responsibilities, you are also making teams more autonomous. Individual team members have more decision-making powers than they have when they are following other project management methodologies. Such autonomy is typically associated with improved work satisfaction and thereby better team morale.

Also, having to self-manage their work means that team members often collaborate with each other, which in turn improves the quality of communication among them. This helps them collaborate better as well. It’s a feedback loop of great beneficence, in other words.

The smaller team sizes which agility insists upon also contributes to team bonding. Typically, team members are able to build a good rapport with each other much easier if they are in a small team than in teams of big size.

Useful metrics

As any project manager could tell you, one of the biggest worrying factors related to running a project is to get the estimate for the team and cost of the product correct. Once these metrics are identified, then, the project’s progress should be rigorously scrutinised periodically to ensure that the project could be delivered on the estimated time, without it going over budget. Unfortunately, such metrics are not always accurate. The waterfall methodology is an example of a project management approach which relies on tracking project progress against the estimated time of delivery- a nerve-wracking experience for many a project manager.

However, in agility, the key metrics that are measured include lead time and cycle time. Such metrics are concerned with measuring the efficacy of sprints rather than the progress of the entire project. This makes the metrics more accurate given how they are reflective of sprints that happen over short time scales than longer times as with a project. This also makes it easier to identify stumbling blocks in the project’s progress and find a suitable solution which could then be quickly applied. You can rely on past metrics like lead time to create data-backed solutions for most problems.

Now that you have seen the numerous advantages of adopting the agile methodology of project development, you may find that your interest in adopting the same has increased even more than before. However, while such benefits are always welcome, it’s not a given that all adoptions of agility are hassle-free or indeed, successful. To ensure successful adoption of agility, there should

be multiple factors in place. Many of these elements may not completely be in your control. For instance, one of the fundamental requirements for a successful project is a skilled and collaborative team. Now, perhaps, you are assigned a team which has been hired before you even joined the organization, and which doesn’t possess all the skillsets you may expect. In such a case, you just need to work with the best you have. However, one element which goes a long way in making an agile project a success, and over which you have control is a good project management platform.

Not every project management platform is made equal. Some are heavy on features while others are more straightforward, designed to help you perform only a specific set of tasks. Some project management platforms offer a more intuitive interface than others. While some are focused more on helping teams collaborate, others are designed to help keep track of tasks more than anything else.

Agility as a project management methodology demands a certain number of features from project management tools. For instance, you need a feature which helps you keep track of how sprints are progressing. Also, you need to be able to assign tasks to different team members depending on the requirements. Given how agility is an inherently collaborative process, the project management tool should have provisions which facilitate smooth communication among team members. And these are just some of the provisions that a project management tool should have for it to ably support agile projects.

As mentioned before, not every project management tool is made equal. This also means that not every project management software would adequately support agile projects.

I’m Productive is one project management tool which is ideal for agile projects. Using it, you could easily assign tasks in a sprint to different users according to the requirements. Also, after a review cycle, if a task is found to be incompletely performed, it could easily be re-assigned to be a part of the newsprint with just a few clicks. The tool comes with an sample number of communication provisions. From commenting on a task to sharing documents that could be accessed by the whole team, to sending messages over private channels to individual users, many are the features that help teams collaborate effectively using this project management tool.

The project management tool also comes with a provision which is rather unique among products of this kind: You could accurately predict the amount of time it would take to deliver the project. In fact, you could do this with just a click on a button, without having to perform any mathematical calculations. For the tool employs a powerful Artificial Intelligence for performing the calculations. Also, it has provisions built-in to accurately capture the metrics which would form the basis of these calculations. For instance, while measuring the time that a team member spends working on a task, factors like the break time they take in that duration are ignored, so that you get the accurate figure.

To learn more about how I’m Productive could help you execute your agile projects without hassles, please visit the website.

Ways to improve performance of agile teams

Agility is among the most used project management models used in software development. There are multiple reasons for this- ranging from predictability in the delivery of updates to the model making it easy to manage the development process. But that’s not to say that there is no scope for improvement in the process. So, here are the ways to improve performance in agility.

The team size should be Optimal

Small team size is one of the foundational principles of agility. Nonetheless, it is one that many team managers and project leads tend to forget about while implementing agility in an organisation. But this, they do to their detriment. The optimal size for an agile team ranges from three to nine people. If it’s more than that, the amount of time that team members would need to discuss before actually performing tasks would be high. In other words, they would be spending more time in meetings and less time working.

So, you should fix the team size at an optimal level, depending on the requirements of the project. Strategies should also be in place to ensure there are no frequent needs for turnover. Frequent turnover could slow down the project’s progress.

Manage product backlog efficiently

The backlog, as the name implies, is where you get to see all the tasks that are yet to be finished in a sprint. If the backlog appears bloated even after significant time has been spent on a sprint, it may mean that the sprint is not being efficiently managed.

More often than not, it’s not the technical inefficiency of developers that causes the tasks to remain unperformed in the backlog. The reason is usually that they have a hard time understanding the user stories. This sees them spending a long time trying to understand the requirement instead of performing the tasks that would help meet that requirement.

To avoid such a scenario, make sure that the user stories that you create are filled with as many details as are required for the team members to understand the requirements. If a particular user story proves to be too complex, inspect the importance of that story. If it can be pushed down the priority list, reshuffle the order of the user stories in the backlog accordingly. Also, if time permits, you can create user stories for two sprints at a time, so that the team members could have more time to acclimatise to the requirements of upcoming tasks.

Factor in interruption buffers

Interruptions are unavoidable in agile sprints- no matter how well to run the sprints are. There are two common scenarios in which interruptions can occur. The first involves a bug being reported in a feature that requires constant attention from a developer. The second scenario involves another team requiring some urgent help from a developer.

Instead of wishing away such interruptions, the smarter strategy is to anticipate such interruptions and make space for them in the planning stage. Buffer interruptions should be scheduled while planning a sprint. Also, when you create a user story, you should take into consideration the number of possible interruptions that might happen during its execution. A rough rule of thumb that many scrum masters follow is to keep a developer’s half a day out of two weeks aside for interruptions. If no interruptions arise during those two weeks, the developer may devote the allocated time to help with some unresolved tickets. 

Conduct daily meetings

The idea of holding everyday meetings is another foundational aspect of agility which many scrum masters ignore to their detriment. These daily meetings are essential to providing all team members with the necessary information on how the project is progressing. It also helps team members to understand if a fellow team member is facing any impediment. If yes, they may help them which helps smoothen the flow of tasks in the project.

The daily meetings should be short- ideally, not over fifteen minutes. The discussions in these meetings are to be limited to the progress of tasks. If any discussion veers off-topic, they should be consigned to a time after the meeting is over. For maximum efficiency, every participant in the meeting should come prepared with their progress status, and also any questions they may wish to ask other team members or the scrum master.

Stay ready to improve the process continually

Ideally, at the end of every sprint, you should find something that could be improved in the process, or rather how the team is following the agile process. Strategies on how to improve the weak element should then be devised and implemented in the subsequent sprint.

To make this happen, during the retrospective that follows every sprint, you should identify a single action that could be executed in the next sprint to make it better than the recently concluded one. You can start by identifying simple actions that are not resource-intensive. You could seek suggestions on points to improve from all participants and choose one of them as an action point.

Remove roadblocks

Instead of trying to tackle roadblocks as they arise during the development process, you should try to anticipate as many potential impediments as possible that may arise, right at the planning stage of a sprint. The best phase to anticipate such problems is while creating the user stories. Such forecasting helps you equip the developers with the necessary tools to remove any such impediments. Foregoing this aspect of planning would result in a higher chance of unexpected impediments popping up along the development pathway. Solving such roadblocks distracts the team from their core tasks, which in turn results in loss of productivity. So, anticipating such roadblocks and taking pre-emptive measures are the best strategies to adopt in this context.

Be transparent about work progress

Being transparent about the work in progress serves to make the team members be more alert about what’s left to deliver. So, it’s a good idea to have metrics related to work progress displayed where the entire team could access them.

One way to do this is by updating the burn-down chart every day. You could also have the kaizen you wish to achieve displayed, as also the roadmap for the project as a whole rather than a single sprint.

Try to avoid multitasking as part of the process

Multitasking is one aspect of work which has come to be widely appreciated in modern offices. However, the truth is that multitasking adversely affects the team’s productivity. Needless to say, this also affects the quality of the product that is released.

Employees get their best work done when they are in what’s called a flow state. This state is nothing but one in which the employees could perform an uninterrupted series of tasks. Generally, the productivity and the quality of work are high during the flow state, not to mention the satisfaction that the employees derive from their work. However, if an employee needs to halt a work in progress to attend to some other tasks and then come back to the original task, it disrupts his workflow, and it is hard for him to reach optimal productivity in such a scenario.

Employees tend to multitask a lot when they have to juggle a large number of tasks during a single sprint. To avoid this, you should make sure that the number of tasks that are in progress at a time is manageable for every team member. This should be something you should be aware of during the planning stage itself so that when creating user stories, you should allow them in such a way that no team member becomes overburdened with tasks. Also, new tasks should be added to the workflow only if you think it is necessary. The unfortunate practice of adding new tasks even if they are not strictly necessary, only because team members happen to have some time on their hands, is still seen in many workplaces. But that should be avoided. The free time that workers have could be better spent on acquiring new knowledge and skills, or maybe by improving the quality of an already finished feature.

Empower teams to self-manage

A manager or a scrum master may not always be accessible to the team members. This is why it is beneficial for the team members to learn how to manage work by themselves, without relying too much on the scrum master. The idea of self-management is to aid the team members to finish all the tasks on their to-do lists without relying on anyone else for directions. This would also equip the team members to guide a sprint without too much effort on the scrum master’s part. As you may have guessed, this also means inculcating some leadership values in the team members, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy of designations. You could educate the team members about the principles of Scrum and also the various nuances and intricacies of the current project. This would give them the necessary context to grow their leadership skills.

Meanwhile, it shouldn’t be assumed that a self-managing principle precludes a team leader. The manager or the scrum master would still be very much involved in helping execute a sprint. However, instead of guiding the team members through a sprint, the leader’s duty now would be to help the team members be self-organised.

Being self-organised helps teams be more independent. Usually, teams that enjoy higher levels of independence are more efficient than their more constrained peers. This in turn enhances the quality of their performance. Suh independence also promotes employee satisfaction which in turn leads to a better overall work culture in organisations.

Introducing new practices to the process

Agility is largely seen as a set of principles that governs the way projects are executed. While this is true to a good extent, it doesn’t mean that agility mandates no new practices be introduced as part of the process of executing projects. Finding space for new and meaningful practices helps increase the performance of agile teams.

This is especially true as new software that supports agile projects are introduced into the market frequently. These software products could also provide valuable tools that could help enhance the quality of project management. Indeed, such software has almost become an integral part of agile project management in the contemporary age. The smartest managers try to get the most out of them by using the novel yet useful tools that they offer.

A terrific example of such a software platform is I’m Productive, the project management tool.

There are quite a few project management systems available in the market, but not all of them need to be suitable for agile projects. I’m Productive thought is especially useful for agile projects.

For one thing, re-assigning a task after one iteration can be done with just a few clicks on this project management tool- something that could be useful while carrying over a task into a new sprint. After all, there are instances when a task needs to be redefined and reassigned based on new requirements.

On a more fundamental level, the project management system helps you design and view the workflow easily. Access to view the workflow could be shared with all relevant team members so that everyone stays updated about the project’s progress.

Aside from staying updated about the progress, another bedrock of agile projects is fluid communication between team members. In this regard too, you would find I’m Productive quite the boon. The software brings you multiple features that help you share your ideas and other information with team members promptly. For instance, you can easily share files and other resources that the team might find useful for executing their tasks, in a common space where everyone could access the documents.

You could also comment on tasks, and share messages with specific people in the teams to help guide them through a project. These are but some of the features in I’m Productive that help you efficiently manage agile projects, and improve the team productivity,

Aside from these, the project management tool also beings a feature which is rather uncommon in products of this nature- the platform helps you accurately judge when the project could be delivered.

It is common enough for project managers to face a lack of clarity regarding project delivery time as the project progresses. An inability to accurately predict this time point often leads to them promising an early delivery than is practical. I’m Productive helps you avoid such scenarios by incorporating powerful Artificial Intelligence. You just need to click on a button to get the accurate prediction, which is based on the number of hours that each team member spends on a task. This metric too is calculated with precision- extraneous data like the time that team members spend on break is not factored in while measuring the hours of work.

As you have seen, I’m Productive- as the name implies- not only helps you improve the performance of agile teams, but also helps you accurately predict the project delivery time. Read their website to learn more about this project management system.

Challenges agile teams face in remote working scenarios

Remote working is more the norm than the exception for many people these days. The benefits and challenges that remote working brings are, not surprisingly, widely discussed. But agile teams, following a unique work model, face a unique set of challenges while working remotely. Let’s look at those challenges and also the solutions.

Adapting methodologies to the virtual world

Agile methodologies were developed to work in a world where the primary mode of work is in-person. Now, in the changing scenario in a post-pandemic world, teams often find it hard to adopt those in-person methodologies into a remote setup. One example is regarding the scrum board. The scrum board is a crucial tool in the efficient functioning of an agile team. But the original scrum board was envisioned as a physical tool.

So, how would you solve this issue? One way is to revise the rules and eschew what’s not completely necessary. The managers and the team members should be in tacit agreement that they would be working under a ‘best-possible-manner’ scenario, for this to work. If a methodology is found to be critical, on the other hand, every effort should be made to adapt that to the remote working setup. Once you have identified the crucial methods, you should find the best possible way to adopt those methods in the changing world. The team members should ideally be a part of the discussion in deciding the adoption methods.

Another way to mitigate the real-world to virtual world adaption problem in agility is by outsourcing certain processes that are hard to be performed in a virtual environment. There could be external service providers located in another part of the world where they could work in person and so help you out with some of the processes. Of course, this solution may not be practical in all cases, especially for companies that are working with a limited budget.

Collaboration

Teamwork and collaboration are important for the success of any project. This is particularly true in the case of agile projects which often rely on teams to be responsive to ad hoc requirements during the project run. But collaboration is typically harder when team members are working apart from each other. Agile teams have to finish their tasks within often short time periods called sprints. But when collaboration is disrupted, teams find it hard to make the final delivery for a sprint within the prescribed time.

But that’s not to say that collaboration needs to remain weak when working in a remote environment. As many agile teams around the world have found by now, software tools have proven more than efficient in helping them collaborate efficiently. Especially useful in this regard are project management tools which come with collaboration features that make it easy for team members to discuss, share crucial information and gather feedback among themselves.

If your company has an in-house communication tool, you could also encourage your team members to use it more often.

Balancing flexibility and productivity

Remote working, by definition, means that you wouldn’t be able to completely control the environment in which your team members function in. Team members may need to take care of multiple things aside from working, even during work hours. Instead of seeing this as a negative scenario, the smarter managers provide team members with the necessary flexibility they require to manage all their affairs- both professional and personal.

Often, the mandate is set that a team member accomplishes so much work within a given unit of time. On top of that, an additional measure prescribing the time of the day during which the employee should be working is also put in place. But more often than not, this latter measure is irrelevant. What’s important is for the team members to deliver work in a pre-determined time period. At which hours during the day they do this could be their own prerogative.

Managers tend to over-prescribe such stringent measures, especially during remote working scenarios. Given how they cannot physically monitor the team members, they tend to ask for detailed reports for work that has been done within the hours of the day the team members are supposed to work in.

These types of practices only result in hurting the team’s morale. The better option is to insist only on the work to be delivered on time, while leaving how they accomplish that- and in what hours of the day they do the work-to themselves.

However, that is not to say that you shouldn’t hold the team members accountable at all. Periodic meetings to review the work process should be conducted. Thanks to the various communication and collaboration tools that are available these days, this shouldn’t be technically challenging to perform. If any team members raise issues they face with work during these meetings, you should try to solve the problems for them.

Monitoring work

While monitoring the progress of work is important for managers, too stringent measures in that direction would also dampen the spirits of the team members, as such measures could give the impression that the manager doesn’t trust them well enough. While working in person, the matter of monitoring tasks is usually woven into the fabric of everyday work. The manager could probably just hop down to the team and have a quick discussion about it. It may even be a quasi-casual discussion, and so it wouldn’t even be registered as a monitoring effort.

But in remote working scenarios, that is obviously not possible. Managers understandably get jittery as they don’t necessarily have ready access to their team to learn about work status updates. Even if they call someone up, they may not respond immediately. Also, the managers couldn’t be sure if they are disrupting work by calling them up in the first place.

One way to overcome this problem is by using a dedicated project management tool like I’m Productive, which could help give you a real-time status update of work progress. You could also have periodic meetings at pre-arranged times. These meetings could be short in nature, and instead of using these to get progress reports from team members, the objective should be to learn if team members are facing any issues with their tasks. If all is going well with their tasks, you need just let them continue performing their work. Otherwise, you could help them solve whatever stumbling block they may be facing.

Given how agility is all about getting work done through collaboration, the ideal approach is not to function as a taskmaster for the team members, but as an additional resource which they could help team members get their work done.

Lack of knowledge sharing due to inadequate personal communication

Working remotely doesn’t necessarily mean that team members are completely cut off from each other. The presence of online communication tools ensures that it needn’t be so. It is nonetheless a fact that in most remote work scenarios, the communication amongst team members is limited to the functional. The messages that team members share with each other mostly pertain to the tasks they are currently involved in.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with this scenario, it is also true that communication other than the strictly functional also promotes fruitful knowledge sharing. For example, team members may discuss some new technological trend in their work sector which is not directly relevant to the current project. Such discussions could in turn result in team members exploring and learning more about the technology. In remote working, such interactions rarely happen.

This has rightfully become a cause for worry for managers in the post-pandemic world where remote work is often the norm than the exception. Also, the absence of group interactions that happen during lunch hours and coffee breaks while working in an office, could adversely affect team morale.

As a solution, you could organize more planned meetings which are of a social nature. These meetings wouldn’t have the spontaneity of in-person coffee breaks and the like, but that’s not to say that they lack meaningful intimacy. Not if the team members are game for it.

As for knowledge sharing, you could create a digital space online- something as simple as a shared workspace or folder- where team members could share any resources that they think would be useful to others in the team, whether these resources are relevant to the current project or not. The Managers could take the initiative in sharing such resources with the team so that the team members would follow their lead.

Issues with design in product delivery

While remote working poses issues for teams of all forms and shapes, the challenges for design teams are particularly high given how it’s hard to verbalize the design aspects of a product. This in turn makes it hard to share design strategies with team members in a remote setting. One solution for this issue is to share all design requirements with relevant team members as a storyboard. As you probably know, a storyboard format is ideal for sharing visual information, as you could sketch in visual details and also give the narrative outline in a storyboard. However, this may not be a workable solution in all scenarios. For instance, storyboarding is usually a time-consuming process, so if a quick design change is required, you may not have the required time to come up with a storyboard to explain the requirement to the design team.

As we have seen, the challenges that agile teams face while working remotely are many. We have also seen the solutions that could help you overcome these challenges. However, one thing that could help make instituting these and other solutions is to use good product management software.

Not all project management tools are well equipped to support agile projects. Agile teams require a certain set of features in these tools if they are to carry out their functions well.

I’m Productive is one project management tool that agile tools should consider for their purposes. There are multiple ways in which the project management system supports agile projects.

A great example is how easy it is to manage the workflow using the system- something that is extremely useful in a remote work setting. Not only could a manager see the progress of tasks in a workflow in real-time, but at the end of a task, it also gets automatically shifted to the review phase. Once the review is performed and if it is found that new additions are to be made to the task requirements, you can re-assign the task to a team member who can then perform it in the new iteration. This is particularly relevant in the case of tasks getting reinvented for the next sprint, as sometimes happens in agile projects.

You could assign a particular task to one or more users as per requirements, with just a few clicks using I’m Productive. To foster better communication amongst team members, the platform brings a number of tools which helps team member share documents and messages with each other. There are also provisions for managers and other relevant team members to comment on a task so that the person who is performing the task could get meaningful feedback even as the task is in progress.

A common worrying factor for managers in a remote working environment is the ease with which their team members could adapt to a virtual collaborative tool like a project management system. With I’m Productive, you can put your mind at ease since the project management tool brings an easy-to-use, highly accessible and intuitive interface. Even team members who are not particularly technically adept could learn how to use the system quite easily, with very minimal external guidance.

In a remote work setting, this is extremely important as individual users may not be able to gain help for accessing some features as and when they require from others. By making the tool utterly simple to use, I’m Productive removes the need for seeking any such help, to begin with.

These are but just a small sample of the features in the platform which help agile teams with their projects.

Aside from these, the project management tool also incorporates artificial intelligence which helps you accurately calculate the project delivery time based on metrics including the number of hours that a team member spends on a task. The system is sophisticated enough to exclude irrelevant data like the break time someone takes during the course of finishing a task, for performing this calculation.

Best of all, you could get an accurate prediction of the project delivery time with a single click of a button.

To learn more about how I’m Productive can help you with your agile projects while working remotely, please visit the website.

 

Scrum vs Kanban- a comparison of two popular agile methodologies

Many companies from across industries use agility to tackle huge projects. Scrum and Kanban are two powerful approaches to agility used to make project management efficient. However, each of these approaches comes with its own norms of functioning. Let’s now look at how they compare against each other.

An overview of Kanban

Kanban is a methodology which helps you manage workflows, largely with the aid of a simple visual interface called the Kanban board. In Kanban, the tasks currently in progress are limited at any stage in a project. This is to ensure that at any given point, the team’s capacity is optimally utilized.

To make sure that you get the most work done with the existing team, without sacrificing quality, Kanban consists of two sets of principles and six core practices.

The two sets of principles are Change Management Principles and Service Delivery Principles.

The change management principles include the following: 1)Start with the tasks that you are performing at the moment 2)Follow incremental changes as the project progresses rather than bringing about massive progress in one go 3)Leaderships acts shouldn’t be limited to those in any particular tier of the hierarchy. Such acts should be encouraged all across all levels.

Now, let’s look at the service delivery principles: 1)Stay focused on the expectations and requirements of the customers. 2)You should focus on managing the work and not those who are performing the work. 3)You should periodically review the network of services.

There are six different practices in Kanban. These are: 1)Visualizing the workflow 2) Limiting the number of tasks that are currently in progress 3) Managing the flow of work 4)Ensuring that process policies are made explicit 5)Establishing feedback loops and 6)Improving the process with collaborative efforts.

An overview of Scrum

Scrum, on the other hand, is a more rigid framework to manage workflow when it’s compared to Kanban. The planning involved in scrum is far more detailed than in Kanban.

Scrum comes with a set of clearly defines processes and roles, and the framework is based upon three pillars. These are Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation.

The core idea of the scrum framework is to cut down a project into a series of smaller tasks, each of which needs to be finished within a particular frame of time. An iteration in which one of these tasks is done is called a sprint. A sprint is a pre-determined unit so that no additional tasks are included in one after it is started.

Now that you know what Kanban and scrum entail on a basic level, we shall now look at how these two project management frameworks differ from and are similar to each other.

Roles

In Scrum, there are certain roles that are to be mandatorily assigned to team members. These include the role of a Scrum Master, Product Owner and also the Development team.

Out of these, the scrum master decides the timelines in which sprints are to be finished. The product owner, meanwhile, is primarily responsible for directing the team during the project’s progress. They should also see to it that the tasks in the backlog are added to the relevant sprints. The development team executes the tasks that have been determined during the sprint planning.

Contrasting with Scrum, in Kanban, you can maintain the current organizational structure to a good extent. There are two roles which you could introduce: Service delivery manager, and Service request manager. But do note that there aren’t mandatory roles.

The role of the service delivery manager entails making sure that the tasks in a project are performed in the order they are meant to be, and get finished at the appropriate times. If the team members are found to face some issue that keeps them from finishing a task, the service delivery manager should help them out with the same. Another duty of a service delivery manager is to devise and implement activities that support continuous improvement in a team.

The role of the service request manager, meanwhile, entails ensuring that the process policies are thoroughly followed by the team members. They should also strive to improve the quality of the corporate governance within a team. Another duty of the role is to help bring down the risks that are linked to individual members of the team. But the service request manager is rarely considered a separate role. It’s usually a set of duties that the team’s manager takes in addition to their regular duties.

Planning

In Scrum, the planning occurs iteratively, before the start of every sprint. A meeting is conducted solely for planning. The participants of these meetings include the product owner, the product development team and the scrum master.

In these meetings, the participants would transform the user stories- which could be considered use cases- into actionable tasks. After that, the time required to perform all the tasks is estimated. If there is an agreement regarding the tasks and the time estimate, the team is them committed to completing all the tasks in the coming sprint. On the odd occasions when requirements change in the course of a sprint, the sprint itself could be abandoned and another planning session is conducted before the next sprint.

While planning in Scrum is based on the sprint that is to come, Kanban relies on a retro-active method by which the planning is done based on data from previous workflows. This data would include the types of tasks and services as well as other related factors from previous workflows.

Unlike in Scrum, the work is not iterative but linear in Kanban. It is common enough to add upcoming tasks in a column for the coming week or month in the Kanban board. Whenever the development team has finished their current tasks and has time to work on new tasks, you could add new tasks in the “In Progress” section of the board. After a certain number of tasks are finished, you would get an idea of how long tasks of different types takes to be finished. Based on this, you can forecast the time it would take for the rest of the tasks to be completed. You could then assign the finish date for each task accordingly.

Commitment

In Kanban, long-term commitment is deferred for as long as is practical. This is to support agility, thereby ensuring that value is delivered at a frequent rate to the end customer. Typically, the commitment of a team member is limited to the task that they are currently performing. Only after they have finished the task would they start on a new task.

 The approach to commitment is different in Scrum though. In this methodology, the commitment is based on what’s assumed as precise forecasting- the purported end result of a sprint and also the tasks that are required to generate that result. If an unexpected issue arises during a sprint, there is a chance that the sprint itself may need to be abandoned. The sprint could also fail if the team’s capacity has been misjudged in relation to the number of tasks that need to be performed in it.

Performance indicators

It’s impossible to get an objective analysis of a project’s progress unless you set specific key performance indicators or KPIs at the outset of the project itself. However, both Scrum and Kanban have different sets of KPIs.

Let’s look at the KPIs in Scrum first.

In Scrum, you should be conscious of two major KPIs: Velocity and Planned Capacity.

Out of these, velocity is predicated on the number of story points that are finished in a project. This is essentially an average number of tasks in all the sprints that have been done so far. Based on this number, you could plan the number of backlog items you could add in the coming sprint.

Planned capacity, as you may have guessed, is how much bandwidth a team has to perform a sprint. The capacity would depend on many factors including if any team members are away on a vacation or on leave because of illness. While planning a sprint, it is extremely important to correctly assess the capacity. If the team’s capacity is not much, you should take up only fewer action items from the backlog. On the other hand, if more members have been added to the team, you could consider pulling more tasks from the backlog and including them in the sprint.

Backlogs have a tendency to get piled up when you are not looking. To ensure that that doesn’t happen, teams following the Scrum methodology usually use certain charts, called the Burndown chart and Velocity Chart.

The Burndown Chart visually depicts the number of tasks that are yet to be finished against the time remaining in the sprint. Velocity charts, meanwhile, typically are histograms that depict the team’s performance so far.

Now, let’s look at the KPIs in Kanban.

Lead time and Cycle time are the two most important metrics that are used in the Kanban methodology.

Lead time is the time between when a task pops up in the workflow and when it is finished and leaves the flow. Lead time starts counting once you commit to performing a task.

Cycle time meanwhile is the time that one actually works on a task. It starts counting from when a particular task is in the “in progress” stage. Typically, both these KPIs are measured in days. The goal of the team is to keep these values as low as possible.

As was the case with Scrum, Kanban to incorporates two types of charts to task the progress of tasks easily. These are

the cumulative flow diagram or CFD and Cycle time histogram.  The purpose of the CFD is to provide a visual representation of the workflow so that you could learn where to give your attention to make the process more streamlined and predictable. Meanwhile, the cycle time histogram is meant to help you gauge how the process is performing from time to time.

 Meetings

As mentioned before, in Kanban, meetings are not mandatory. However, if you still plan to have them, there are two types of meetings you could choose from. These are service-oriented cadences and team-level cadences. Both these types of meetings help you keep your team properly oriented towards the workflow and also ensure that the workflow is progressing steadily.

Under these main categories of meetings, you could in turn have different types of meetings. These include operations review, daily meeting, delivery planning meeting, strategy review, replenishment and commitment meeting, service delivery review and risk review.

You could even combine some of these meetings or skip them according to your requirements. The most important thing is to ensure that a meeting or combination of meetings is useful for the team. If it’s not, you can always forsake it and try another form of meeting from the list, or combinations thereof.

Coming to scrum, every sprint cycle included four types of meetings. There are daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective. Unlike in Kanban, scrum meetings are mandatory. Aside from the four types just mentioned, there is also backlog refinement. It is not a meeting type included in the scrum guide. Nevertheless, it is one which many scrum teams use, typically as a sprint is close to its end. It is used to reprioritize the user stories if required.

Sprint planning meanwhile is held at the start of a sprint and is used for delegating the tasks to everyone. Once you have the team members’ commitment to performing the tasks, the team should meet every single day to discuss the progress of their tasks and also any problems they may be facing.  This is the daily scrum. After a sprint is finished, the team members and other stakeholders may meet to do a review of what they have achieved during the sprint. This happens in the sprint review. In the sprint retrospective, the team members evaluate what are the elements which have worked well in the previous sprint, and also what could have gone better. This latter could give them ideas on how to improve in the coming sprint.

Boards

Both scrum and Kanban use boards that depict workflow visually to help you manage the workflow. But the boards used in both are different in significant ways.

In scrum, the board is essentially a counterpart to the tasks in the backlog. Once a team is committed to taking up a set volume of tasks, those tasks are added to the backlog on the scrum board. The team members would then start the tasks which then become part of ‘work in progress.’ The objective is to finish all the proposed tasks before the sprint is finished. After every sprint, the board is reset to be a clean slate.

The Kanban board functions differently from this. In Kanban, the board is an uninterrupted map that depicts the process. While building the board, the aum should be to create a Kanban system that is robust enough to support a smooth workflow over a long period of time. Ideally, the Kanban board would also have the Work in progress(WIP) limits depicted in it. The objective with this is to be able to keep a check on the volume of tasks that enter and leave a process so that a good speed of delivery can be maintained.

The software solutions

We saw before that the Kanban method functions with the Kanban board as a basis. The same is true about the Kanban software as well. Put another way, all the tasks that a team should perform and their state of progress would be visible on the software. This way, everyone in the team could easily access crucial information about the workflow through the software.

Every unit of work or task is depicted in the software as a card. There would be columns that represent the different stages of work in the process. Also, there would be swim lanes which indicate the priority for each lane.

Scrum software traditionally has relied on mostly text-oriented interfaces rather than visual depictions like a Kanban board. The depiction of workflow in it is similar to computer folders with different items inside them. However, of late, there has been a shift in how the interface-id is designed in many scrum tools, towards a more visual-oriented style of representing workflow in boards. Keeping with the modus operandi of the scrum methodology, you should add the tasks to these boards before a sprint begins and should ensure that they remain on the board until the sprint is finished.

Once all the tasks are finished, you could consider the sprint as done. If a new task comes in, the requirement could be reviewed and a new sprint could be begun.

Every sprint is followed by a retrospective meeting. During this meeting, the board needs to be reset, thereby readying it for the next sprint. Usually, the scrum board is not owned by a homogenous team. The ownership rests with a cross-functional team with members from different functional areas who have come together to successfully complete a sprint.

The WIP limit should be set before the start of every sprint. The team members commit to finishing a precise number of tasks without which the sprint couldn’t be completed. For this reason, it is extremely important not to have the WIP limit surpass the time availability of the team.  In other words, the number of tasks in a sprint(which is the WIP limit in this case) should match or be lesser than the total time availability of the team.

Unlike a scrum board, a Kanban board isn’t owned by any cross-functional team. Also, the work-in-progress limits are set not only before the workflow starts but also during the workflow stages, depending on the changing requirements that happen during a workflow. This helps the team reorganize themselves to tackle any unexpected bottlenecks that may happen during the workflow.

A Kanban software platform would ideally have the columns in the board labelled so that it shows not just the different stages in the workflow but also the work-in-progress limit which is set for each column. The WIP limit denotes the highest number of tasks that could enter a particular work stage.

Whereas in scrum tools, each sprint is defined to be of a certain duration, no time limits are set on Kanban boards. You could add new tasks or cards to the board at a point during the workflow, provided the number of total tasks doesn’t surpass the WIP limits. This also means that there is no need for the board to be reset on a periodic basis.

Certain Kanban software tools also let you gather data related to every task which appears on the Kanban board. You could use the data to identify bottlenecks and also improve the average time in which tasks are finished.

Tracking progress

Efficiently tracking the progress of tasks and project is of importance for a project manager, in both scrum and Kanban projects.

Scrum software platforms usually have a backlog where you could place all future tasks for a particular sprint. To ensure that the pace of tasks progress doesn’t slack, these tools come with a burndown chart.

The burndown chart shows you the volume of work that is still left to be done to finish the project. Burndown charts are handy if you need to give a quick glance at where the project has reached the moment. However, if there are progress gaps these are hard to identify with the burndown charts. The chart summarizes the amount of work that all the members of the team have done so far. If process gaps occur and work gets affected, the burn charts only show that as a drop in the amount of completed work.

You will need to figure out the reason for the drop yourself, as the software wouldn’t assist you with the same.

As mentioned earlier, there is no predetermined duration in which tasks are to be finished in Kanban. For this reason, Kanban software tools don’t require burndown charts at all. Rather, these tools typically come with what is called a cumulative flow diagram.

This diagram will collect data related to all the tasks that get into a workflow automatically.

You could use this data to find out the average time it takes to finish an assignment. This way, the cumulative flow diagram could have the tasks in a workflow and also the time duration that each task remained in a particular work stage. This makes it easy to identify if any work stages are blocking cards, thereby creating a bottleneck. The more duration a card remains in a stage, the broader the stage will appear in the

diagram. This makes it easy to locate the areas in the workflows where bottlenecks are arising. You could then take the necessary action to solve the problem.

Estimating the work

Estimating how much work is involved in a project or a sprint is of critical importance in scrum projects and by extension, in scrum software platforms. Typically, this estimation is done by the whole team while refining the backlog. Not only should they make sure that the tasks are properly quantified, but they should also be matched according to the bandwidth of the team for the coming sprint.

Sizing up a task is typically performed using the Fibonacci sequence. After all the tasks in a project are thus weighed, you could decide how many of them could be performed in the coming sprint. In scrum software platforms, you could assign story points for each of the user stories- this indicates how resource-intensive a particular task is. You could also keep track of how the tracks are progressing in the software.

Teams usually need to spend substantial amounts of time estimating the workload. In fact, more often than not, the value of this estimation process is dubious. The truth is that you could rarely predict the volume of work involved in a sprint accurately. The original estimation going wrong is more the rule than the exception.

In Kanban, one usually cuts down large tasks into smaller tasks. The objective is to keep individual tasks at the smallest possible size without affecting the value of the deliverable. This approach has two advantages- it helps execute tasks easier, and it helps keep the workflow steady and predictable.

Rather than predicting the workload based on tasks, in Kanban, previous process cycle times are taken as the foundation to estimate how much work could be performed in a given period of time. Certain Kanban software tools make automatic calculations based on previous data to give you an estimate of the number of tasks a team could finish within a time period. Compared to scrum methodology, Kanban projects usually yield better estimates of workload. This is in turn reflected in Kanban software tools as well.

Is there a clear winner in Scrum vs Kanban?

Both scrum and Kanban are methodologies that agile teams could adopt to manage their projects. But which of this one should adopt would depend more on the nature of the projects than anything. Scrum usually fares poorly in projects that are too long. Kanban meanwhile is a poor choice if you expect the demands from the project to keep fluctuating, as the methodology is not designed to deal with such variabilities.

The bottom line is that there is no objective measure to decide which methodology is better than the one. The usability of either depends on the type of project. But now that you have seen the differences between the two in detail, you should be able to easily decide which is better suited for your purposes.

Regardless of the approach that you pick, it’s a good idea to use a good project management tool that supports agile projects. I’m Productive is an example of a project management tool which is ideal for agile projects. For managing sprints or managing projects using Kanban boards, the platform has in-built features that make project management as easy as it is efficient. The tool even comes equipped with artificial intelligence which helps you predict the project delivery accurately. You could get this estimate with just a click of a button. 

Please head to the website, to learn more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The disadvantages of agile methodology

Agility is one of the most commonly used project management methodologies, especially in software development. From enabling the frequent rollout of features to help teams be more responsive to changing requirements, many are the advantages of agility. But as incredible as this project management method is, it also has some negatives.  

Here, we discuss the disadvantages of agility.

Hard to forecast the cost of the project

Agility makes accommodations for uncertainties. That is one of the main reasons why the project management methodology has found traction across industries. It not only helps product development teams be more responsive to unexpected changes during the development stage, it also enables a more collaborative work culture: team members interact frequently amongst themselves to stay updated about how each others’ tasks are progressing.

However, the principle of working without a clear end in mind also poses a problem: it makes forecasting the price of the project and also the time it would take to finish it hard. It also makes it challenging to allocate resources to tasks correctly since you are never completely sure of the scope of a project from the outset itself. As you can imagine, this problem gets worse, the bigger a project is.

Needless to say, this is not good news for project managers as they are mostly answerable for any delays in project delivery or going over budget on a project.

Minimal documentation

In the agile methodology, regardless of the framework that you use, two ideals are prioritized: faster product development and gaining maximum output from the team members with minimal obstructions. While those are certainly worthy ideals, prioritizing them also means some other significant aspects of project management don’t get the required attention. A case in point: documentation.

Proper documentation is an important element in project management. Without it, it becomes extremely hard for teams to improve on a product in the future. The time that teams would need to spend on deciphering the technicalities of a product without adequate documentation could be considerable. And only after such scrutiny would they be able to identify the scope of improving the product when the need arises. (And in a world where customers expect frequent updates from software products, such improvements are all but a given).

That’s not to say that documentation doesn’t happen as a part of agile projects. It does. Only, it usually happens in a rushed manner, so the documentation is almost always incomplete. Also, the documentation process usually happens towards the end of an iteration or task, which means many details from the initial stages may not get captured.

Lack of cohesion in the end product

There is a consistent demand for faster output in just about any industry in the current world. Agility addresses this scenario by fragmentizing a project into multiple iterations or development phases. These iterations are usually short, each delivering at least one prominent feature of the product. But this method of fragmented development comes with an inherent risk- that of the end product itself becoming fragmented in nature, appearing more like a collection of disparate features than a product meant to solve a specific problem. The lack of cohesion in the end product makes it hard for the marketing team to communicate the key benefit of a product to prospective customers. It also alienates users from the product as they get confused about the ultimate use of the product.

The end product is not properly defined

As said before, agility makes a lot of accommodation for improving the product during the course of product development. This act of improvement could also mean incorporating features that were never envisioned to be part of the product offerings at the outset of development. In other words, tasks that were not part of the initial plan might get added as the development progresses.

This is certainly advantageous when an unforeseen requirement comes in amidst development. However, the downside is that the addition of new tasks may distract the team from what’s truly important with the product. Managers may end up prioritizing new tasks which are objectively less important than other tasks. This results in the teams getting sidetracked, which in turn means unwantedly long development time. Also, thanks to mis-prioritizing tasks, you may actually end up with a product which doesn’t provide meaningful solutions to customers’ problems.

So, the problems that keep the development process open-ended in agility include delayed project delivery, additional costs of development and also the potential for delivering a product that lacks the most desired features.

Hard to measure progress

Agility is meant to help projects progress more smoothly than by using traditional project management methods. It is then ironic that the methodology makes measuring how a project is progressing hard.

Please note that we are not talking about tracking the progress of tasks across time, which is fairly straightforward, especially if you are using agile frameworks like Kanban. Our concern here is measuring the quality of that progress.

Typically, managers define Key Performance Indicators or KPIs to help gauge how meaningfully a project is progressing. A particular KPI could be considered a landmark crossing in which a project passes a major milestone. However, in agility, the journey of the project isn’t strictly planned, as it leaves leeway for improvising. It’s like setting out on a journey with a destination in mind but leaving the route to the destination ambiguous. That makes setting any landmarks- KPIs in our case- hard.

This naturally makes measuring the progress of the projects difficult for the managers. Indeed, there could be times when progress is adjudged more instinctually than with deliberate logic. Needless to say, such a scenario could be nerve-wracking for the project managers.

It May make the job of less experienced members harder

An interesting analogy that could be made with agility is jazz music- to be more precise improv jazz. Improv jazz is the branch of jazz in which the musicians don’t follow a preset composition. All the players in a band would play notes as they go along, making up musical passages spontaneously in relation to what the other members played.

In theory, such an approach to music-making sounds like a sure-fire way to chaos. But some of the most enduring songs in music history has come out from the improved jazz milieu, and it continues to be so. But the quality of music that is produced is completely determined by the quality of the musicians. Merely good or competent musicians would find it hard to create music with cohesiveness- let alone originality- in an improv scenario. The same holds true for musicians without adequate experience.

A similar situation is prevalent in agile projects too wherein developers with little experience may find the going tough. Usually, such team members would require clear roadmaps so they know how to proceed. But unfortunately for them, such clarity is lacking in agile projects.

Demand on consistent commitment to collaborate

As you must surely have gleaned by now, in order for agile projects to work, the team members must collaborate and work well together. The ad hoc manner in which some tasks may come into the pipeline means that the employee morale could be upheld only if everyone is in synch regarding the project’s evolving objectives.

But for team members to remain in synch, there need frequent meetings. If unexpected requirements come in, meetings too should be called unexpectedly so that team members could be briefed a. Also, the shifting priorities entail that the team members should be flexible in how they share work-load amongst themselves. All this calls for a deeper level of commitment from the team members to collaborate than in traditional project management methods.

While collaboration is to be encouraged in, asking for too much commitment from team members to that end could also be counter-productive. For one thing, team members have tasks they would have to finish by themselves, for which collaboration is only a support mechanism. But if collaborating with others eats up too much of their time, they are bound to rush through their tasks which in turn increases the chances of errors.

In fact, in certain agile projects, even the customers partake in the collaborative process. Their expectations from a product are factored into the development, and so is their feedback about each iteration of product development. While this sounds good in theory, customers may not be willing to dedicate their time to such collaborations.

Issues with time management

This problem is related to many of the issues with the agile methodology which he has discussed so far. Team members should stay in sync regarding the progress of a project and for that, they should attend regular meetings.

Consistent product testing in agility means that developers need to collaborate closely with testers. Sometimes, clients are also actively involved in the development process, and the team members would need to give product demonstrations to the clients at various stages of development. Such activities take up time, so much so that team members may find themselves with inadequate time to perform the core tasks assigned to them. So, managing time may not be easy in agile projects.

Not well suited for long-term projects

While agility works extremely well for certain projects, it’s the least desirable project management method for certain other projects. One category of projects that agility categorically doesn’t support is long-term projects.

As mentioned before, the iterations or sprints in agility are meant to generate deliverables frequently. This is quite suitable for software projects. However, in long-term projects, the inevitable fragmentation of an iterative process results in only complicated matters. This is particularly true with non-software projects. For example, if you are constructing a bridge, the end product is inviolable from the start and there needn’t be provisions to accommodate unexpected requirements.

In such cases, traditional project management methods might be more suitable than agility.

May erode the quality of a software’s architecture

This is yet another problem that arises as a side-effect of the open-endedness of agile projects. Addition of new, unexpected features and reprioritizing the whole array of tasks are common enough aspects of agility. But this could adversely affect the quality of the interface of the software product that is being developed.

Frequent improvisations are rarely conducive to a good interface or underlying architecture.

Big features get sidelined

Huge or complicated features don’t fit neatly into the principle of agility. Iterative processes are meant to deliver small or incremental features. So, when big features that require a large number of tasks are to be tackled, they get pushed back into the priority list. If these functions are important to the end customer, they may not appreciate waiting for them.

Could hurt user experience

An ironic fact about agility is that the more number of features you add to the product, the more the chances are for the product design to be of poor quality. This in turn means poor quality of user experience.  

The problem is that the designers would need to adapt frequently as new features kept getting added to the product. Sometimes, the addition of features would simply result in an overwhelming number of control options being added to the interface so that it ends up becoming cluttered.

More than anything else, this serves to confuse the user.

Ways to counter the disadvantages of agility

There are multiple things that you could do to ensure that your agile project doesn’t suffer from the disadvantages that are common with the project management philosophy. Let’s now look at them.

Fix progress metrics from the outset itself

We saw that the difficulty in qualitatively measuring the progress of the project is one disadvantage of agility. To offset this issue, you should create a project roadmap at the outset itself. These roadmaps needn’t be of a conventional nature. As we saw in an analogy, setting up landmarks may be hard for the journey. But you should still ensure that no matter the detours that you take in the project, you would finish certain key features within a set period of time. These should be the most functionally important features in the product.

Deciding the key features also help the less experienced members of the team a lot. It gives them a clear idea of what tasks they should focus the most on during the course of a project. The same holds true in the case of new members who are on-boarded to the team.

Share updates about the project’s progress

We mentioned about the importance of measuring the project’s progress in the previous section. However, the buck doesn’t stop there. Equally important is it to update the progress status of the project with all team members. You should do this on a periodic- even daily- basis so that everyone is on the same page.

A meeting could be an ideal venue. But as we have seen elsewhere, meetings that aren’t crucial could eat into the team members’ valuable time. For that reason, these updates could be automated and shared over a digital platform.

Always use a scrum board

A scrum board is a simple tool that would help all team members to see the progress- status of the current sprint. The board would include all the tasks that are currently in progress and also product features in the backlog, in the order of their priority. Given how an agile project typically involves a number of sprints, it’s common enough for team members to lose track of tasks in a given sprint.

Use a project management software

A good project management software is a meaningful ally for project management whether the project follows the agile methodology or not. That being said, it is still especially useful in the case of agile projects which, with their large number of sprints, subtasks and feature backlogs could prove a handful for managers to keep track of.

However, not all project management tools would be suited for agile projects. Aside from the functionalities required for managers and team leaders to access all the tasks related to a project in one place, the software should also support the creation of tasks and assigning them to different team members. Also, in the review process, there should be a provision to reassign the task to a team member if further additions are to be made to it- something that would be useful if the task is to be pushed to the next iteration or sprint.

But every project management software needn’t have such features that are essential for agile projects.

I’m Productive is a project management software that you could consider for your agile projects since it contains all the above-said features and more.

With its intuitive interface and options to customize, it’s a project management platform even those who are not used to such tools could easily master. This makes it an ideal tool for large teams in which there are more chances of less technically adept members to be present.

One feature which makes I’m Productive stand out from its peers is the single-click button to accurately predict the project delivery time. There is no need to speculate on project delivery time and falling short of it. The system accurately measures the time each team member spends on a task. Such metrics form the basis of the calculation performed by a powerful artificial intelligence that is part of the system.

You too can reap the benefits of this incredible project management system while running your agile project. Visit the website to learn more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best practices for agile projects

Agility is a project management framework that breaks down bulky projects into granular sections which in turn makes managing the project easier. From faster project delivery to lesser costs for project development, many are the benefits associated with agility.

However, to get the most out of agility, you should adopt certain best practices. In this blog post, we would be looking at these practices in detail.

Generic best practices

There are multiple approaches or frameworks that you could adopt in agile project management. But regardless of the approach, certain best practices are always applicable.

Iterative approach

In agile projects, an iterative approach is adopted for project management. This involves breaking down huge projects into smaller pieces or iterations. Each of these iterations in turn goes through continuous tests based on which they could be repeated until the desired result is achieved. This iterative approach helps the teams understand the drawbacks of the product version at hand and improve upon it.

Regular meetings

Agility insists upon regular meetings ideally on a daily basis. These meetings are typically short and are used as venues in which the team members could fill others in on the progress they have made with their tasks so far and what remains to be done. This helps you stay updated on the project progress and also know if there are any impediments any of the team members face with their tasks, with which you could help them.

Use of a good project management tool

Using the right project management tool goes a long way in implementing the agile methodology in your organization. From regulating the workflows to fostering better teamwork, a smart project management system is a great ally for any project manager. It could also be useful for documentation and reporting, which in turn helps reduce your overheads.

Best practices specific to agile frameworks

Now, let’s look at the best practices you should adopt depending on the agile framework that you use for your project.

Scrum

Arguably the most common agile framework, scrum is known for its brisk efficiency as well as simplicity. If you are using this framework, these are the best practices should adopt.

Create a product backlog

A product backlog is simply the list of items which should be added to successfully develop a product. In the scrum framework, you should create such a backlog in conjunction with the product vision.

The product vision, to put it simply, is the stated objective of a product and how you plan to achieve that objective. By creating both the product backlog and product vision at the same time, you can ensure that the product development team and the product stakeholders are in sync.

This helps avoid confusion and any resultant delays that may cause.

Burndown charts

Sprints are an important part of the scrum framework of agility. A sprint is a short iteration or part of the product development in which a particular feature of the product is created.

 In huge projects, the number of sprints could be high. Also, if continuous testing is implemented, each sprint could in turn have multiple iterations. Such things make tracking and managing sprints quite the exercise for managers.

 It is in this context that a daily burndown chart becomes an important, and useful tool to keep a finger on how a sprint is progressing.

 A burndown chart is an elegantly simple visual representation of the work that has already been done and also the work that is pending in the project. This representation is given in the backdrop of the total time available for the project. It’s an excellent tool to forecast the potential of tasks getting delayed.

Have proper communication guidelines in place

Good teamwork is essential for the efficient completion of any agile project, or any other type of project, for that matter. However, it is especially important in the scrum framework in which every sprint comes with its own stated objective and the team members would need to collaborate closely if they are to achieve those objectives. Having strong, uninterrupted communication among the team member is then crucial.

To this end, a foolproof communication strategy should be devised for all the team members to follow. This avoids any confusion regarding communication protocols and also bottlenecks that may arise because of that.  Setting up communication guidelines is particularly useful when the team members are spread geographically and are working with each other remotely.

Stand-ups

Stand-ups or daily scrums are so much a part of scrum, they have become synonymous with each other in the imagination of those who follow the scrum framework of agility. Typically lasting up to fifteen minutes, these short meetings are, as the name suggests, performed standing up. The idea is for everyone to share their progress about tasks with the other team members so that everyone remains on the same page.

Kanban

Kanban is among the most visually-oriented approaches to agile project management. Originally developed in Japan, it involves the use or color-coded cards to keep track of tasks(Fun fact: it was originally created to keep track of demand and supply of goods in a production line). These days, Kanban is widely used as a framework for agile project management. To successfully adopt Kanban, you could consider the following best practices.  

Visualize workflows

In Kanban, the workflows are represented as forms or cards which depict the current status of every task in a project. It gives you a clear overview of the project’s progress and also if there are any impediments in the product development pathway. Kanban boards are typically interactive in that you could drag and drop a task from one position to another as per its progress.

Optimize the number of works in process

So that the project manager doesn’t get unwieldly, the number of cards or tasks in progress at any given time should be limited. This should be done by taking into consideration the team size and also the time the managers or team leaders could realistically spend evaluating tasks in progress without affecting the quality of their work. Optimizing the number of work also helps ensure that the team members can finish their tasks on time. Also, having a limited number of tasks in progress at a time makes it that much easier to re-prioritize or re-arrange the order of tasks if any unforeseen requirements come in during the product development process.

Get continuous feedback from team members

As mentioned before, a strong collaborative culture is of utmost importance in an agile project. Getting continuous feedback from team members about how they find the process is one way to help bolster collaboration. It helps you identify problem areas- especially in terms of how team members are communicating with each other, or related to the lack of resources essential to the smooth functioning of the team. Also, team members could provide you with insights that may help improve the quality of the final product.

Focus on the flow of work

In the Kanban framework, it’s always a good idea to focus on how the workflow proceeds as much as on the tasks themselves. After all, the core idea of Kanban boards is to provide you with a clear overview of how the tasks progress in the flow.

If you have a predictable workflow, that means the flow is indeed good. Another indication of a good workflow is if the tasks proceed with minimal interruptions. If on the other hand,  the tasks are begun but are halted from time to time, that’s a sign of a poorly designed workflow. If that is the case, you may need to step in and redesign the workflow from scratch.

Lean Development Model

As the name indicates, the lean development model aims at eliminating from the process everything that doesn’t add value to the product. This results in what could be termed a ‘lean’ process. In lean development, these are the best practices that you should follow:

Identify value 

Identifying values in a project could be tricky- especially if the end product has multiple features. The ideal method then is to break down the project into small units of tasks. Each task could in turn have sub-tasks that branch out from them. Once you do this, it becomes easy to identify the value of each of the tasks and sub-tasks.

This will also help you gain a greater understanding of how the workflow is arranged. Further, you could easily identify those tasks that are of insignificant value. This makes it easy to eliminate them from the workflow.

 Reduce waste

In the previous section, we touched upon the aspect of eliminating unwanted tasks from the workflow. This is one way in which waste could be reduced in an agile project that follows the lean development model. Another way is to eliminate meetings that add little value to the workflow. You could also cut out documentation which doesn’t aid the development of the product.

Improve continually

Constant improvement of the product being developed is one of the key tenants of lean development. And that’s to be adhered to strictly.

One way to achieve such an ever-evolving improvement throughout the different iterations of agile product development is to ensure that the requirements of the product are clearly communicated to the team. Another thing of importance is conveying to team members the guidelines they should follow during the product development process, including the guidelines they should adhere to for effective communication with each other. This helps them achieve the maximum results with little in the way of waste.

Extreme Programming(XP)

Extreme Programming or XP is perhaps the agile framework that uses humanistic principles the most- like mutual respect among team members. The objectives of extreme programming include finding out the best possible way for team members to collaborate while creating software, increasing the productivity of the workers, and creating high-quality software products in the process.

Noble as those objectives are, Extreme Programming wouldn’t be successful unless you adopt certain best practices. Let’s now look at these.

Collaborative planning

In the traditional method of project management, project planning is performed predominantly or even exclusively by managers and others in the higher rungs of hierarchy. Agile projects, on the other hand, typically aim for a more egalitarian mode of functioning. This is especially true in extreme programming.

To this end, the planning process should be a collaborative process in which all members of a team should participate. This helps eliminate any confusion team members may have regarding the objectives of the project. Meetings should be held for all team members at regular intervals so that updates could be relayed and the progress of the tasks could be measured.

Continuous testing

Even before the final code for the software is locked, you should run tests on the preceding iterations, checking the efficiency of individual functionalities. This sort of continuous testing will help the software programmers forecast scenarios in which their code may potentially fail, and make alterations to the code accordingly. The benefits of continuous testing include both faster software development and the production of code with minimal defects.  

Shorter release cycles

Traditional software development models involve developing the entire software and then testing it before releasing the finished product. However, agile projects involve shorter release cycles. Usually, at least one functionality is released in one go. Extreme Programming also adheres to this principle. Shorter release cycles help give customers new updates without making them wait for long. This strategy also helps software developers identify bugs in the code that appear during the product development stage.  

Simple design

A quick turnover of software is a typical demand in the highly competitive marketplace of today. A simple software design goes a long way in fulfilling this demand. Not only does a simple design take less amount of time to code, it also makes bug fixing easier. Another important benefit of having a simple software design is that it helps bring down the cost of developing the software. The relative ease of production also makes for a more enjoyable work environment for the team members.

By adopting the agile methodology in project management, and also its best practices, you could reap many benefits including faster project delivery and reduced cost of development. But that’s not to say that managing the project itself is guaranteed to be simple. In fact, managing these projects could get quite knotty, especially if they are huge, involving multiple teams and a large number of tasks. Add to this having to adopt the best practices for agile projects and you may very well be looking at substantial challenges managing these projects.

One way to ease the pain in managing agile projects is by using project management software. A well-designed and features-heavy project management tool could be your best ally for agile project management. However, the catch is that not every project management tool is made equal, especially when it comes to agile project management. There are certain features without which it becomes simply impossible to manage an agile project.

I’m Productive is a project management tool that is perfectly suited for agile projects. The software includes all the features that you would need to successfully manage an agile project. From creating tasks to assigning them to the relevant team members, from tracking the progress of tasks to reviewing them, from commenting on tasks to re-assigning tasks for the next iteration, many are the functionalities that make I’m Productive ideal for agile project management.

Aside from such features, the task management tool also helps you accurately predict the project delivery time. It uses sophisticated Artificial Intelligence to this end. Predicting the project delivery time helps avoid uncertainties and also helps you gain a predictable revenue cycle. To learn more about the project management tool, and how it aids you in managing agile projects, please visit their website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

Different types of agile methodology

Agility is an approach to project management which is widely used to create software products, even though the approach is by no means limited to that particular use. In the simplest terms, the methodology involves cutting down a big job into multiple smaller tasks, which are called sprints. Each sprint would result in the creation of at least one significant feature or update for the product.

The agile methodology has been successfully adopted by many companies and continues to find favour among firms big and small. The main reason for this is that the methodology satisfies the need for speed in project execution which the dynamic post-internet workplace demands.

However, even when two companies use the agile approach, they don’t necessarily follow the same protocols as agility itself comes in different types. Companies could adopt one type over another depending on their requirements. Let’s now look at the most common types of agile methodology.

Lean Development

Having evolved from the lean manufacturing principle developed by Toyota, lean development is among the most popular types of agile methodology, and it is used especially for developing software. It is an approach that includes the values and best practices that should be adopted while you tackle a project using the agile approach.

The lean development approach lays down seven important principles. These are:

1. Delete everything that doesn’t matter

The word lean speaks about efficiency, of cutting off the flab from any process so that only the most essential aspects remain. Put another way, streamlining is the core idea here. Given this, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this is the first important principle in lean development: if something doesn’t add value to a project, simply delete it. That could be considered as excess baggage which you have no cause to lug around.

2. Ensure quality in development

Developing a piece of software is largely a technical matter. Provided the developers have the necessary technical skills, it could be accomplished without any difficulties. But ensuring quality in the development process is a different matter entirely. When technical skills are not scarce, what differentiates two products from each other could be the difference in the quality of development. This is in turn dependent on how disciplined the workforce is, and is reflected in the number of errors the product has.

3. Generate knowledge

As said before, lean methodology is particularly applicable for software production. And software creation, by definition, leaves behind an infrastructure which could be modified, reused or reconfigured as per future requirements. This principle of lean methodology mandates that the infrastructure should be thoroughly documented, so that knowledge could be accessed by relevant persons as and per needed.

4. Defer commitment

Commitment is a word that has largely positive connotations, especially in the professional framework. After all, unless you are committed to finishing a task on time, you probably wouldn’t achieve that result.

 However, workers could also end up having tunnel vision because they are committed to something. Being focused exclusively on one thing, they may miss the significance of a new task that unexpectantly comes up. This leads them to overlook this latter task, continuing to work on their current task.

 This in turn ends up being detrimental to the project as a whole.

To avoid such a scenario, lean development calls for deferring commitment. This, of course, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be committed to the plans that you have created for task execution. Just that you shouldn’t get too attached to those plans if they are made without enough understanding of what business requirements are to be satisfied by a project.

Once you have this understanding, you can easily judge the importance of one task in relation to another. Then, you wouldn’t be stuck in the tunnel vision that we discussed before.

5. Fast delivery

Now, here’s something you must surely have heard n number of times- we live in a fast world. For many of us, the meaning of that phrase is inextricably linked with the quick communication that the internet affords. However, there is another-related side to the speedy nature of the present world. And that has to do with the marketplace, or rather the change that has come in consumer behaviour over the last couple of decades- we have come to accept frequent updates or new variations in the products that we consume.

Part of this behavioural change is ushered in by the high competition among companies in a globalized marketplace. But it is also because spending time online has rewired our ways of thinking- we now expect more things to happen in any given interval of time, much like how we expect to consume quite a lot of content in short bursts of time while online.

Nowhere is this expectation reflected more than in the arena of software products. Customers typically expect meaningful updates that would delight them in a piece of software that they use.

This is why the principle of delivering value to the consumer at the earliest possible time is an important principle in lean development.

6. Respect the team

This goes without saying. But the fact that it is included as a principle here shows that the lean development approach was devised with certain ground realities in mind.

Team members don’t always get along well with each other, and sometimes their attitudes could adversely affect the quality of the end product. To this end, this principle stresses that effective communication amongst team members is important. Managing any conflicts that may arise amongst team members should also be a priority for the managers.

7. Optimise the whole

A crucial problem that many software development teams face is that of suboptimization or sub-par optimization.

There are two probable scenarios in which this could happen. One is when developers create code of less-than-optimal quality when they are forced to develop at a high speed.  The second scenario is not related to development but to testing. If the persons involved in software testing are burdened with too many tasks, there is bound to be a long gap between when developers create code and testers providing them with the feedback. The end result is that the software developers will continue creating code that may be filled with errors.

Optimizing the whole is included as a principle in lean development precisely to avoid the problem of suboptimization.

It is predicated on the notion that all the activities required to design, create and deliver software form what’s called a value stream. You should optimize the value stream in order to deliver value to the customers at short intervals.

Kanban

Kanban is another common type of agile methodology used in many organizations. The name traces its origins to Japan. The meaning is related to the idea of being just on time.

The central tool in the Kanban framework of agility is the Kanban board or a table. This would be segregated into multiple columns so that the entries in these columns show the way the software product is progressing. Put another way, it’s an effective mechanism to visualise the flow of tasks in an agile project. Depending on the progress of the tasks, the entries in the tables would change to reflect the current status. Each task gets its own card on the Kanban board, and whenever a new task is opened, a new card is included on the board.

The biggest utility of the Kanban method is that it’s easy to keep track of the flow of a project using it. Every team member could have access to the board so that everyone is in sync about how far the project has come and how much is left to do. The task status depicted in the Kanban board is near-real time so that everyone stays current about the tasks in progress.

One of the key advantages of Kanban is that you could easily view the tasks related to a project- be it finished, in progress or in the testing phase- all in one place. Also, since you have a clear overview of the tasks at any given moment, you can optimize the number of tasks planned for the future. The framework also enables continuous deliveries of values.

On the flip side, since there are no timeframes mentioned in the Kanban board, delays in finishing a task could incur. 

 Scrum

Arguably the most commonly used agile framework, scrum is also one of the most successful among the frameworks. (Indeed, both the aspects are mutually related).

The idea of a scrum comes into play because of the short but periodic sprints which are inherent to agility. A cluster of these sprints- which are essentially different stages of a product’s development- come under a scrum.

Typically used for developing software, scrum as an approach to project management is also used in other types of projects. One defining feature of the scrum framework is the daily scrum- a session that lasts about fifteen minutes, in which team members fill each other in on their progress so far and their agenda for the coming day. This helps everyone stay updated about the progress of a project.

Since scrum, by nature, mandates strict deadlines, team members are usually motivated to finish their tasks on predetermined dates. This minimises the possibility of delays in project delivery. At the same time, scrum also prioritises quality so that errors are minimised in the development process.

 Also, scrum is a rather flexible framework, meaning the product developers could adjust their priorities according to shifting requirements. That does come with the caveat that each team member’s role may not be strictly defined. This in turn could cause confusion within the team.

 Extreme Programming

The term extreme programming probably conjures up images of something dynamic, the project management equivalent of explosive action, maybe. But the truth is that Extreme Programming, or XP as it is usually called- rests on humane qualities like simplicity, the value of communication, respect, feedback and courage.

One of the most important aspects of this framework is that it puts customer satisfaction right at the top of the priority list. The product developers are encouraged to stay open to the fluctuating nature of customer requirements. Put more plainly, even if a requirement is relayed to the developers late in the development stage, they ought to be open to them, incorporating the requirement in how they develop the product.

A lot of emphases is put on teamwork in XP, so much so that when an issue arises, it’s rarely the case that one team member is tasked to solve it. More often than not, the entire team- including the managers and the product developers- are equally burdened with coming up with the solution.

The aim of this is twofold: to increase both the team’s productivity as well as the efficiency.

The software being developed is tested from the first day itself so collecting feedback from the testing team is a continual process. This in turn enables continuous improvement in the development process.

As mentioned before, simplicity is one of the key tenets of extreme programming. In software development, this is reflected as simple codes. This makes improving the code rather easy. Also, continuous testing makes for a more agile software development process.

But that’s not to say that extreme programming is without its downsides. For one thing, the constant attention on the program code could mean other aspects like design don’t get adequate attention. Another issue is that it’s hard to implement extreme programming unless all team members function in the same geographical location.

 Crystal

Rather than being a single framework, Crystal is in fact a group of frameworks that share some similar characteristics. The variations are formed with regard to the number of people in a team.

For instance, the Crystal Clear framework is applicable for a team of up to 8 people whereas Crystal Yellow is meant for a team sized 10 to 20. Crystal Orange meanwhile is for bigger teams of 20 to 50 people and Crystal Red is for teams of 50 to a thousand members.

The core features that Crystal values include community, communication, talent, skills, interactions and people. By focusing on these features, the framework aims for the best development process possible. The Crystal frameworks are typically used in software development projects.

The two pillars of the development process in Crystal are symbiosis and interaction. Essentially, this means that the people to whom projects have been allocated should interact well with each other and establish a symbiosis with the processes that they partake in. The fundamental idea of Crystal, as envisioned by its founder Alistair Cockburn is that if the quality of interactions among team members improves, that will benefit the entire project.

Adopting the Crystal framework helps ensure that deliveries are made frequently, and also enables close collaboration and knowledge sharing among the team members.

How a project management tool could help adopt agile

No matter the framework that you adopt to implement agility in your organization, the project management would run much more smoothly if you use the right project management tool than without it. However, you may get baffled by the choices available in the market- especially given how not all of them support agility efficiently.

I’m Productive is an excellent project management software that supports agile projects. From creating and tracking tasks to assigning them to team members according to the requirements of a scrum and more, it comes with an exhaustive number of tools to help you sail smoothly across an agile project.

The tasks management tool also incorporates a powerful AI which helps you accurately predict the project delivery time. In fact, you could do that with the click of a button!

To learn more about this powerful project management tool, and to see how it could help you manage your agile project, please visit their website.

 

 

What is an agile project

Agility is an approach to project management by which big projects are broken down into smaller chunks of work. Each of these individual pieces is easier to manage compared to managing the whole project as a monolith. These shorter pieces could be finished in relatively short periods of time, in what are called sprints.

Typically, if you follow the agile principle, you should be able to finish your job quicker as opposed to following other modes of project management. Also, agility- as the name implies- helps you adapt to changing requirements easily.

The last point is particularly relevant for software development and marketing teams- since their jobs usually come with an inherent tendency for unforeseen changes.

The values in agility

There are four different values that are central to agility. These values are stated in the Agile Manifesto- something of a guideline for all companies which choose this methodology. Let’s look at the core values now.

1. Prioritize people and interactions over processes and systems

Everyone agrees that technology is fairly advanced in this era- regardless of the domain one works in. However, while we get carried away by the prowess of technology, we shouldn’t lose sight of the most important element in a business ecosystem- humans. That’s the first core value of agility. If you rely on tools and processes more than humans, it will hamper your ability to adapt to new circumstances.

2. Prioritize functional software over holistic documentation

Everyone who has been a part of a software development team could tell you that documentation is an important part of the process. Without the right documentation, developers would be at sea regarding how to proceed.

However, even more, important than documentation is a functional software- a tenet so central to agility it is its second core value. The idea is not to overburden developers with more information than they strictly require.

3.Prioritize collaborating with customers over negotiating contracts

More often than not, businesses forget customers are crucial stakeholders in the process of building a product. This sometimes results in unwantedly long development processes. More than that, this could also result in subpar products.

It’s only by collaborating closely with your customers- making them a part of the development process- that the end product could become as robust as it needs to be.

4. Prioritize adapting to changes over executing plans

Even the best-laid plans would need to be put aside in the face of unexpected changes. To this end, every sprint in an agile project provides an occasion to revise and alter the course of a task, if that could help create an even better product.

The principles of agility

Aside from the core values, the Agile Manifesto also lays down twelve principles that are important in agility. We shall now look at them.

1. The most important priority of an agile business is to satisfy its customers. They are to achieve this by early and continuous delivery of value- be it in the form of software or any other product or service that you provide.

2. Changes in requirements are to be welcomed, even if they come quite late in the development stage. Agile businesses could leverage the changes to deliver a competitive advantage for their customers.

3. Focus on delivering projects at a frequent rate. The rate of delivery could be as little as a project per two weeks. The ideal upper limit is two months per project.

4. Throughout the run time of a project, team members who are involved in coordinating should work closely together on a daily basis.

5. Projects should be built around motivated team members. Once you have identified such members, provide them with the environment and support they need to succeed. Equally important is to trust them to finish the task.

6. The most effective way to convey information is through face-to-face conversations. This is true whether you are relaying info to different teams or within your own team.

7. The key measure of progress is always the final product.

8. One of the key aims of agility is sustainable development. This means a constant pace of progress could ideally be maintained ad infinitum.

9. For better agility, give unremitting attention to gain technical grandeur and a high quality in design.

10. Simplicity is an important element in agility. By this, it is meant you should enhance the volume of work not required to be done as much as possible.

11. Self-organizing teams are crucial for agile processes. From such teams emerge the best designs, architectures and designs.

12. Better efficiency is a continual process. To this end, agile teams consider how they could be more effective on a periodic basis. Based on this, they make the required variations in their behaviour.

What are the main components of agility?

Now that you have seen the values and principles that are central to agility, it’s time to look at the main components of an agile process.

User stories

User stories are work requests that come to an agile team. Just like regular stories, user stories would also contain information that would help you gain an understanding-in in this case, of what task needs to be performed.  

More than that, a user story would help teams create an estimate of how much effort they would need to put in to perform the task. It’s often a short description that’s created from the perspective of a user. Its main value is that it outlines not just what your customer wants but also why they want it. Such insights help you in delivering the best possible solution for your client.

Sprints

A typical sprint in an agile process is a short yet important fragment of a bigger project.

A sprint usually takes between one to three weeks to finish. Each sprint is comprised of multiple tasks. The decisions regarding which tasks each team member should work on are taken during the sprint planning meeting.

In agile processes, sprints are repeated continuously so that the product becomes rich in the desired features. After a sprint is finished, you could review the product, and get an idea of what’s working in the product and what’s not. Based on this review, you could improve the product by instigating the next sprint.

Stand-up meetings

Different project management modes have different methods to ensure all team members stay updated about how the project is progressing. Not all of these methods are successful. Some, in fact, serve only to waste people’s time.

Agile projects use a rather simple yet efficient method- the daily stand-up meeting. Also known as scrum meetings, these are typically over in about ten minutes- a time in which members of a team interact about their previous day’s actions and also what they plan to do in the new workday.

As the name suggests, the team members would be standing during the event, given how these meetings are meant to be held for only a short duration.

Agile board

While stand-up meetings help team members stay informed about what their peers are working on, an Agile board helps project managers and team members keep track of task progress on their own. The tool visualizes the progress of tasks and projects.

An agile board could be of different types- from a simple board with notes on it to a Kanban board. It could also be a technologically advanced tool that is perhaps embedded in a project management system. 

Backlog

Earlier, it was mentioned the work requests that an agile team receives are called user stories. Now, as more requests come in, it’s common enough for many or some of these user stories to become part of a backlog.

In agile project management, there is a method by which the tasks in the backlog become part of a sprint. The team members partake in what is known as sprint planning in which they collectively decide the actions which need to be executed in the next sprint.

 It’s during these planning sessions that the user stories that are in the backlog would be shifted into the sprint. This signifies that the tasks would be finished in the following iteration.

For project managers working in an agile environment, managing the backlog is a pivotal task.

The roles in Agile teams

Agility shakes up the traditional definitions of roles in an organization. The aim is to make every role as functional as it is flexible. But that’s not to say Agility doesn’t entail any roles.

Depending on the complexity and size of a project, the number of roles needed would vary for implementing agile. Having said that, these are the most important roles that are present in an agile structure:     

Scrum master

One of the most important roles in an agile team is that of a scrum master. For it is the scrum master who should make sure every sprint proceeds as planned.

 If during the execution of tasks, the team members face any unforeseen obstacle or challenges, the scrum master should help them resolve such issues. To this end, they could provide the team members with the resources or knowledge they need.

Also, if the team members require anything from the management to help proceed with their tasks, the scrum master should advocate on their behalf.

Product owner

Another crucial role in the agile ecosystem is the product owner defines the objectives for each sprint. Aside from that, they also manage the backlog.

Team members

The team members are responsible for executing the tasks that are involved in a sprint. A typical team in agile projects is small in size- constituting some three to seven members.

 But these team members could be possessing different skill sets, coming from various professional backdrops. If the project requires otherwise, they could all be performing a similar job as well.

The bottom line is that the roles in an agile team are flexible, and decided according to project-specific requirements.

Stakeholders

The stakeholders usually comprise those in the higher echelons of the hierarchy in an organization. They are rarely involved in the project execution on a daily basis. Also, it is unlikely that all members of a team would frequently interact with them.

The stakeholders, however, should be kept informed about the progress of a project. This could be done either by scrum master or with the aid of software that automatically updates them.

 The steps in agile methodology

Certain aspects vary from one agile project to another. For instance, a project could use scrum or Kanban as a framework.

But despite such variations, all agile projects follow the same six steps. We shall now look at them.

Project planning

The purpose of project planning is to help teams understand the objective of the project and also the means to achieve it. To this end, a project scope could be developed in this step.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the project scope is set in stone. As discussed elsewhere, agile projects are meant to be accommodative of changes and variations in plans.

Product roadmap creation

A roadmap constitutes the features that should be included in the product for it to be successful. The roadmap is created during the planning phase. As you may have guessed, this is a critical step given how if you miss adding any important feature in the roadmap, it will adversely affect the quality of the end product.

The features you list in this step will be in the backlog. Once the sprint planning happens, the features would be moved to the sprint iterations.

Release planning

In conventional project management methodologies, the sole release date for the project arrives after the completion of the project. In Agile, things are a little different.

Rather than releasing a single product as the final output after a lengthy production cycle, new features are released at the end of every sprint.

Before the project is even started, the features that need to be released after each sprint are decided. The flexibility that agility provides means with this plan could be altered if needed as the sprints proceed.

Sprint planning

The name of this step itself is rather descriptive. The idea is that the stakeholders could meet together and plan the sprint before its starts.

The objectives include deciding the tasks that each team member should perform and also assessing their workload. This latter is a crucial element since the workload should be evenly spread across team members.

A visual representation of the workflow is also typically created in this step. The resultant document could be shared with the team.

Daily stand-ups

These are daily meetings that usually take up no more than ten or fifteen minutes. All team members would be standing during this meeting. And each of them would fill in the rest of the members about their accomplishments from the day before and objectives for the coming day.

Sprint review and retrospective

The sprint review is held after a sprint is ended. The stakeholders are usually given a preview of the end result in this step. Discussion with the stakeholders could be done either in person or remotely as per the requirements.

A sprint retrospective meeting, meanwhile, is an avenue to discuss what went fine during the recently concluded sprint and also things which could have gone better. Other points of discussion include whether the workload was fairly distributed to the team members in hindsight, and also the accomplishments each team member made during the sprint.

How a project management tool can help in agile project management

Countless are the companies that continue to benefit from having adopted agile as an approach to project management. The process itself, as you have seen is well laid out. However, for the implementation to be smooth, project management software could help a lot.

Not all project management tools work equally well for agile project management though. You need certain features in the tool for that objective to be fulfilled.

I’m Productive is an excellent example of a project management tool that could be used to efficiently manage agile projects.

To begin with, using the platform you can assign tasks to different members of the team, which is an essential attribute of managing a sprint. The platform lets you assign multiple members to a single task if so you wish.

Team members can collaborate efficiently during a sprint by communicating with each other, without having to leave the platform. They could comment on a task if they are granted permission to do so. They could also get notified about any important updates regarding a task or the project.

You could set deadlines for tasks in I’m Productive with just a few clicks. The workflow is easy to follow visually- you could easily discern the tasks under progress and also the upcoming tasks. Once a task is finished, it will automatically be shifted to review mode.

As you have seen by now, in agile projects, you get the flexibility to reassess a task and then channel it in a different direction. You could do that in the review stage. If needed, you can re-assign the task to be performed by a team member in a different way.

Over and above all these features that help you with agile project management, I’m Productive also incorporates a powerful Artificial Intelligence which helps you predict the project delivery time accurately with the click of a button.

So, take your agile project management to greater heights with I’m Productive. Please visit the website for more information.

ProofHub vs Basecamp- How to choose the right project management tool

While managing a project comes with its own set of challenges, choosing the right project management tool shouldn’t be a challenge. However, the fact is that with many project management tools in the market providing a wide array of features, picking the right one could often be an exercise in bafflement.

Here, we take an in-depth look at two great candidates- Basecamp and ProofHub. Read on to learn which one is best suited for your purposes.

Basecamp

Simplicity and control

You can find many of the useful features in a conventional project management solution in Basecamp- like to-do lists for your projects. To simplify managing projects, you could divide projects into different phases in the to-do list. You could set the due dates for them and also assign one or many users to them. You could also add your comments and notes, or attach external files to them if you want to.

The project management system reduces a lot of overhead for managers. For instance, if a task is overdue, there is no need for you to let the concerned team members know individually as the system will notify them automatically. Also, you could get a quick and comprehensive view of the tasks for the day along with a list of the overdue tasks and also tasks which are coming up.

 The team members could also have access to this view, so everyone remains on the same page.

Individual users can also leverage the “My stuff” menu in this project management system. The menu offers a single place where you could view all your tasks, even if you are working on multiple projects at the same time.

Communication and client-access

Being a platform for collaboration, you would probably expect strong support for real-time communication in Basecamp. If so, the tasks management tool certainly strives hard to meet your expectations. In fact, the platform has quite a few tools dedicated for that.

Aside from tasks that different team members could collaborate on, the project management system also supports message boards, group chats and pings. Each of these could be used for a different purpose.

For instance, group chats are particularly useful for casual communication amongst members of a team. Message boards, on the other hand, are ideal for making announcements to a large number of people and also for updating the team about a task or a project. It’s also well-suited for pitching new ideas to a team. 

The ping feature is recommended for one on one conversations or conversations amongst a small number of people. The project management system also enables you to centralize all your real-time conversations.

This ensures that you wouldn’t have to grapple with a large number of communication channels where it’s easy to miss messages.

Such a comprehensive communication framework is rarely provided by your average project management system.

Another feature not common to most tasks management tools lets you grant access to clients in addition to your team members. Basecamp brings you multiple levels of customization so you could grant clients the ability to track project progress, but only to the extent that you want.

One obvious advantage of having this feature is that you don’t have to spend time updating clients frequently about how the project is coming along. This in turn helps you focus more on executing the project.

You can set the controls for clients on a granular level- deciding on the parts of the project they could see and edit. The default setting is private. So, only if you opt to share with a client would the setting be changed.

You could also forward messages, to-dos and emails from your clients to Basecamp so that all communication is centralized in a single space.

Calendar sync and check-ins

One of the most common challenges that teams face is syncing calendars. The challenge gets compounded when the team members are working in different geographical locations.

Given this backdrop, the support to integrate the calendar that Basecamp provides would be welcome for teams of all sizes and types.

Users are cold easily sync all the popular calendar tools like Outlook calendars, Google Calendars and iCals. This helps avoid any confusion regarding the availability of a team member at any given time. This also helps you schedule calls with team members according to their availability, within the project management system.

Another useful feature in the project management system is Automatic check-ins. Anyone who has managed a team of any meaningful size could tell you how time-consuming checking in with team members could be.

The fact that this action is usually performed daily means that the time loss is repeatedly experienced. Basecamp’s Automatic check-ins can free you from physically checking in with team members. Instead, just set custom questions which could be shared with team members every day or on a weekly or monthly basis.

If not everyone in the team is to be included in these check-ins, you could choose to share the questions only with selected members. Once the answers are in, you could comment on them if you wish to.

The individual users could answer the check-in questions at a time of their own convenience. This should obviously be liberating to them, as it frees them from having to attend meetings periodically.

Collaboration and notifications

We talked about how the tasks management system supports real-time communication which aids collaboration. Another principal feature required for collaboration is the ability to share documents easily and securely.

To this end, every project workspace in Basecamp comes with its own space where you could share documents and images- a localized repository for every workspace if you will.

All team members working on a project could access files from this space. Besides, every file would have complete version history, so that you could track any changes that have been made on it.

Organizing the files is also quite simple. You could even color code them and arrange them according to your requirements. Files from the local system could be dragged and dropped into space.

Managing notifications is one aspect of working using project management tools that gets messy for many people. Usually, the problem is that people get bogged down with frequent notifications. But such problems can be easily avoided with Basecamp’s savvy notification management feature. For it allows you to customize notification settings according to their preferences.

To begin with, you could get notified only for those that are relevant to you- be they messages, updates on tasks or something else. You could also specify hours of the day in which you want to receive notifications, and on which days of the week. Another handy feature sees brings you a summary of the updates you missed when you were away.

Basecamp’s impressive set of features comes with a few drawbacks though. For instance, you get only limited project views in the tasks management tool.

 Even as you get a calendar view, you don’t have the advantage of a Gantt chart or a Kanban board in the system. And in the absence of Kanban boards and Gantt charts, managing an agile project becomes significantly hard.

Another drawback is a lack of provision to set priority for tasks. Apart from the flexibility in changing due dates, there is little you could do to that end. This becomes especially problematic while running a complex project involving a large number of tasks.

ProofHub

A problem that stifles many while adopting a new project management system is the difficulty in learning how to use the different features of the system. This is particularly true in the case of users who are not used to working on technically intricate systems.

 However, even such users wouldn’t find ProofHub’s features challenging to master. Far from it. For ProofHub is one of the most intuitive task management systems around.

Accessibility and notifications

Further, the platform could be customized to suit your purposes- you could organize the teams you manage into different groups based on certain parameters of your choosing. The result is a much cleaner interface, with even better accessibility. Such segregation also leads to better data security. The reason is it’s easier to implement security protocols in relatively smaller groups.  

You can get notified of important changes, be they in the tasks or in the form of milestones. ProofHub offers a fair amount of flexibility in terms of the notifications you receive, so you would not be overwhelmed with notifications.

Calendar sync and importing files

Earlier, we saw how Basecamp helps you sync different third-party calendar apps like iCal and Google Calendar with its internal calendar. The same feature is available in ProofHub too.

ProofHub also makes it a little easier for you to shift from Basecamp to its platform as you could import files from both Basecamp and Basecamp Classic into ProofHub. These files could be discussions, projects, text documents, tasks or people. In case you are wondering, you don’t need to pay any extra fee for this feature.

Compatibility and customer support

Being compatible with multiple operating systems including iOS, Windows and Android, ProofHub is a great tasks management tool if you work using multiple devices. The high level of compatibility the platform provides means you could continue a task you have been working in the office, even when you are commuting from the office to elsewhere. All you need is a decent internet connection on your device.

ProofHub brings yet another form of flexibility, as it allows you to customize how the interface looks and behaves according to your preferences.

While a bulk of the features mentioned so far are available in many other project management systems, some features in ProofHub are rather rare among its peers. For instance, proofing.

You have the provision to perform design proofing within the platform itself, The platform also provides workflows and steady boards. Both these features can help shed clarity on how tasks are progressing in a project. You could easily get a clear idea of which tasks are proceeding on time and which are lagging. This in turn helps you direct the workflow for optimal results, thereby improving the productivity of team members.

Though not a feature that’s often discussed, efficient customer support is one of the tasks management system’s highlights. To begin with, there are quite a lot of use cases, video tutorials and FAQs on the platform’s website.

It is normal enough to face some issues while you use the platform. You are bound to find the solution to such issues in the information provided in the website’s resources. Meanwhile, the latest features and resolutions to recently reported issues could be found on the Update page on the website.

If you are unable to find the solution you seek even on the Update page, that is also no cause for concern.

Among the project management systems, ProofHub has one of the strongest presences on social media. You could share whatever queries you may have on their social platforms- including Facebook and Twitter- and get them resolved.

The best bit is that query resolutions are almost always quick.

Mobile optimization and collaboration

We mentioned strong customer service support as one of the features which put ProofHub on a different tier from many of its competitors. Yet another feature many other similar products don’t have is mobile optimization.

In fact, one common issue customers raise about project management systems is the poor experience using mobile apps. The creators of the platforms do tend to prioritize optimizing the desktop experience.

The logic seems to be that given how most people work on their projects using computers, there is little need to optimize the mobile experience. But that logic is flawed, especially in the current age when owning multiple devices is the norm rather than the exception. More importantly, many handheld devices now have processing powers equal to or surpassing that of computers.

There is then no reason why someone wouldn’t want to do the bulk of their work on such a device- perhaps, even a phone.

Given this context, the ProofHub Bolt app is perfect if you perform project-related tasks or project management using your phone. The app works well on both Android and iOS devices.

The interface is optimized for a mobile experience- meaning, you wouldn’t have to contend with frames that are missing their borders and similar issues that typically plague mobile versions of project management systems.

ProofHub enables collaboration using its plethora of communication tools. You could proof design along with your team members, and also comment on tasks as you wish. The @mention tool could be used to invite a specific person’s attention to a comment. You could even comment through email, without having to log into the platform.

Other provisions include adding images to chats and comments. You could simply drag and drop images to visually illustrate a point. To find a particular topic under discussion, you could search using relevant keywords or phrases, much like how you may run a search on a web search engine.

Should you choose ProofHub or Basecamp?  

Basecamp is a hugely popular project management system. And that popularity has some very good reasons. Robust software architecture and intuitive interface are just two of those reasons.

However, Basecamp is useful mostly for simple projects where the number of tasks is relatively less. For more advanced projects, ProofHub is the better choice.

What’s missing in ProofHub and Basecamp?

The ability to accurately predict the time when a project could be delivered is a worrying factor for many project managers. But both ProofHub and Basecamp prove a letdown when it comes to this point.

I’m Productive, on the other hand, is a tasks management system which uses a powerful AI to make that accurate prediction. In fact, you could make the prediction with just a click of a button.

The system has a mechanism to track the time a team member spends on a task, without counting such metrics as the time spent on breaks. This in turn helps the AI make accurate predictions. The tool also includes everything that you would require in a project management system. Visit the website where you could learn more.

ProofHub vs Jira- Know which project management tool to choose

ProofHub is a project management tool that has gained in popularity relatively recently whereas Jira has been widely known for a while now. But both task management tools have plenty to offer managers who are in charge of project management and their teams. 

So, which of these would suit your purposes better? Take a look at our comparison between Jira and ProofHub to know the answer.

Jira

Just about anyone who has worked in a software development project would be familiar with terms like agile and scrum. Agile project management is arguably the most common project management protocol used in the current age for developing software products, and scrums form an integral part of the same.

Given this scenario, it is only desirable that a project management system should support agility. This is precisely what Jira does with its array of agile tools.

Support for agility, views and bug tracking

For instance, you get both scrum boards and Kanban boards in this project management system. These tools make it easy to visualize the progress of tasks so that you could see which ones are going as per the schedule and which ones are lagging. Based on this insight, you could take appropriate actions to hasten a task that has fallen behind.

To further support agile project management, the project management system also supports agile sprints. For those unfamiliar with sprints, they are short iterations of actions which form part of a larger process. You could view them as building blocks for processes in agile project management.

The project management tool also provides you with multiple project views including user stories and story points. This is more crucial a feature than some may imagine. The crux of a good project run is collaboration. This naturally means that more than one person would be involved in a project at the same time. Depending on their roles, the different personnel involved in the project would need to view the project’s progress using different ‘views’ if they are to learn about the project details that are relevant to them.

 The convenience that working in digital ecosystems brings is indisputable. However, along with conveniences comes a fair share of problems. For instance, bugs in the system.

Before it became the tasks management tool that it is today, Jira was designed as a system to track software bugs in digital projects. Even though the tool has evolved over a time of period, this functionality of tracking and recording bugs still forms a core part of the software. The tasks management tool makes it very easy to view the bugs that it has recorded- listing all of them in a single space in the backlog.

Though teams typically aim for a zero-bug environment, that ideal remains something of a holy grail. Also, project managers need to contend with the limited number of people in a team. This means when bugs are reported, they would need to decide who among the team members should be assigned to resolve them.

Having all the reported bugs listed in one place would help in prioritizing the most critical bugs so that team members could be allotted to resolve them in an optimal manner.

Reporting, customization and versatility

Reporting is yet another arena in which the tasks management tool is of immense help to project managers and team leaders. The tool can bring you more than a dozen reports.

 Different types of projects make different types of reports ideal. A large number of reporting formats becomes crucial in this context. They help project managers and team leaders gain the necessary insights into the performance of their teams. Even better, they could get these insights in real-time even as a project is in progress.

The types of reports you get in this tasks management tool include sprint reports, version reports, burndown charts, burnup charts and more. Many of these reports are well suited for agile project management since the reports are formatted to match the requirements of agile projects.

A high level of customization is something that we all demand from technology products, especially those in the software realm. From being able to add the films of our choice to the watchlist on a movie streaming platform to bringing all banking products we use under the same tab in a bank’s app, this demand manifests in different ways.

Such a demand is to be expected in the field of project management tools as well. The makers of Jeera seem to have anticipated it. The tasks management tool allows for a high level of customization.

For instance, you could create visual depictions of processes according to your requirements using the custom workflows feature. But it’s not just the workflows that could be customized in the tasks management tool. Other elements like scrum boards and reports could also be customized.

Further, software developers could develop custom filters in Jira by using the Jira Query language. Another related point is that the tool could be integrated with over 3,000 third-party apps. This enables another level of customization, whereby you could make the software function precisely the way you want to with these integrations. 

You may have got the impression that Jira is well suited for software development teams. While that is correct, it doesn’t mean that Jira cannot be used by other departments in an organization for their project management requirements.

On the contrary, Jira is among the most flexible task management tools. For instance, marketing departments could easily use the tool to plan product launches and other complex events. The Human Resources department could also use it to optimize its hiring process. These are only two use cases the tasks management tool supports. From agile project management to information technology service management, a whole gamut of uses could be fulfilled with this project management tool.

This offers you a significant cost advantage. Instead of having to invest in different project management tools for multiple departments, you could satisfy the requirements of all departments using a single tasks management tool.

Security

The benefits of adopting Jira as the project management system of choice for your organization wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the security element that the tool brings. As more and more of our life and work are being shifted online, the idea of data security couldn’t be overlooked. In this regard, Jira is compliant with all the major security protocols including SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO/IEC 27018 and more.

There are a few relatively minor issues that you may have to contend with if you choose Jira as your project management tool. Perhaps the most important is that the tool doesn’t have the easiest interface to use. Those who are used to working on interfaces that require technical adeptness wouldn’t find a problem here either. However, for the rest, it’s a different story- especially during the initial stages of using the tool.

Another potential problem is the relatively lesser number of collaboration tools that the tasks management platform provides. Apart from Kanban and Scrum boards, you may be hard-pressed to find many other collaboration tools on the platform.

Some may say this is a non-problem as Jira allows integration with third-party collaboration tools like Slack. But that still doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been better to have such tools inside the platform itself.

ProofHub

Contrasting sharply with Jira, ProofHub’s interface is simple enough that even users who are not technically proficient can easily use it. To enhance the quality of the layout, you could cluster together groups based on a parameter of your choice. In addition to a cleaner interface, this brings more data security to the project management software.

Ease of use, calendar integrations and compatibility

The idea of ease of use is reflected in other features that the project management tool brings you as well.

For instance, you can receive email alerts immediately when any changes are made on tasks which are relevant to you. This is true for when a project crosses a major milestone or if there is any status update you ought to know of. This frees you from having to log into the platform frequently for updates. Rather, the updates would come directly to your email inbox.

You could, of course, choose to get only those notifications that are relevant to you, so that your inbox wouldn’t be flooded with messages that are of no use to you.

ProofHub calendar can be used in conjunction with other apps, as the tasks management tool supports integration with multiple third-party programs. These include iCal and Google Calendar. This is yet another instance in which the creators of ProofHub seem to have understood the importance of ease of using the platform.

The provision allows you to directly sync any existing meeting schedules into the platform with very little effort.

In addition to this, the tasks management tool also lets you import files from Basecamp and Basecamp Classic. The files could be anything from projects to tasks and discussions.

ProofHub works flawlessly regardless of the operating system in your device- be it Android, iOS or Windows. You could continue a task you have begun on one device on another, at any given point in time, according to your convenience.

The project management system is optimized for mobile, so you could easily get even complex tasks done on the mobile application. This couldn’t be said about all the project management tools that are available today. A cluttered interface, slow response time and hard-to-access menu bar are only some of the problems that make for a subpar mobile application experience with many project management tools.

The ability to work across devices and operating systems is a boon in an age when such versatility is very much in demand. However, except for mobile optimization, such compatibility is rather common across project management platforms that are available in the market these days.

But that’s not to say the platform doesn’t have features that are not easily available in other project management platforms. Proofing and time tracking are two such examples. There are also steady boards and workflows which could be used to help improve the productivity of your team members. These latter features help bring clarity regarding the flow of tasks in the project- giving you a fair picture of which tasks are proceeding as planned and which are not.

This in turn helps you make meaningful interventions to ensure tasks are completed on time.

Customer support, collaboration support and automation

Another not-too-common feature which makes ProofHub special is its customer support. Even otherwise useful product management systems sometimes get weighed down by the issue of shoddy customer support. Not so ProofHub. The project management system comes loaded with an ample number of use cases and video tutorials. These would help solve many of your doubts regarding the functionalities. The FAQs section makes it even easier to find a solution to problems you have been facing.

If you can’t find a solution in any of the resources in the platform; ProofHub has an active presence on all major social media platforms where you can have your queries resolved.

ProofHub provides excellent support for collaboration. For instance, all users could access up-to-date information from a central repository, provided they are granted access permission. You could track the status of the project in real-time as well as the progress of individual tasks.

ProofHub also enables a fair bit of automation. For instance, you could set certain tasks to recur so that they would be repeated in the workflow at the appropriate times without your intervention every time. Like Jira, ProofHub also supports agile project development. For example, with Kanban boards, you could easily track the progress of tasks in agile projects.

Sometimes, you may need to exert granular control over how the project is managed. In that regard, if you need to assign people to certain stages alone in a specific workflow, it is possible in ProofHub.

We talked about ProofHub supporting collaboration before. Allied to that are the many ways in which the platform enables communication.

You could comment, use the @mention tool to draw someone’s attention to a message and proof designs, all using the in-built communication tools.

This streamlines many processes and eliminates the need to switch to third-party tools whenever you need to connect with your team members. You could even forgo logging into ProofHub and still add your comments to ongoing discussions through email. Images could be used in the chats by a simple drag-and-drop method.

Should you choose Jira or ProofHub?

Both ProofHub and Jira offer tools that support project management- be they agile or not. Both platforms are comparable in their robustness. The largest differentiating point is the interface. ProofHub’s interface makes it easier to master the tool, so you could easily have even a large team new to the platform becoming familiar with it in no time. If the interface is a matter of concern for you, you should opt for ProofHub.

Is there anything important missing in Jira and ProofHub?

The ability to accurately track the time someone spends on a task is a crucial feature that’s missing in both project management tools. This in turn limits their ability to help you accurately estimate the project delivery time.

This is one of the areas in which the project management system, I’m Productive excels. Not only does I’m Productive have the aforementioned feature, it even comes with an AI that helps you accurately predict the project delivery time with the click of a button!

Head over to their website to learn more.

 

 

ProofHub vs Trello- Know which project management tool you should choose

Would ProofHub or Trello be the better project management tool for your requirements? Which would be simpler for your entire team to learn to use in a short time so that you can minimize the adoption duration? Does such simplicity come at the expense of good features? The questions are probably many. Do read on to find the answers.

ProofHub

User-friendliness is an aspect we have come to expect from just about everything since the concept became intrinsic to electronic and digital utilities. Be it a packet of confectionaries that comes sealed but is easy to open or the simple interface of a digital kiosk, we appreciate user-friendliness in its different guises.

ProofHub doesn’t let you down in that regard. In fact, project management software is among the easiest to use in the market. A highly intuitive user interface is the main reason for this. In fact, the interface on this project management software is so simple that even new users wouldn’t have any trouble using its features-an important reality given how multiple users would need to learn how to use such a tool in a short span of time if it is adopted by a whole team or an enterprise.

ProofHub gives you the option to organize teams into different groups according to a parameter of your choice. This helps further enhance the ease of use. For one thing, doing so results in a much simpler layout- with meaningful segregations making it easier to access information. Also, clustering by groups helps increase the data security in the project management software. After all, it is easier to set security norms when the teams are more in number but lesser in size.

To help ensure that you stay updated about every new development relevant to you, the project management tool also brings you instant alerts via email. You could choose only those notifications that are relevant to you so that your email inbox wouldn’t be inundated with unwanted alerts.

To make managing projects easy, ProofHub lets you sync the calendar in the project management tool with third-party calendar apps including iCal and Google Calendar. Files and documents- including discussions, tasks and people- could be imported from Basecamp and Basecamp Classic, freeing you from the hassles of setting everything up from scratch if you are migrating to ProofHub.

Aside from such cross-platform functionalities, ProofHub also works well on all the leading operating systems- including Android, iOS and Windows. This ensures that regardless of the system you are on, you could use the project management tool with maximum efficiency. The tool also lets you customize its appearance according to your wishes.

Such customizations and compatibility aside, one of the coolest things about ProofHub is that if offers advanced features which are not typically seen as part of offerings from project management tools. For instance, you get features for both time tracking and proofing in ProofHub. Then, there are features like workflows and steady boards that can be used for improving team productivity.  The latter features also make it easier to guide the task flow thereby aiding in task management.

While we are talking about the great features of ProofHub, it should also be mentioned that the project management software is optimized for mobile.

This is more important than you may imagine. For no matter how efficient a project management tool is while its’s run on a computer, it needn’t be so in the mobile version- an unfortunate problem that mars many an otherwise fine project management tool. Thankfully, the ProofHub app works seamlessly on Android and iOS. So you could track tasks, manage projects and do more on the go. 

The useful features in the project management software are perfectly backed by solid customer support. To solve any common queries that you may have, you could access use cases, video tutorials and FAQs of which there are quite a few on the platform.

To keep a tab on what new features have been added and also to learn about any new issues that may have been reported, there is a dedicated Update page. The fact that ProofHub has an active presence across various social media pages also makes it easy to get answers to your queries.

Since the bulk of the software development projects that happen in the current era are agile projects, it is only right to expect that a project management tool should support agile project management. You can be sure that such expectations are met by ProofHub. For instance, Kanban boards that are included in the system make it easy for you to arrange and systemize tasks in an agile project.

You also get the provision to add specific subscribers to a distinct stage of a workflow, so that only those team members you want would have access to that particular stage. This, obviously, is not a provision that is exclusive to agile projects. But given how agile projects typically involve a large number of smaller teams, with each requiring its own set of access, it is logical to assume this will aid agile project management a lot more than other types of project management.

Whether you are involved in agile project management or not, it is imperative that team members collaborate, and communicate well with each other. To this end, the project management tool brings you a good number of tools- including ones which let you comment and proof designs.  You could even add images to your comments, using a simple drag and drop method.

There are, of course, provisions to communicate with your team members in real-time, so that you wouldn’t have to switch to a third-party tool every time that is required. To find any specific topic from among the many that are discussed by the team, you could search using keywords.

To share knowledge with others, the project management tool helps you share files and documents.

 You also get provisions for tracking time and also invoicing, so that you bill those involved for the right lengths of time that they spent doing their tasks. In fact, for instances of multi-tasking, there are multiple timers available, so that you could switch from one task to another and back again without having to restart a timer each time.

Trello

One main reason why Trello is widely used for task management is the ease of use it offers. In fact, even those without a technical background would be able to learn how to use its features with minimal external guidance. This talks as much about the intuitive design of the platform as to the excellent guidance elements built inside the system.

 Particularly delightful is how easy it is to onboard a new team member into this tasks management platform. Once you give him or her the required access, you could just permit them to roam free, so to speak, and learn how to navigate the simple interface by themselves.

Typically, task management systems are adopted by teams involving a large number of people simultaneously. In this backdrop, Trello’s simplicity is a trump card for the platform, making it attractive for the users. That’s something that cannot be claimed by many of its competitors.

Trello also brings you a dedicated automation bot. Using it, you could set up triggers that would result in desired actions. The bot named Butler would ask you a set of questions, and the triggers would be automatically configured based on the answers you provide. You could automate everything from commands for setting due dates to notifying your team about any major change in tasks and moving a card from one column to the next. This, needless to say, frees up your valuable time, so you needn’t dabble in redundant tasks but focus on more crucial matters.

One frequent complaint project managers have regarding tasks management systems is how they don’t support integration with third-party applications- at least, not to the extent that you want them to.

There is a fair chance that you wouldn’t need to raise such complaints about Trello. Among other applications, Trello lets you integrate with Google Drive, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. You also get Power-Ups, which help you with multiple aspects of project management including communication, file management and reporting. These are essentially extended features that are not necessarily part of every tasks management system in the market.

An oft-repeated mantra in workplaces is “There are no individual rock stars, the team is more important than any one person.” This ethos is reflected in the centrality of collaboration for effectively carrying out a project.

Trello brings some great tools to help team members collaborate well.

Among these are tools which help you comment and share documents with team members. You could also mention specific team members in your comments(by using @ symbol, of course). In Trello, tasks are represented in cards, and you could assign cards to different team members as is required.

 Aside from tagging each other, users could also comment on their cards and channel conversations in such a way that all discussions about a particular card would happen in a single space. As mentioned before, Trello can be integrated with Slack, which makes communication even easier. This also means that you needn’t leave the platform when you have to communicate with a team member, thereby helping you save time.

Individual users also get a fair amount of control over how use the platform. For instance, they could configure notifications using email or push notifications and also customize the user experience according to their wishes.  

Trello’s eclectic features work not just on computers. They are equally functional- and accessible- in the app’s mobile version. You could effectively manage a project using the platform’s mobile app even when you are on the move- a functionality that’s becoming increasingly important in a world where the divide between professional workspaces and personal arenas is getting blurred. This level of optimization for mobile is not available in all project management tools either. In fact, there are quite a few tasks management tools which are excellent in their desktop versions but function terribly in their mobile counterparts. 

But that’s not to say that the tasks management system doesn’t have its downsides.

The number of project views available in the system is a typical point of contention among users. The system affords the Kanban view- supportive of agile project management. But that doesn’t negate the fact that it brings only a limited number of views. In fact, at the time of writing this, Kanban is the only view available in the free version of the tool. This is especially problematic if you need more detailed views of the tasks. However, you could access other views- including map and calendar - by upgrading to the premium plan.

The lack of an in-built tool for reporting also poses a problem. You could add third-party tools for the same, using Power-Up. However, that overhead could have been avoided with an in-built tool. Indeed, some of the other task management systems available in the market come with such tools integrated into them.

Should you choose Trello or ProofHub?

As mentioned before, Trello has a highly intuitive interface and affords plenty of scope for customization. In addition, the free version of the app supports up to ten boards, making it an attractive option if your team size is small. However, for bigger teams and especially when you are handling complex projects involving a large number of tasks and people, Trello is not the best option. In such cases, you can always rely on ProofHub.

Is any essential feature missing from ProofHub or Trello?

ProofHub and Trello bring you great functionalities to aid you in your project management. Depending on the type of project you are handling, you could choose one or the other, that would satisfy your requirements. Or would they?

Would they be able to help you find out when you could deliver a project? The answer is an unequivocal no. For neither tool has a mechanism to accurately measure the time a team member spends on a task, without counting the break time etc. Unless you get that measure right, then, you cannot possibly accurately predict the project delivery time.

But you do have a viable alternative in the form of I’m Productive- a project management system that incorporates an AI with which you could make the aforementioned prediction with just the click of a button. Check out their website to learn more about the features.

ProofHub vs Clickup- How to pick the right project management tool for you

Much to the relief of project managers and team leaders, there are quite a few good project management tools available in the market. However, it’s not easy to choose the one that would suit your purposes, among the many. This is particularly true when you compare two feature-rich tools like ProofHub and Clickup. So, how do these compare against each other?  Read on to find out.

 Clickup

A project is akin to a machine with movable parts. And depending on your requirements, you would need to manage different parts of a job. This could entail managing processes, tasks or time that everyone spends on their tasks, or it could mean supporting efficient collaboration and reporting. Whatever be your requirement, the good news is that Clickup is a game.

Let’s now look at some of the features which make this project management service efficient.

To begin with, the project management tool brings multiple views into the picture- pun intended. Just because a particular view of the workflow suits one user doesn’t necessarily make it universally useful. And the efficacy with which someone could perform his or her tasks could depend to a good extent on the view that they have of the tasks list.

In Clickup, you could use the list view if your primary intention is to manage task priorities. Calendar view, meanwhile, will help you see the timelines for the tasks. To track progress in this project management software, Gantt view is perhaps best suited. After all, Gantt charts are among the most useful inventions to track the progress of tasks and projects. In the Gantt view, you get to see your tasks within the framework of Gantt charts.

But it’s not just the inclusion of Gantt charts which makes the project management tool useful for tracking the progress of tasks. The dashboard itself is rather helpful in this respect. You could get a holistic view of the tasks you are handling in your dashboard. Much of the information you need is represented as visuals on the dashboard, making it easy to glean in a short time. You could also easily switch between views, which is not in fact a feature available in many of its competitors.

For collaborating with your team members, you could add comments to tasks or documents that have been assigned to or shared with others. The team members could view your comments instantly and take relevant actions accordingly.

It’s no exaggeration to say that every project in this day and age is a software project, or at least, includes some amount of software development. This also means that quite a lot of projects these days are agile projects- agile being a preferred methodology for software development. Clickup is particularly relevant in this context since the project management software supports agile project management.

It’s not that the project management tool brings many features that specifically aid agile project management. Rather, the features in Clickup are adaptable enough that you could easily rig them to be used for agile projects. Teams involved in software development could use Clickup to track bugs and also manage sprints- a cornerstone of agile projects.

The project management software could also be used in the case of product launches. To view the progress of agile projects, you have the provision to create scrum dashboards in the project management tool. Developers could also automate a sprint point system if they wish, which would free them up from redundant tasks. They could collaborate on coding using the platform as well.

Remote working used to be an occasional or even something of a niche activity for many companies. But thanks to the intervention of a certain biological virus, that’s not the case anymore.

 Clickup proves a great ally in this changed context too. For teams could finish their tasks and deliver projects remotely without hassles using it. You could assign tasks to team members, provide them with the necessary access to collaborate, share documents with them to lay down the progress path, set reminders and do more on the project management software.

One important advantage of Clickup is that it could be useful for a single user as it is for a team. Many project management tools in the market are specifically designed for the use of teams, with very few features specifically meant for the solo user. You could manage your day-to-day activities easily with the project management tool, and thanks to the simple interface, using it is rarely a pain.

Like other project management tools, Clickup also comes in free and paid versions. The free version of most such tools gives you access to only a limited set of tools. But that’s not the case with Clickup. For even with the free version of this project management software, you can enjoy a rather extensive list of features. Among other things, you could enjoy a dashboard, real-time collaboration, integrations, different views, time tracking and more, without paying.

We mentioned before that the features in the tasks management tool are adaptable to suit different purposes like agile project development. Such adaptability also widens the purposes for which it could be used. This also helps curtail the cost of operations in an organization since you wouldn’t need to invest in multiple products to satisfy all your requirements. For instance, given how Clickup supports communication among team members, you may not need software specifically for communication.

Compared to the many advantages of using this project management software, the drawbacks it possesses are minimal. The tool does have the issue of the text size is a tad too small in certain sections, and the colours may not always contrast well against each other to make discerning different usable elements easy.

Clickup also sometimes suffers from the ‘too-much-is-not-always-too-good’ problem. For instance, customization brings malleability to the features but too many options to customize make it hard for the users to choose the one which would help run the software optimally.

The problem with over-proliferation also exists in terms of the number of features. The learning curve is almost always high for new users to master the features. This could make it a little tough for teams to adopt the platform in the initial stages of use. But with Gantt charts, agile project management support, a comprehensive dashboard and more, it is certainly worth investing your time to master the platform.

ProofHub

You will be in the company of giants if you are going to use ProofHub.  Among others, the project management software is used by Taco Bell, Disney, Nike and NASA. The pedigree aside, what makes this one of the most compelling project management tools out there?

To begin with, ProofHub is among the most user-friendly project management tools. That’s an important distinction especially given how in a typical scenario, a large number of users in an organization may need to learn how to use the product in a short span of time.

Teams could be organized into groups according to parameters that you set- this results in an even more minimal layout while promoting greater data security. You could also get instant alerts on your email in the event of any milestones or status changes related to tasks. You can choose those notifications that you want so that your email inbox wouldn’t get cluttered.

Another useful feature in the software management tool allows you to sync its calendar with third-party calendar apps including iCal and Google Calendar. This makes managing schedules even easier.

Plus, you could import files from Basecamp and Basecamp Classic into ProofHub. These could be tasks, discussions, text documents and projects. The best part is that you wouldn’t have to pay extra for this either.

The software works well on multiple operating systems including Android, iOS and Windows, paving the way to smooth interoperability across devices. You could also customize how the software looks according to your preferences.

Also included in ProofHub are certain features which are not standard in project management tools. These include features for proofing and time tracking. The system also provides steady boards and workflows- these could be used to improve the productivity of team members.

Needless to say, you could easily track the progress of projects in ProofHub. You could set certain tasks to recur if you so wish. The system provides Kanban boards- which are particularly useful for agile project management. You could easily chart the workflow for your projects while team members could follow the progress of the tasks that concern them. The platform also allows you to add subscribers to different stages in a workflow.

This ensures that only those people who have been granted permission to a particular stage in a workflow could access that part of the workflow.

But that’s not to say that team members couldn’t communicate with each other when they want to. In fact, ProofHub provides quite a few features to support the same. There are discussion tools that can be used to share documents and files with others, and tools which enable you to comment and proof designs. There is even a provision to add comments without logging into the platform-through email. Comments could be enriched by adding images to them- that too with a simple drag and drop mechanism.

One significant pain point for many users while working on a project is filing reports. The makers of ProofHub apparently understand this. At least, that would explain the inclusion of the provision for creating custom reports. You could add to the reports you create exactly those details which you want.

Compared to many of its peers, ProofHub is sophisticated when it comes to tracking the time that users spent on tasks. In fact, the latest iteration of the software includes multiple timers so that users could pause one and start/resume another as they move back and forth between tasks- something which is increasingly becoming common in a work culture where multi-tasking is not always relegated to the machines.

If you are wondering if such functions would work well both in the computer and phone versions of the app, you needn’t worry. While it is true that many project management tools’ mobile apps lag when compared with their computer versions, with ProofHub, the app is perfectly optimized for mobile, so you could manage your teams and projects while on the move.

ProofHub offers a rather robust framework so that the tool rarely crashes no matter how many users are on it at any given point in time. But at the same time, owing to a large number of features, you could encounter scenarios when you may require clarification on how to use certain tools.

Rest assured that you wouldn’t feel lost at sea in such instances- for the platform is rich with use cases, video tutorials and FAQs which include answers to all the common queries that users may have. To make things even better, there is also an Update Page which lists the latest features which have been added to the platform, and also issues which are reported by users.

Should you choose ProofHub or Clickup?

Both Clickup and ProofHub bring comparable sets of features which support agile project management and more. This obviously makes it hard to recommend one over the other. However, if you are prone to use your project management tool a lot on your mobile phone, you would do well to choose ProofHub. The platform’s excellent customer support also probably gives it an edge over the other. But the principal differentiating factor may be the pricing. So, do check out the pricing for these two project management tools at the time you plan to buy one.

Do Clickup and ProofHub lack in anything?

While we discussed many sophisticated features that enrich both the tools, neither of them helps you accurately predict when you could deliver a project. It could be argued that this is a critical oversight given how a dependable revenue cycle is all but impossible if you cannot make that prediction accurately.

This is why the project management software, I’m Productive becomes a powerful alternative. Aside from providing you with all the features that make an excellent project management software, it also incorporates an AI which lets you make the aforementioned prediction, with a single click of a button! Head to their website to learn more.

How to use the features of Microsoft Teams for project management

Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular apps from Microsoft- one that has become even more popular since last year as more and more professionals began to collaborate online as part of their work. And it is precise as a collaborative tool that Microsoft teams is used the most.

 But there are certain features in the tool that you could use to make it an efficient- even if not holistic- project management tool.

Let’s take a look at the ways in which you could use Microsoft Teams for project management.

Communication

Transparent communication is a prerequisite for efficient project management. And any project management tool that doesn’t enable this is not worth being called so.

Microsoft Teams ably supports communication which is the bedrock of collaborative work. This alone may not make the tool a complete project management software but it goes a long way toward that end.

For instance, if you are a project manager guiding three different projects for three clients, then, you could create a distinct team for each of the clients using the Teams tab. After that, within the individual teams, you could create channels. Now, it’s only a matter of adding team members to the relevant teams or channels. You can do this with just a few clicks.

There are two types of channels. These are Public and Private channels. As the names imply, the Public channel is accessible to every member of a team while the Private channel is available only for those members who have been invited to it. A private channel is differentiated from a public channel with a lock icon.

The Private channels feature is a comparatively newer addition to the Teams platform. The feature helps collaborate on processes that involve information of a sensitive nature- for instance, budget. Typically, Private channels are well suited for small team sizes. 

All the users including the team owner should be invited to the channel for you to partake in it. Those who are not wouldn’t even know such a channel exists, emphasizing secrecy as the hallmark of these channels.

Further, every private channel has its own settings. These could be tweaked according to the needs of the channel, without being dependent on any settings in the parent team. However, it should be noted that you don’t get the option to change a private channel into a public channel or the other way around.

Deadlines

While smooth communication is necessary for hassle-free completion of any project, communication alone wouldn’t ensure that either.

A pivotal aspect of project management is meeting deadlines. No matter how technically astute the members of a team are, unless they could meet the deadline, the clients are not bound to be happy. Especially not when shipping a product to the market in a timely manner is getting even more important in a business ecosystem in which a large number of competitors function in any given domain compared to the previous centuries.

With Microsoft Teams, you get a simple method to ensure that everyone in the team is cognizant of the deadlines under which they function: you could just share the Outlook group calendar with the team. Adding a group calendar is simple enough- like with many other things you could do in Microsoft Teams, this can also be done with just a few clicks.

After adding the calendar, every team member would be able to access both their personal Outlook calendar as well as the group calendar in a single space.

For added convenience, the personal calendar is colour-coded in blue while you will get to see the group calendar in green color.

Plan

One of the smartest tools you could use with Microsoft Teams to help with project management is Microsoft Planner. As the name suggests, it’s one tool that could be efficiently used for planning your project.

Using Microsoft Planner, you could not just keep a tab on how all the tasks in each project you are managing are progressing, but also stay aware of the deadlines associated with those tasks.

But first, you would need to integrate Microsoft Planner with the Microsoft Teams platform. As with most things in Teams, this too can be done in a few simple steps.

First, head over to the team to which you wish to add Microsoft Planner. Then, click on the + sign. This would add a new tab to the group. After that, click on Planner. Here, you get the option to either create a new plan or pick an existing plan which was previously saved.

You will find the choice for either in the drop-down menu. Make your choice and just click Save. That’s all you need to do to add a new plan to your team.

Customize

Adding teams and channels, and integrating Plans are not where the buck stops with Microsoft teams when it comes to project management though.

For one thing, the platform is incredibly customizable so that you could wield it the way you want to suit the requirements of your particular project. Integrations can be made according to how relevant they are to your needs.

Teams offer plenty of flexibility to that end. You could access quite a large number of third-party apps and services which can be integrated with the platform. To access these, click on the Apps tab which would reveal the list for you. You can then simply choose the ones that are ideal for you.

On top of that, new integrations relevant to Microsoft teams are being developed in a fairly constant manner. This means that the functionality that you derive from the platform as a project management software is only bound to get even more as time goes on, making it even more worthwhile to start using Microsoft Teams as a substitute for a dedicated project management tool.

Set guidance

When choosing a project management tool, one of the biggest concerns for project managers is the learning curve that’s involved in adopting one. For it’s not just an individual who would need to learn how to use the software, but everyone in the team should be adept at it for collaboration to be practical.

Microsoft Teams, thankfully, has a very low learning curve, so adopting it for an entire team- or even the organization- is as easy as it gets.

But this apparent easiness poses a minor issue: without proper guidelines on how everyone in a team should use the tool, you may find yourself being part of multiple teams and channels inside it, even if you don’t necessarily have to be a part of them.

This could be distracting, to say the least, and may eat into your valuable time. Now, imagine if such a scenario exists for multiple people in a team, and we are talking about a cumulative loss of man-hours that may not be insignificant.

To avoid such adverse happenings, you should ensure certain things. To begin with, you need to define who among the team members could create a new team or channel. Also, the third-party apps that could be added to a team or a channel should be regularized, based on the project requirements.

This will help ensure that people won’t end up wasting their time on apps that are strictly not supportive of work.

As mentioned before, channels could be either public or private in nature. While private channels are useful in discussing matters that could be deemed sensitive, if everyone in the team were to create private channels, the result could be chaos.

You should, so, define which team members could create private channels. Not just that, you should also define for what purposes a private channel could be created.

Aside from these, you should also set naming conventions for teams and channels beforehand, to avoid confusion. Also, once a project is closed, you ought to archive a team instead of letting it linger in the tool, which only serves to clutter the space.

If you take such measures, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to manage certain projects using Microsoft Teams.

Would Microsoft Teams help you manage all sorts of projects?

Microsoft Teams is predominantly a collaborative tool, with certain project management tools added to it. So, to expect from it a whole spectrum of tools that you would get in a typical project management tool would be folly.

However, for projects that are not complex, and which involve a relatively smaller number of people, the project management tools in Microsoft Teams should suffice. If your project is complex and involves a large number of tasks and processes, you may need to look for a full-fledged project management software, like I’m Productive.

I’m Productive is a project management software that brings a wide array of features to help with your project management. The tool also has a feature that helps measure the time duration that a team member spends on a task, without counting unwanted metrics like break time. This in turn helps the system predict accurately the project delivery time. In fact, I’m Productive comes equipped with an AI which helps you make that prediction- with just a click of a button.

Please visit their website to learn more.

Everything you need to know about Microsoft Loop- the new collaboration tool

Microsoft Office has long been a fixture in the landscape of tools that teams and individuals use to carry out their professional duties across the world. So entrenched is the MS Office suite in our computing devices that we have ceased to think of it as a collection of tools specifically designed to support business purposes. After all, many of us use a Word file to draw up a list for grocery shopping while maintaining an Excel Sheet to keep a tab of the latest movies and tv shows we want to watch. We have long since come to see the tools in MS Office as handy for just about anything- whether business-related or not.  

This versatility speaks for the efficiency of the tools. But at the same time, it’s also true that while it’s easy for an individual to use the tools for their purposes, the options for collaboration are limited. Microsoft aims to remedy this situation. Or so it seems, going by the fact that they have announced the brand new app, Microsoft Loop.

In fact, Loop is a newly branded version of Fluid from Microsoft. Those familiar with Fluid would know that it consists of different blocks of collaborative Office content which could be copied and shared with others in your team.

The different elements of Loop

Like Fluid, Microsoft Loop also contains three main parts. These are the Loop Components, Loop pages and Loop workspaces. All of these elements are life, meaning that different individuals could edit them concurrently, provided they have been granted permission for the same.

Loop components

Loop components are pieces of content which could exist across different apps. Not just that, these content pieces could be worked upon by different individuals. If anyone makes a change in any of them, those changes will get updated in real-time in all the apps which it's present.

A key rationale behind introducing Microsoft Loop seems to be the increasing adoption of hybrid work in the wake of the pandemic. This has seen multiple people working from different locations, and using different apps. In this context, it is feasible that members of the same team would access the same piece of content but on different apps. In such situations, Loop components could be a quite valuable asset for collaboration.

The shared component could be anything from a list that has been uploaded on a Teams channel to a calendar entry. As mentioned before, you could manipulate these on different platforms. For instance, you could paste a document on Outlook and edit the same on your email, in real-time.

At the same time, the Loop components could exist within the Microsoft Loop hub as well. More specifically, inside what’s known as Loop workspaces.

You could envision it as akin to a project board. You would find a list of all the Loop components and Loop pages in a single space, along with information on who is working on them. Here also, the components get updated in real-time.

Loop pages

The second part of Microsoft Loop is Loop Pages. These are distinct canvases where individuals could share their Loop components with others so that they could collaborate on them.

The closest analogy might be a whiteboard. But you would be mistaken to think its functionalities are limited like that of a whiteboard. Among other things, you could share the Loop  Pages components which have been created outside  Microsoft Loop. Even if someone is not a part of the Loop page, they still could edit the components on different apps that they have access to, bringing down the hassles in collaborating.

Microsoft has been talking about components on which team members could collaborate for quite some time now. It’s more than logical to assume that the company has been not just signalling about the possibility of launching such features. They have most probably been also working on the ideas they discussed. However, it looks clear that some tweaking has been made in Loop so that it fits a work culture that has been altered in the aftermath of a pandemic.  

For instance, the demonstrations that the company gave the central Microsoft Loop hub purport an efficient mechanism to remotely track the components. When Managers and their team members often find themselves working apart from each other geographically, this is not just a useful feature but a necessary one.

 Project management services are many in the marketplace- surely a phenomenon of which Microsoft is well aware. Given how the market for such services is only widening, it’s understandable why Microsoft may wish to corner its own slice of the pie.

The notion, especially, is one project management tool that has been challenging the Microsoft Office ecosystem. By introducing Loop- many of whose aspects sound like boosted-up versions of tools available in other project management tools- Microsoft seems to be trying to confront such competitors head-on.

Loop workspaces

But the efficacy of the tool is not possible without the third element of Microsoft Loop- which is Loop workspaces.

As the name indicates, they can be used to keep things organized. You could segregate pages into various sections according to the parameters of your choice.

The primary objective, of course, is to make finding something easier- especially useful in the case of big projects involving a large number of tasks and processes. Like in the case of Loop pages, multiple users could collaborate in a Loop workspace too.

It’s hard to measure the efficacy of Microsoft Loops despite the fact that the demonstrations company has given so far have been commendable.

 But seeing is not the same as using. This is especially true with a collaborative project management tool.

Multiple things should work flawlessly for the system to be considered robust. Not only should the features function well for individual use, they should also support real-time collaboration. If, for instance, someone makes a change in a document on an app and that is not reflected inside Loop in real-time, it defeats the purpose of a collaborative ecosystem.

Microsoft Loop components would soon be available on Microsoft Teams, OneNote and Outlook. Once that happens, we could know for sure how well or poorly the features are going to function in the real world.

Going by Microsoft’s track record, there is every reason to have faith in the efficacy of the proposed project management software, if it is indeed a project management software in the traditional sense of the phrase.

There are many questions to which we still seek answers. Would the software support agile project management? Will, there be seamless integration among the different apps or would that be a problem area for the tool, as is the typical in such instances? Would the load- the number of people who collaborate simultaneously- affect the efficacy of the tool?

Such questions would only get answered when we have a chance to get our hands on the tool and use it. Until then, it looks like Microsoft has announced an exciting and useful tool.

Their competitors, beware while potential users could have reasons to cheer.

Will any important feature be missing from Loop?

The announcement about Loop that Microsoft made has been received with palpable excitement online. While individual users have expressed their anticipation on social media, technology journalists have been busy detailing the various features Microsoft has promised in the tool. Indeed, the features are the cause for the greatest excitement.

After all, who wouldn’t like the flexibility of editing a document in one app and having the edits reflected in the primary tool others in your team uses?

 For one thing, it frees you from having to upload a file into the primary tool(in this case, Loop) every time you make an edit. Needless to say, you could save valuable time this way.

Useful as such features are, there is ambiguity as to whether a certain crucial feature is included in the project management tool or not- the ability to accurately measure the time someone spends working/collaborating on tasks.

This feature may sound arbitrary, but only until you consider the fact that without having that measure of time, you wouldn’t be able to accurately predict the project delivery time. If you cannot make that prediction, your chances of a predictable revenue fall consequently.

Whether Microsoft Loop would have that feature or not in the future remains to be seen. (There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the feature is included in the impending version, though you are advised to check on the same).

 In the meantime, you could check out I’m Productive- a project management software which, among other things measures the time spent on a task accurately, without counting irrelevant metrics like break time. The project management software even incorporates an AI with which you could predict with precision the project delivery time, with just the click of a button.

Head to their website and learn how this project management software could help you manage your project.

ProofHub vs Asana: How to choose the right project management software for you

Asana is one of the most popular projects management tools while ProofHub is widely used by some of the biggest business enterprises. But which of these would be ideal for your purposes? Please read our comparison below to see how they fare against each other.

Asana

Everyone loves project management software that is rich in features. But a wide spectrum of features wouldn’t be much help if they are not genuinely useful. Thankfully, Asana scores high on both those counts.

 In fact, even in its free version, the project management software brings you a good number of features. This is notable especially since this is not the case with most project management tools. In fact, the number of features you get for free in many project management tools is so minimal that they couldn’t even support the functioning of small organizations.

In Asana’s free version, you gain support for unlimited teams and projects. Aside from this, you get multiple project views, options for messaging, file storage and more. In fact, if your team size is less than fifteen, you probably wouldn’t need to upgrade from the free plan. It even lets you integrate third-party time tracking tools without having to pay extra.

Among the features of the tool that we touched upon above included multiple project views. This feature illustrates how useful the project management tool is for managing different types of projects.

The views in question include lists, calendars, Kanban boards, portfolios, timelines and workloads. Many project management software available in the market brings you a couple of views at the most. That being the case, the expansive number of views Asana brings oughtn’t to be taken for granted.

Also, team members could switch between views easily enough. This is a crucial element given how a view that is useful for one person may not work for another. This ease of customization also helps the team members be more productive.

Talking about customization, you could also create customizable project dashboards according to your requirements. As an added advantage, these dashboards also get updated in real-time. A team member could customize his or her dashboard in such a way that they get to see precisely the information points which are useful to them.

It is also easy to automate processes using this project management software. For instance, you could set up custom triggers for action, while defining the specific rules under which the actions should be performed. You could also avail certain basic automation, including assigning a task to the subsequent person in the workflow and alerting the team over Slack once a project is finished. The platform supports automating even complex workflows which include a large number of users and processes.

While such things as automation and customization certainly lessen the hassle of project management, unless there is an efficient collaboration between the different team members, there is no way that a project would be smoothly completed.

Asana, thankfully, brings a multitude of features that aid team collaboration. Creating and assigning tasks to the different team members, creating task dependencies, setting- and if need be, changing- due dates, chatting with team members in real-time..you can perform all these and more actions with just a few clicks on the project management software.

There are other ways in which Asana helps collaboration. An example is using the calendar view to plan actions according to the schedule of others in the team. You could also manage all your to-do lists and project discussions within the project management tool itself.

You could even integrate Asana with third-party messaging software and email apps to facilitate communication between team members. The bottom line is that you wouldn’t have to move out of the platform every time you wish to communicate with a team member, and that’s a time-saving device if ever there was one.

Agile projects are becoming even more common than before and by extension agile project management. Asana efficiently supports agile project management by incorporating features that help to plan for sprints, track bugs, launch products, issue work requests, create project roadmaps and more.

 These types of features are also not common in many competing project management software. Agile project management always comes with its fair share of challenges. But with Asana, you can be sure that the challenges are not compounded due to a lack of adequate project management tools.

The usability of Asana isn’t case-specific either. Departments across the organization could use Asana for their purposes, be they involved in IT development, Human resources, financial management or any of the other myriad departments that dot the modern organizational landscape. This level of versatility also curtails the need to invest in multiple project management tools for a single organization. Asana has a one-product-fits-all ethos even as it brings features that fit the requirements of multiple departments in the organization.

We have seen quite a number of cool features so far which make Asana a strong contender for you to choose as a project management software.

But those features wouldn’t be complete if you don’t include the ease with which you could integrate apps into the platform. More than a hundred third-party apps including Google Drive, Zapier, Zoom and Slack could be integrated with the project management tool. However, please do know that all integrations may not be supported in the free plan.

Having seen the many features that make Asana brilliant, let’s now turn our attention to some of its drawbacks. To begin with, the project management tool’s mobile app leaves a lot to be desired. The platform works much better on a computer monitor; the tool is just not adapted well to make using it on a mobile phone screen easy.

Another drawback is that the project management tool doesn’t let you assign a single task to more than one user. There are provisions like creating subtasks and then adding users to those. But still, there are instances when having multiple users assigned to a single task would be useful. In such cases, Asana is a let-down.

The final drawback we wanted to point out about the project management software may not necessarily be a drawback in the classical sense. The problem is more arbitrary than inherent to the system: you may end up getting an overwhelming number of notifications from Asana in your email.

Aside from cluttering up your inbox, this also has the potential of distracting you from work- after all, not every notification may need your immediate attention. However, the issue can be easily resolved- you need to just change the notifications setting.

ProofHub

Boasting a client list which includes Netflix, Google, Nike and Disney, ProofHub is a project management tool that affords exceptional ease of use.

Like with Asana, you would find an extensive number of functionalities in ProofHub too. But an argument could be made that ProofHub’s features are more intuitive, thereby offering relatively less entry barrier to using the tool.

You could segregate teams into different groups based on a parameter you specify. This way, you could not just get a layout which is clutter-free, but also greater data security. You also have the option to receive instant alerts over email if any changes have been made to project tasks or if the project hits a milestone. You could choose the notifications that are relevant to you.

Remember how we said how Asana could easily be integrated with third-party apps? Well, ProofHub too affords such luxuries- especially when it comes to calendar apps. You could sync the platform with iCal and Google Calendar, thereby helping smoothen scheduling tasks.

Also, you could import both Basecamp and Basecamp Classic files into ProofHub without the least hassle. These files could include tasks, discussions, text documents and more. And if you are worried about extra costs that might be incurred while doing so, rest assured that you can enjoy the feature without paying anything more.

ProofHub also functions smoothly across platforms. The project management system works well on all the major operating systems including iOS, Windows and Android. You could access the tool from any device that you may have, at any time you choose; all you need is a good internet connection. Further, you could also customize the interface according to your requirements.

The level of flexibility that ProofHub brings cannot be claimed by many competing project management tools.

Features that help you create and assign tasks to others are fundamental to any good project management software. And you can be sure that these functions are included- and work supremely well- in ProofHub.

However, the tool goes beyond providing you with just the essentials for project management. For instance, you get features like time tracking and proofing. Features including steady boards and workflows are also advanced amenities that can be efficiently used to help increase the productivity of your team members. Both workflows and steady boards help project managers guide and organize tasks efficiently and with clarity.

While mentioning the things that make ProofHub special, it’s important to talk about the efficient customer support you get to enjoy in the tool. To begin with, if you come across a stumbling block in using a feature, you can send in a query and actually get a response. The unfortunate truth is that that cannot be said about many other project management tools.

You may even find the solution to your problem without having to send a query. For you get an ample number of FAQs, video tutorials and use cases in the platform. Also, if there are any new features and issues, you could find them on the Update page.

The fact that ProofHub is active on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook makes it even easier to get a response to any queries you may have.

A typical problem that plagues many project management tools is that their mobile apps are rarely up to the mark. There is arguably a good reason for this- almost all teams which use such tools have computers as their primary work system.

But such an assumption precludes the occasional though not unusual scenarios in which team members may use mobile phones to perform an important task- like when they don’t have access to their primary system. Using a sub-par mobile application during such scenarios is problematic, to say the least. But you needn’t worry about such issues with  ProofHub, since it is optimized for mobile. The app could be efficiently used to manage projects, both on Android and iOS.

Those involved in agile project management also stand to gain from using ProofHub, not least because it includes Kanban boards which help bring clarity to even the most complex workflows. Through Kanban boards are not the sole device required for agile project management, it’s not a feature that you get in all project management systems, shedding light on the importance the creators of ProofHub give to agile project management.

ProofHub also brings a good number of communication tools to bolster collaboration among team members.

Team members could share information with each other by attaching documents and files in a single space. They could also write comments and proof designs on the project management tool. You could even attach images to comments by a simple drag-and-drop manoeuvre.

Should you choose ProofHub or Asana?

ProofHub has a delightfully intuitive interface with a good set of features that could help you with your project management. These features would more than suffice for relatively small teams. However, if you are contemplating an enterprise-wide platform to support complex projects involving intricate workflows, Asana may be a better option. This is especially true if your organization includes multiple departments each responsible for a distinct function.

Is anything crucial missing from Asana and ProofHub?

Time tracking is a feature that’s available in either or both of these project management tools. However, there is a particular aspect of time-tracking which is missing in both- namely, there is no efficient way to accurately track the duration someone spends on a particular task, without counting the time they spend on breaks. This in turn makes it all but impossible to accurately predict when you can deliver the project.

 I’m Productive, meanwhile, is a project management tool that gets such metrics right. In fact, you could predict project delivery time with just a click, thanks to the AI which is part of the platform. From agile project management to helping plan projects for departments as diverse as content creation and HR, this platform supports many purposes. Learn more about this project management tool by visiting their website.

 

Zoho Projects vs Wrike- learn which project management software you should choose

Zoho Projects and Wrike- which is the better project management solution for your requirements? If that is a question that concerns you, then, we invite you to read the following comparison, to arrive at the right answer. 

Zoho Projects

Useful for project managers/team leaders

One of the fundamental aspects of Zoho Projects that endears it to project managers and team leaders is that it helps you thoroughly plan a project from top to bottom. No matter how complex or long-winded a project is, you have more than a fair chance of planning for every sequence using this project management tool. For instance, you could create not only tasks but also subtasks for each task. And of course, you could assign them to the different team members as applicable.

Another endearing aspect of the project management tool is that you could automate recurring tasks so that you would be freed from having to perform redundant tasks. Almost all projects come with a fair share of redundant tasks; so, you know this is one feature that you would love about the project management tool.

Useful for teams

Zoho Project is not just useful for individual team leaders and project managers in task management. It also helps team members communicate effectively with each other. And as anyone who has guided or been a part of a project could tell you, without efficient communication, the progress of a project is bound to be bumpy, to say the least.

With Zoho Projects, you get more than just one channel for communication. You can use activity stream, wiki, feeds, forum and chat for communication. Each of these could be used for distinct purposes. For instance, a chat room is where you hold conversations with relevant team members exclusively on a particular topic. Feeds meanwhile can be used for staying updated about the newest project-related developments that are relevant to you, like any new announcements or proposals. The presence of such features shows that Zoho Projects is more than just a tool that can be used for basic task management.

Staying on the topic of teams and how they function in the context of a project, we should also talk about team productivity- for that’s something which Zoho Projects helps enhance. The project management tool uses multiple tools to this end, including resource utilization charts, timesheets and global timers.  And so that you could be sure that productivity is suitably rewarded, the platform also has invoice software integrated into it which could record both the billable and non-billable hours that someone may have worked.

We would be remiss not to talk about the options for knowledge sharing in Zoho Projects. You could create a page where can be saved documents and other information which may be useful in the course of working on a project.

Team members could then easily access these resources. Needless to say, creating these pages, adding the resources and granting the required permissions for team members can all be done with ease on this project management software.

Robust software infrastructure

The project management tool, while providing highly useful features for task management, also doesn’t suffer from the plight of too much downtime. The online software which is used for automation is robust. This in turn means that you could get more work done using the project management software with the least hiccups. Further, the platform is continually updated so that the features remain easy to use, even as you get to experience the most intuitive and cutting-edge interfaces.

Yet another reason why you may want to check out this project management software is the excellent customer support that you receive. It is an unfortunate yet common reality that when a customer has a query, it goes without getting a response for long or forever. But that is not the case with Zoho Projects. This means, that if you face problems with the system, you have a higher chance of resolving them soon and moving on with your tasks.

Having given you an idea of what makes this project management software compelling, it should also be added that the tasks management tool is not without disadvantages. Perhaps, the most important of these is that it’s not easy to search out a task in the tool. If you are within a project, then you could find tasks that are only attached to that specific project.

Another problem area is bug reporting. Though the project management software has a largely bug-free software infrastructure, one does encounter bugs from time to time. However, the bug tracking and reporting process in the tasks management tool is not up to the mark. For instance, a common complaint among users is that while you are reporting a bug, you may have to upload a screenshot of the problem. Fair enough. Only, when you try to do that, the screenshot doesn’t always get uploaded properly.

The dashboard in Zoho Projects also could have been better. But it is patchy when it comes to letting you add the contact information of a client. Not that you couldn’t do it, but not easily. The same holds with ordering the names of clients alphabetically. This might seem like a small problem to contend with. And that is true, but not if you are trying to find a specific name from a long list.

The project management software also poses a problem in terms of learning how to use it. If you are new to the tasks management tool, then you would have a hard time familiarizing yourself with the different features, let alone mastering them. You do get access to handy tutorials but you would need to spend some extra time perusing them before you could use the tool.

Finally, the project management software doesn’t have a recommendation system by which you could know of more features you could explore for efficiently managing a project. Such a feature would have been useful, especially for agile project management, which usually entails using various tools that support specific purposes.

 Wrike

Unique features

Earlier, we discussed the aspects that make Zoho Projects an effective tool for agile software management and more. But among its drawbacks, we saw, was a dashboard that’s not exactly at the cutting edge. However, in Wrike, the opposite is true. Wrike’s dashboard is not just used it is also unique.

The dashboard is an amalgamation of three different panes, which brings you a clear overview of the whole workflow that constitutes the project. While project charts may be a good way to gain a view of things, this dashboard is even better- thanks to its comprehensive nature as also the intuitive design. The biggest advantage is that you wouldn’t have to move to multiple places on the platform to view details about the project. Compared to conventional project charts, this simplifies project management.  

The first pane in the dashboard is the one you use to access the different projects you may be involved in, as also teams and financials. Needless to say, that sort of comprehensiveness is simply not possible with conventional project charts. The second of the panes helps you create and assign tasks to different team members as per the requirements. You could also set due dates for the tasks that you create, using this pane. The third pane, meanwhile, consolidates all the current tasks and subtasks. In other words, Wrike’s dashboard gives you a holistic view of just about everything related to the project, unlike traditional project charts.

Almost as useful as its dashboard is the real-time analytics which Wrike brings. Be it reports or infographics or charts, what you access gets updated about every fifteen minutes. This ensures that the metrics you view- and possibly present to someone- are never outdated. Among the metrics, you could access are task statuses, approvals, team performance, workload and more. Such frequently updated values are of particular importance in agile project management, given how multiple teams often need to access data for successfully running projects. The feature is equally important when you manage multiple projects at the same time.  

Versatile platform

Yet another way in which Wrike becomes a great choice for agile project management- or for managing any sort of project, for that matter is by its versatility. More precisely, how it can be used to meet the requirements of just about all the departments in an organization. Be it HR, sales, content management or research that your department is involved in, you are bound to find Wrike ideal for your purposes. The tool brings you distinct templates that could be used by different departments. Having an enterprise-wide solution like this, needless to say, could help bring down the cost. After all, you wouldn’t have to invest in multiple platforms for different departments.

Wrike simplifies the job of project managers even more by the inclusion of custom request forms.  You could use the form builder in such a way that many of your tasks can be automated. These tasks could include assigning projects to team members, populating subtasks and more. You could use custom rules that the system will follow so that you wouldn’t have to manually interfere every time. You could surely see why such a time-saving feature could be useful, not just in agile project management.

Talking about automation, Wrike helps you automate the workflow too. The project management system integrates with more than four hundred third-party tools, all of which could be used in managing a workflow. The automation process also affords commendable depth- for instance, you could even automate the approval process if you so wish. Such savvy features seem to proclaim that the age of relying solely on things like traditional project charts for project management is over.

The idea of Wrike being a progressive project management system is further reflected in the many tools which aid collaboration. The old-fashioned way of collaborating entailed using such communication channels as messages, email threads and phone calls. But Wrike ensures you have more efficient tools for communication at your disposal. These tools support dynamic reports, real-time comments, notifications and live editing among others. Also, you can share information pertinent to a shareholder from Wrike itself.

Future-oriented

Any discussion about Wrike’s usefulness as a project management software is incomplete without talking about how robust the system is. The idea of robustness relates to two fundamental aspects of the software- one is how smoothly it runs and the second is how it can accommodate a large number of features without significant updates. Wrike scores high on both these fronts.

As discussed earlier, many are the meaningful actions that you can perform using the tool- from creating tasks to publishing assets to sharing files and tracking time across projects. Wrike functions flawlessly more often than not, allowing you to perform your tasks without having to frequently update to make use of all its features. The expansive features list means that even as you use the basic features, you could learn other-more advanced- features, which in turn could help you manage projects even better.

Should you choose Wrike or Zoho Projects?

A particularly complex project involving a large number of tasks and subtasks stands to benefit from using Zoho Projects. For others, the expansive features of Wrike would be more than enough.

What do Zoho Projects and Wrike lack?

Both the project management systems discussed here are robust when it comes to supporting collaboration among team members and also with helping you track task progress. Those are two key attributes of a good workflow management system. Given that, there is no reason to dismiss these tools.

However, there is one function which almost all project managers worry about more than anything else- accurately defining when they could deliver a project. Both the tools lack a feature to help you do that. And the reason for that is that neither of the tools has a means to accurately measure the time someone spends on a task, without counting break time and the like. Without that metric, you simply cannot predict project delivery time.

This is why the project management software, I’m Productive becomes a significant alternative. Not only does the tool capture time spent on a task accurately, it even employs an AI which lets you predict project delivery time with just a click of a website link.

 

Wrike vs Zoho Projects - learn which project management software you should choose

Zoho Projects and Wrike- which is the better project management solution for your requirements? If that is a question that concerns you, then, we invite you to read the following comparison, to arrive at the right answer. 

Zoho Projects

Like every project management software worth its name, Zoho Projects also supports the basic features like creating and assigning tasks to different team members and also set due dates for the tasks. But what makes it different from many other workflow management tools is that it lets you automate document processes including revision tracking and access controls.

The platform also brings you a portal using which you could share documents and files with your team members. Another useful feature is the reporting module which could be used to create business reports and management summaries.

What makes Zoho Projects particularly useful is the fact that you could plan a project down to its very smallest details using it. For instance, it’s not only tasks but subtasks that you can create for each and every milestone. And of course, you could assign them all to the relevant team members. Such expansive planning is particularly useful when it comes to managing complex projects. Further, you could automate recurring tasks using Zoho Projects, adding another level of ease to managing projects.

To aid communication among team members, Zoho Projects brings multiple channels- including feeds, chat, wiki and forum. All such channels could be used depending on your purpose. For instance, you could set up chatrooms for conversations dedicated to a specific subject. Feeds, meanwhile, could be used to get constant updates about important announcements, changes made to a task and the like.

You also get tools that help improve productivity in this project management software. These include timesheets, global timers and resource utilization charts. There is also invoice software integrated into the system so that you receive accurate records for billing and raising invoices.

Wrike

Similar to Zoho Projects, Wrike also brings its fair share of tools which help team members collaborate effectively in the course of working on a project. Among other things, the workflow management system supports live editing, real-time comments, dynamic reports and more. Such tools negate the need to rely on conventional tools like email and phone calls to collaborate with team members.

Wrike also provides real-time analytics. This means you get aspects like reports, charts and infographics automatically updated every 15 minutes or so. This means you can be sure you are never perusing outdated information at any given point in time. Among other metrics, you could view real-time team performance, workload, approvals, project statuses and more. What makes this feature particularly striking is that you don’t get it in every project management system.

Wrike also boasts one of the most unique- and uniquely useful- dashboards among project management tools. The dashboard contains three panes which together bring a complete picture of the whole workflow. To access all financials and projects, you can use the first pane. The second pane is the one you can use to create and assign tasks to team members, and to set due dates for tasks. All the current tasks, as well as subtasks, could be found on the third pane.

Wrike also brings a host of features that could be considered department-specific. This means that no matter the department in the organization that uses the tool, they are going to find it useful. The diverse set of features in Wrike makes functioning easier for HR, the content creation team, the operations and product development teams and more. This level of versatility also makes it more cost-effective- you wouldn’t have to invest in different project management tools for different departments.

Should you choose Wrike or Zoho Projects?

A particularly complex project involving a large number of tasks and subtasks stands to benefit from using Zoho Projects. For others, the expansive features of Wrike would be more than enough.

What do Zoho Projects and Wrike lack?

Both the project management systems discussed here are robust when it comes to supporting collaboration among team members and also with helping you track task progress. Those are two key attributes of a good workflow management system. Given that, there is no reason to dismiss these tools.

However, there is one function which almost all project managers worry about more than anything else- accurately defining when they could deliver a project. Both the tools lack a feature to help you do that. And the reason for that is that neither of the tools has a means to accurately measure the time someone spends on a task, without counting break time and the like. Without that metric, you simply cannot predict project delivery time.

This is why the project management software, I’m Productive becomes a significant alternative. Not only does the tool capture time spent on a task accurately, it even employs an AI which lets you predict project delivery time with just a click of a button.

Wrike vs Notion- A comparison to find the better project management tool

Is Wrike a better project management software for your purposes, or should you opt for Notion? Both workflow management tools offer interesting, not to mention useful features. So, how do you quantify the value of the tools in terms of your requirements? Check out our comparison below.  

Notion

Using Notion, you could easily create useful information sheets including office policies, contracts for team members, goals of the company and more. You could add to these different types of content including embeds, lists, images and more. In fact, you could easily rearrange them according to your wants by dragging and dropping them at the appropriate places. You could also add nested pages.

To support the tracking of tasks and projects, Notion provides quite a few features. For instance, you could easily define database properties using this workflow management tool. The database could also be viewed in multiple views including board, table, calendar and more. This helps you parse information according to your requirements.

Further, you could create a page within another page, thereby helping you keep track of subtasks that may be related to a major task.

Creating notes is a breeze in this project management software. You could create brand new content for a note or simply drag and drop an existing content. The types of content that could go into the notes include images, videos, programming codes and more. You could tag the notes with the appropriate keywords so that keeping track of the notes is easy.

You could add different team members to a note and also set due dates if a note signifies a task.

One of the biggest advantages of Notion is its ease of use. Even someone with scant prior experience using a project management tool would have very little trouble familiarizing themselves with the features. Functions like single-click export and keyboard shortcuts  add to the ease-of-use factor

Wrike

Wrike strives to stand apart from its peers with its unique dashboard. It contains three different panes, all of which when combined gives you more than just an overview of the workflow. You could access all the projects and teams using the first pane while the second pane has functions which help you create and assign tasks to team members. The third and last pane is where you could find all the tasks and subtasks. In other words, you get to view all the details related to a project in a single space, thanks to this one-of-a-kind dashboard.

This workflow management tool also brings you a good set of features to bolster team collaboration. These include real-time comments, live editing, notifications and more. You could also share information with stakeholders using this project management software, without having to resort to a third-party tool for the same.

One of the crucial features in Wrike that facilitates project and task tracking is real-time analytics. Charts, infographics, certain reports and analytic dashboards are all automatically updated every fifteen minutes or so. This ensures that no matter when you peek into analytics, the details would be current. Just to be clear, this is not a feature that you get with all workflow management tools.

Should you use Wrike or Notion?

If your project is relatively simple, consisting of a very little number of tasks, and if you and your team are unused to using project management tools, then that’s a scenario which merits the use of Notion. But in terms of the number of useful features available and security functions, Wrike outweighs it.

What’s missing in Notion and Wrike

Both the project management tools discussed here are useful for the core tasks of project management to different degrees. Depending on the type of project that you run, you may find the features of one tool more suitable than the ones on the other. But the fundamental fact remains that both are efficient in their own way. But that is not to say that these tools completely satisfy all the requirements of a project manager.

In fact, both tools fall short in fulfilling a significant need- to be able to accurately measure the time someone spends on a task. This aspect gains in significance because unless you have this metric, you wouldn’t be able to accurately predict when you would be able to deliver the project.

Enter I’m Productive. It’s a project management tool which accurately logs the time a team member spends on a task- without counting such extraneous metrics as break time. The tool also comes embedded with a powerful AI, so that you could predict the time of project delivery with just a click of a website link.

 

 

Wrike vs Monday.com- Choose the right project management system for you

Should you choose Monday.com or Wrike as your project management system? Both have emerged as popular tools in the recent past. Here, we compare the two so you could choose the right one for you.

Monday.com

A pivotal aspect of this project management system boards. A team typically has access to a board which would have the list of all the tasks they need to perform as part of a project, and also the team members who are responsible for the tasks. If you so wish, you could also give your clients access to the board to some extent. This could help them see how the project is progressing.

Another feature which makes this workflow management system powerful is its adaptability. You can easily create custom solutions to the different processes that may be part of a project. You can just drag and drop the required solutions for this purpose. The platform also provides ample automation, apps and widgets to this end. If specific functionality you want is missing in the platform, you could develop an app for the same which can then be integrated into it.

To support collaboration, Monday.com lets you comment on the latest updates and pose questions to others in the team, thereby paving the way for discussions. You could also share information with ease, thanks to the fact that you could upload files and prepare notes that can be shared with others. You could even follow live social media feed activity to keep updated about work-related discussions.

Monday.com delivers on the analytics front as well. You could easily access insights into campaign performance, workload capacity and more. The tool also gives you drag-and-drop dashboards, enabling you to add charts and graphs to the team’s workspace.

Wrike

We talked about how easy it is to view key aspects of a project- the tasks and associated team members- on Monday.com. Wrike too doesn’t lag in that respect, thanks to a unique dashboard that is made of three different panes.

The first pane helps you access the projects and teams you are involved with. You could create new tasks and assign them to the relevant team members using the second pane. The third pane features all the current tasks and subtasks.

 As you may have guessed, the three panes of the dashboard combine to bring a clear overview of the project, helping you track project and task progress with ease.

Wrike provides excellent real-time analytics solutions, by automatically updating every fifteen minutes elements like infographics, reports and charts. This smart feature ensures that you always get to view the current information no matter when you access the metrics. You could view updated info on the team’s performance, workload, task statuses and more. This feature is beneficial for any project. Even more so if you are guiding multiple projects at the same time.

The workflow management system also comes with a wide array of features that makes it useful for multiple departments in an organization. From HR to sales to product development and operations, all departments have something to aid their functions in this project management solution. You will find templates in the platform that caters to specific departments. Just pick the one that’s right for your department and start using it. As easy as that!

Should you choose Wrike or Monday.com?

In terms of features, both the project management systems that we discussed bring you a similarly exhaustive set. To a good extent, this explains the popularity of the two workflow management systems. It also makes it extremely hard to pick one over the other. Ultimately, what makes the difference is how easy you may find using the tools, and also the different subscription packages they come in. Monday.com does have a tiny upper hand in terms of design, thanks to its more minimalistic aesthetics. That being the case, we recommend that tool.

What Wrike and Monday.com lack

The ability to measure accurately the time someone spends on a task is missing from both workflow management systems. This drawback also makes both these tools incapable of giving you an accurate prediction of when a project could be delivered.

The project management tool, I’m Productive though differs in this regard. It measures time spent on a task without counting such things as break time. The AI that the tool employs also helps you predict the project delivery time accurately with just a click of a button. Visit their website to learn more.

Wrike vs Basecamp- Find out the right project management tool for you

Should you choose Wrike or Basecamp as your project management software? Both tools bring useful features. But what exactly are these features and what are the ways in which the platforms differ from each other? Check out our comparison below.

Basecamp

There are a couple of features which put Basecamp at a remove from many other project management services. For example, the tool lets you create custom settings so that clients could track the progress of projects directly. This frees you up from the redundant task of updating the status with the clients frequently. While creating the settings, you could specify which aspects of the project the clients get to see and edit. So that communication with the client could be centralized, you could also share messages and emails from clients to Basecamp.

Another feature that is not common in all project management features which you get in Basecamp is automatic check-in. Using it, you could create questions that your team members should answer on a periodic basis- be it daily, weekly or monthly. You could schedule the questions to be shared with either the whole team or only certain members of the team. You could also comment on the answers if you so choose to.

While team members could answer the questions you share using the automatic check-in feature in their own time, Basecamp also supports real-time communication. In fact, the features for this are so expansive you probably wouldn’t have to use any third-party communication solutions at all.

 Aside from commenting on tasks, you also could make use of group chat and message boards. Group chats are useful for casual communication among team members while message boards are ideal for communicating announcements or progress updates to a large number of teams. Then, there is also the ping feature which is meant for one-to-one communication.

Aside from these, you also get the gamut of basic features without which no project management tool will be complete- including ones that let you create and assign tasks to team members, and make to-do lists.

Wrike

Wrike too boasts features which are not usually seen in workflow management tools. A case in point is the dashboard. While a dashboard in itself is not a rarity in similar platforms, Wrike’s comes with a twist. For it has three different panes which together give you a comprehensive view of the whole workflow. Pane no:1 gives you access to projects and financials. In another word, it’s the pane you use to manage resources. Pane no:2, meanwhile helps you create and assign tasks to team members and also set due dates. The third pane contains all the current tasks and subtasks which you should know about.

For creating and sharing files and tracking projects, Wrike also provides incredible security so that you can be sure that no sensitive information related to a project could be accessed by a third party. Wrike also brings you real-time analytics, meaning that infographics, reports and analytic dashboards get automatically updated every fifteen minutes or so. This ensures that the metrics you are looking at any given point are not outdated.

Among other things, you could see real-time updates of task statuses, team performance, workloads and approvals.

Yet another aspect which makes Wrike a compelling workflow management tool is the fact that it brings you solutions specific to different departments in your organization. Or rather, the solutions that it brings can be easily adapted to suit the purposes of the various departments- be it product development, content generation, operations or sales. In fact, you get different templates that could be used by departments involved in different functions.

Should you choose Basecamp or Wrike?

While Basecamp has certain unique or near-unique features like automatic check-ins which places it above many other workflow management tools, when compared with Wrike, the latter does bring a more expansive list of features. On top of that, the enterprise-level security which Wrike affords is pretty robust. This possibly makes Wrike the better option among the two.

What Wrike and Basecamp lack

Rich as these two tools are with features, they seem to lack in one respect- they don’t have a feature which helps you measure the time someone spends on a task. That’s no minor issue, not if you want to accurately predict when you could deliver the project. But I’m Productive is a project management tool that not only accurately measures the time someone spends working on a task, but also incorporates an AI which helps you predict project delivery time. To do the latter, all you have to do is click on a button! Head to their website to know more.

Wrike vs Trello- Choose the right project management software for you

Choosing the right project management service could mean the difference between a smoothly proceeding workflow management, and one that can be compared with an often bumpy ride. Here, we contrast Wrike and Trello, so you could make an informed choice between the two.

Wrike

Wrike is exceptional when it comes to security. You could share files and track the performance of individual team members without worrying that information would be viewed by an unauthorized party. The project management service provides enterprise-level security towards that end.

Though Wrike brings you a host of useful features, it also provides a good number of free templates. This means, you could easily start using the service with one of these templates, even before you master all the features in the workflow management tool.

Wrike’s dashboard is one-of-a-kind. That’s no exaggeration because you wouldn’t find something like that in any other project management platform. It has three different panes which together present you a view of the complete workflow. All the workflow details you want to peruse could be viewed in this single space.

You can access all projects and financials through the first pane while you can create and assign tasks to team members using the second one. The last of the panes shows all the tasks and subtasks in a project.

One of the most valuable assets that you get while working and collaborating on a digital platform is data. But to help improve the performance of a team, you would need this data in real-time. To this end, Wrike brings you real-time analytics. Infographics, analytic dashboards and even reports get refreshed automatically every fifteen minutes or so. This means that you wouldn’t have to worry about any of the data that you view being outdated.

 You could view real-time metrics like task statuses, approvals, workloads and more. This feature is especially useful if you are involved in multiple projects at the same time. Also significant is the fact that not every project management service in fact brings you this feature.

Trello

One of the best-loved project management tools, Trello brings a long list of smart features for you. Perhaps, the catchword that explains Trello best is simplicity. For instance, it lets you organize your to-do lists as cards, lists or boards- depending on your requirements.

Aside from the three above-mentioned views, Trello also lets you view tasks in the timeline view. As the name suggests, this helps you see how the different tasks flow over a period of time. Trello’s interface also helps keep things simple- you could easily add begin and end dates using it, and also change the parameters if you so wish.

The table view is yet another view that you get in this project management tool. It mimics the arrangement ethos of a spreadsheet, helping you sort and filter items easily. Meanwhile, the dashboard view brings you a holistic picture of how the team is progressing with their tasks.

Other views include a calendar view which brings you a monthly vision of tasks and a map view which represents information in the form of a map.

In Trello, tasks are represented with cards. Keeping to their principle of simplicity, you could easily label or move a card across different stages of the workflow. If you click on a card, you will be presented with the card back. This is where you could find or fill in comments and task descriptions.

You could add new members to a card, set due dates and attach relevant files to cards. Also, to ease collaboration, if multiple team members are working on the same card, you could clone the card so any update made on the original card will be instantly visible on the other cards.

Should you choose Wrike or Trello?

Trello’s simplicity is not just charming, that also elevates its functionality. You also get multiple views in this service- which is particularly useful while handling complex projects. In other words, Trello is a compelling choice for a project management service. But if specific features like a real-time update on analytics or a comprehensive dashboard are important for managing your project, you could choose Wrike.

What Wrike and Trello lack

The idea of measuring the time someone spends on a task is central to accurately predicting the project delivery time. Unfortunately, neither Trello nor Wrike has a feature which accurately measures the said time, making a correct prediction of project delivery time all but impossible. But you could use the project management service, I’m Productive for the same. Incorporating an AI, it helps you make the prediction accurately with just a click of a button.  Head over to their website to learn more about the service.

Wrike vs Jira- A comparison to help you choose the right project management tool

Should Wrike be the project management software of your choice, or is Jira a better option? Below, we contrast the two workflow management tools so that you can make the right decision.

Jira

It’s no exaggeration to say that the agile method is the most successful model for software products in the present era. Alternative models have been proposed and tried out, but they invariably failed in the long run. At least, none of them has had as wide an impact as agility yet.  In this context, the agile tools that Jira brings become particularly important.

Among other tools, the project management service brings you Kanban boards and scrum boards which make tracking the progress of tasks easy to perform in real-time. Using such tools, you could easily discern which tasks are on track and which are lagging. Jira also brings you multiple project views including story points and user stories, while also supporting agile sprints.

If you trace back Jira’s history, you could see that the tool was initially developed in order to help track coding bugs in software projects. Though many more functionalities have been added to the software since then, this feature still remains central to Jira. Using the feature, you could locate and record any bugs that you may find in software that is under development.

You could also view all issues in the backlog. This sort of comprehensive view is especially useful when you need to prioritize solving one bug over the others.

If such features gave you the impression that Jira is meant solely for software development teams, rest assured that that’s not the case. Certain versions of the project management service ably support other departments too. For instance, you could plan product launches and events using the software- something that marketing teams would appreciate. Meanwhile, the human resources department would like the fact that you could customize workflows in Jira to optimize hiring and onboarding processes.

Wrike

Contrasting with Jira which is of special use to software development tools, Wike’s features can easily be adapted by different departments.

 Whether the department is involved in hiring, marketing, development or anything else, chances are you could easily find features that could be customized for your purposes. In fact, the platform even brings you a number of templates that could be considered specific to departments.

To keep track of project progress, Wrike brings you real-time analytics. Infographics, reports and analytic dashboards are all updated automatically every fifteen minutes or so. You can get real-time analysis of metrics including workload, approvals, team performance and project statuses.

This feature becomes even more useful if you are guiding multiple projects simultaneously. Such up-to-date analytics are not part of every project management service, making the feature, not just useful but also special.

Another way in which Wrike is a little different from other project management tools is by virtue of its dashboard. Made of three panes, the dashboard brings all the details of projects that you want to access in a single space. You can access financials and projects using the first pane while the second one helps you create and assign tasks to different team members, and also set due dates for the tasks. The last pane contains all the current tasks and subtasks.

Though the phrase ‘holistic view’ is bandied about a lot in the context of dashboards, this is one instance when it is truly merited.

Should you choose Wrike or Jira?

Software development teams, especially ones that use the agile methodology, would find plenty to like about Jira. Though other kinds of projects could also be run using the workflow management tool, Wrike’s features are probably more supportive for them.

What do Jira and Wrike lack?

Much as the agile-centric features of Jira is admirable and as useful as real-time reporting in Wrike is, both the tools fall short in one important way. They don’t help you measure the exact time someone spends on a task, without counting the break hours and the like. Accurately predicting the project delivery time then becomes a moot point.

This makes the project management software, I’m Productive a viable alternative. It measures the time spent on tasks accurately. More than that, it helps you predict project delivery with just a click of a button. It even employs a powerful AI to help you do that. Check out the website to explore more about the tool.

Wrike vs Asana- How to choose the right project management tool for you

A project management service could be a valuable resource that helps improve team collaboration and productivity and eases up tracking and managing projects. This is especially true if it’s a rightly lauded resource like Asana or Wrike. But amongst the two workflow management tools, which one will work better for you? Read the comparison below before making your choice.

Wrike

There are quite a few things to be told about Wrike. But we think it’s appropriate we start with their dashboard. For it is rather unique compared to similar features in other project management platforms.

The dashboard is made of three different panes which when clubbed together give a comprehensive view of the whole workflow. You could see just about any detail in this single space. Among other things, you could access projects and financials, create tasks and assign them to different team members, and view the current tasks and subtasks in the three panes.

To support efficient project management, Wrike brings a large set of features that helps you share files, track the time that a project takes and more. Further, such features come with robust security provisions which put this project management software a step above many of its peers.

Wrike brings you a number of free templates, so getting started with one of them is easy enough. However, the system is densely packed with features, so it might take some time before you learn to use all of them. Needless to say, such exhaustive features are especially useful when it comes to managing complex projects.

Wrike is also cutting edge when it comes to getting you the analytics that you need. For instance, it updates its charts, reports and analytics dashboard every fifteen minutes. This ensures that the analytics you view at almost any given time is up to date. Among other metrics, you can view task status, workload, approval and team performance in near-real-time.

Another aspect of Wrike that makes it a great workflow management tool is its adaptability. It could easily be used by different departments for various purposes. Be it product development or human resources or marketing, Wrike brings you the necessary tools that are required for meaningful functioning.

 Asana

Asana too sports a lengthy list of features which are valuable additions to your arsenal while managing a project. This is reflected even in their free plan which in itself is liberal in its provisions.

Among other features, you can use the platform for unlimited projects even with its free version. Asana also lets you integrate it with time tracking tools of your choice, without paying any additional charge for the same.

Asana is liberal when it comes to the number of views it brings you too. These include lists, portfolios, Kanban boards, timelines and workloads. The system is also flexible enough so that every team member could manage tasks using views that suit their purposes. Also, you could switch from one view to another without breaking a sweat.

You also get a dashboard in Asana which you could customize according to the information that you wish to view at any point.

You could also easily automate redundant tasks and processes and even workflows using Asana. You could set up rules and triggers for automation- and that’s made easy, particularly thanks to the graphical interface.

 Asana also wants your team to collaborate well while working- at least, that’s what one should surmise from the different features that support the same. For instance, you could easily chat in real-time with others in the team, assign priorities so that everyone in the team can view them, and more. Also, you could integrate Asana with messaging systems and email apps, if your team prefers to function using such third-party tools.

Like Wrike, Asana is also versatile enough that it could be used efficiently- and easily- by different departments in the organization.

Should you choose Wrike or Asana?

The term ‘neck-to neck’ describes best the way features are stacked against each other in both the project management tools. Having said that, Wrike probably has an edge over Asana, but that’s only if your project is super-complex and involves prolonged scrums, in which case the advanced features might become central to project management.

 Also, you may want to check the price for the two tools before you make a decision. Generally, Wrike tends to be the pricier option. Whether the features justify the price or not will solely depend on the requirements of your project.

 What Wrike and Asana lack

While tracking work time for individuals might be a feature in one or either of these project management tools, they don’t have a provision to accurately measure the time someone spends on a particular task. This drawback also prevents them from giving you an accurate estimate of project delivery time.

But I’m Productive is a workflow management tool that measures the said time metric correctly and more importantly, uses such metrics to estimate the project delivery with precision. In fact, the tool does this with the help of a powerful AI- you just need to click on a button to get the estimate. Check out their website to learn more.

 

Zoho Projects vs Notion- Find out the better workflow management tool for you

While Notion has a reputation for being an easy-to-use project management service, Zoho Projects is not far behind in the ease-of-use front. Having said that, which of these workflow management tools brings the right set of tools to aid you in your project management journey? Read our comparison to find out.

Notion

It is quite easy to make notes or add other media like videos and images that are relevant to a project using Notion. You get a dedicated blank page for this purpose. You could not just drag and drop content into this space but also rearrange the same. As for types of content, aside from the aforementioned videos and images, the platform also supports programming codes, bookmarks and more.

The provision to add custom keyword tags also makes it easy to track the notes and documents that you create in this project management system.  Further, you could keep the notes you create private or share them with team members.

But the notes you create form only one type of information that you would require for the effective running of a project. The team would also need documents related to engineering practices, office policies and company policies. For this reason, Notion brings you Wikis, using which you could add different types of content including embeds, lists and images. As with notes, you could just drag and drop the content and rearrange them according to your requirement.

Aside from these, the project management software also helps you create and maintain tasks- an essential feature to manage workflow. The users could add the properties of a database of tasks according to their requirements. They could also behold a database in multiple views- including table, calendar and board views.

This project management software considers any content that you add to it- be it a web page, image, video, list and the like- as a block. You could just put together different blocks in the same space, arranging them according to your wish. For instance, if you need to consult different forms of content to finish a task, you could put all the related entries in one place.

 

 

Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is a project management system that brings its own set of tools to help you manage workflow and see a project through. One of the smartest features of the system is that it allows you to create both tasks and subtasks for every milestone.

This permits a detailed level of planning which is especially important for complex projects. You also get the option to automate recurring tasks using this workflow management system.

To aid collaboration, Zoho Projects brings a good set of features. For instance, you can use many channels of communication to work efficiently with your team members, including feeds, activity streams, wiki and chats. You could use these channels for distinct purposes. For instance, feeds can be used if you want to stay updated about the latest announcements or changes made in a project. A chat room, on the other hand, provides a dedicated space for team members to discuss a topic.

At the same time, this project management software also brings you tools to help improve your team’s productivity. Some of these include time sheets, global timers and resource utilization charts. The software also comes with invoice software integrated with it. This makes sure that the number of billable hours is captured accurately, and you wouldn’t make any errors while issuing bills.  

To share important documents with team members, you could create a page where you could save them. This could be set up as a common knowledge pool from which team members could derive what they want, whenever they want to.

Should you choose Zoho Projects or Notion?

Notions’ interface has a simple elegance that makes it a joy to use. Combine this with the obviously useful features like Wikis and you could make a strong case for this software. However, Zoho Projects possibly brings you an even more expansive list of features to make project management easy for you.

What Notion and Zoho Projects lack

It’s nigh maddening to remain uncertain about when exactly you would be able to deliver a project. In many cases, the expected delivery date becomes more arbitrary than anything substantial. One main reason for this is that project management tools don’t generally bring you an accurate way to measure the time a team member spends on a task. Without this metric, every prediction of project delivery is bound to be vague.

The project management service, I’m Productive replaces this vagueness with an accurate prediction of project delivery. To do this, the system employs a powerful AI. You could just click on a button, and the AI would give you an accurate delivery time. Among other things, the system captures the accurate time duration someone has been on a task to support this.

That’s no small addition that this workflow management tool brings, on top of features including task creation and tracking. Head to their website, to learn more.

Wrike vs Clickup- A comparison between two smart project management services

Should you choose Wrike or Clickup as your project management service? Both the tools come loaded with features and have interfaces that make them easy to use. So, how do they compare against each other? Check out the comparison below, and then make the right choice based on your requirements.  

Wrike

One of the smartest ways in which Wrike makes life easier for project managers is by automating crucial processes. For instance, the form builder tool makes use of conditional logic while creating forms. This means that against new form requests, the platform can automatically assign tasks to the relevant team members and even populate the form with subtasks for you. All you have to do is set custom rules for the automation.

You could even automate entire workflows using Wrike. The project management tool can be integrated with more than 400 third-party tools which could be used in workflows. Many of these tools aid in the automation process. Even crucial steps like approving tasks could be automated, provided a finished task matches certain criteria.

While such effective automation frees up the project manager from having to do redundant tasks, Wrike also helps teams with its collaboration tools. You could eschew traditional methods like emailing and making calls and use this collaborative environment which Wrike brings you.

Not only can you comment in real-time, but you also get timely notifications and dynamic reports in the project management service. Further, you could easily share information with stakeholders directly from Wrike.

The workflow management tool also excels in terms of its dashboard. Incorporating three panels brings you a complete overview of the workflow so that you could see all project-related details in one place. The first of these panels provides you access to projects, financials and the likes while the second pane helps you create and assign tasks, and also set due dates for them. The third and final pane would have the current tasks and subtasks.

Clickup

Clickup also brings its fair share of features to help with project management. Not least of these are the different number of views to visualize the project plan. For instance, the list view would be handy in managing priorities. Meanwhile, the calendar view makes it easy to view timelines, and the Gnatt view is ideal when you need to track the progress of a project.

Clickup also supports collaboration amongst the team members. For instance, team members could easily add comments to a specific task or a document. They could in turn get notified of any changes that are made as well. Dashboards, meanwhile help them view all relevant information in a single space. The workflow management tool also helps ensure that schedules are being maintained, thanks to the time tracking feature.

Clickup is especially suited for agile teams as certain features are extremely customizable for such teams. For instance, these features could be used to manage sprints or to track bugs- both of which are crucial functions of agile software development teams. Using Clickup, the teams could also create scrum dashboards where they could view information related to a specific scrum.

This project management service also helps team members to easily share documents, assign and share tasks and track the progress of tasks- features which foster effective collaboration.

Should you choose Clickup or Wrike?

You could argue that a similar set of features is available on both Clickup and Wrike and that the differences are negligible. That wouldn’t be a wrong argument to make either. However, Pickup lets you customize features for agile operations makes it a great tool for agile teams. For regular projects, Wrike could be a good option. Ultimately though, you should check out the prices that these tools come in at the time you plan to choose between them. Different plans come at different price points, bringing different levels of access to features.

What Wrike and Clickup lack

The logic is simple- you need to know the exact amount of time someone spends on a task so that you could calculate precisely when you would be able to deliver a project. Unfortunately, neither of these workflow management tools gives you that feature. But the project management tool, I’m Productive does. The tool is even integrated with an AI that helps you accurately predict the project delivery with the click of a button. Please check their website for more information about the platform.

 

 

Monday.com vs Zoho Projects- Know which project management solution serves you better

When it comes to project management solutions, should the choice be Monday.com or Zoho Projects? There are many features that make each workflow management special. To know how they compare against each other, please read on.

 Monday.com

 One of the key differentiators between working in the post-digital world and before is the volume of decisions that you now make based on data. It is safe to assume that the said volume is exponentially higher than before, simply because every other thing is quantified and represented as data points in today’s world.

 Monday.com becomes a great ally for you in this context given how it synchronizes all the information related to a project that you put in it so that you can access them all in a single location. Put another way, it brings a whole lot of data in a single place so you can make informed decisions.

 Monday.com makes it easy for team members to track the status of their projects thanks to the highly intuitive manner in which work could be displayed using it. Also, it’s super-easy for anyone in the team to know the tasks that they are responsible for at any given point in time using this workflow management system.

 The workflow management tool also incorporates an intuitive interface which makes onboarding a team hassle-free and time-efficient. This is not a simple advantage given the fact that many other project management tools in the market feature interfaces that look like they are designed to baffle more than guide you.

 Talking about having an edge over the competition, Monday.com also brings you the ability to customize automation- a feature that is lacking in many of its peers. This means that you can kiss goodbye to the repetitive tasks which often have you grumbling, and instead focus on high-value tasks.

 Monday.com is also a boon for collaborative works- it brings you a plethora of features for the same. Using this project management tool, you can easily assign tasks to someone, update statuses and also track the progress of projects.

 Searching out items when you want to track down a previous communication is also easy. Even better, the platform lets you integrate all major communication tools your team may be using- including Zoom, email, Slack and MS Teams. It provides integration support for over thirty tools.

Be it giving feedback, sharing documents or pitching ideas, it can be done smoothly using Monday.com.

 Zoho Projects

 Having talked about distinct advantages that Monday.com brings you over other project management services, Zoho Projects to brings its own features that are not easily replicated by other services.

 Some of these features help you plan projects incorporating far more details than many other project management tools. For one thing, it’s not just tasks that you could create but also subtasks, and you can do this for every milestone.

 We discussed the communication potential that Monday.com brings to your team. The same is true with Zoho Projects as well.

 In fact, the project management tool brings multiple channels for the same, including feeds, chat and streams. Each channel can be put to a different use.

 Feeds, for example, can be used to keep updated about something while chat rooms could be created and maintained to discuss exclusively topics. This workflow management tool also facilitates something that is becoming increasingly central for businesses to stay competitive: which is knowledge sharing. You could simply create a page in Zoho Projects where you could save documents and other data related to a project, which others in the team could then access.

 Another bedrock of efficient teamwork is the team’s productivity. Zoho Projects has different features to help teams boost their productivity. These include resource utilization charts, timesheets and global timers. Invoice software is also integrated into the system. It helps ensure that you bill hours without errors.

 Should you choose Monday.com or Zoho Projects?

 Zoho Projects has many things going for it- including features that help detailed project planning, and which help maintain high productivity. Such features probably make it a good choice for complex projects. But for other projects, Monday.com would be our pick.

What Monday.com and Zoho Projects lack

 You don’t get a feature to accurately measure how long someone spends on a task. This in turn handicaps your ability to accurately judge the delivery time of the project. This is a major drawback in what are otherwise really good project management solutions.

 I’m Productive, meanwhile, is a workflow management tool that uses an advanced AI to help you predict project delivery accurately. It, of course, has a way to measure the time spent on a task. In fact, that is one of the key metrics used for predicting project delivery. Head to their website to learn more about this incredible project management solution. 

 

Zoho Projects vs Jira - Know which project management service is ideal for you

Should you choose Jira or Zoho Projects as the project management service to help you and your team through coming projects? That question could only be answered by taking a comparative look at both the services. So, without further ado, take a look at the same.

Jira

Perhaps, the most impressive aspect of Jira is that it includes tools that are dedicated to agile projects and scrum management. These include Kanban and scrum boards which represent workflows in a highly accessible, visual format, so that team members could easily keep track of the progress of tasks. The project management software also includes provision for multiple project views, including user stories.

Jira was originally invented to track bugs and related errors during the course of software development. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the tool provides excellent bug tracking provision in its current avatar too. Developers could locate and record bugs in the software they are creating, and they could also see all the bugs in the backlog.

Jira also makes reporting super-efficient, which isn’t something that could be said about many other project management tools. Using the tool, you can create version reports, burndown charts, burnup charts, sprint reports and cumulative flow diagrams among others. In fact, that’s just a small cross-section of the types of agile reports that could be created using Jira.

All projects are not made alike. Those who manage projects are aware of this fact but some project management tools are designed as if every project runs the same way. Thankfully, that’s not the case with Jira. The tool brings you excellent customization possibilities. Not just the workflows but also other features like scrum boards and reports could be customized according to your project’s requirements. Software developers could easily enhance their software’s capability by integrating with other apps: Jira lets you integrate with over 3,000 third-party apps!

But that’s not to say that only software development teams stand to benefit from this tool. There are certain versions of Jira that could be used by marketing teams while planning out product launches and other marketing-related events. Meanwhile, human resources teams could make use of the workflows for their onboarding processes. These are mere examples, of course. The high level of customizability Jira offers means that different teams in an organization can use the product according to their wants.

Zoho Projects

Regardless of how complex a project is, Zoho Projects helps you plan it out, incorporating even the minutest details. This is in large part due to the ease with which the platform not only lets you create tasks but also subtasks for each milestone. Assigning these to the ideal team members is also equally easy to do. In addition, you could also automate recurrent tasks using Zoho Projects, so that you could have more time to attend to unique tasks that demand your full attention.

No workflow management service is worth its name if it doesn’t support efficient support for communication among team members. On this front, Zoho Projects scores in spades. In fact, the tool brings you different channels for this purpose- including chat, activity stream, wiki and feeds. Each of these serves a different purpose. Feeds, for instance, help you stay on top of the latest announcements and other developments in projects that are relevant to you. Chat rooms, on the other hand, are spaces dedicated to discussing distinct topics by team members.

It’s not just inter-team communication which Zoho Projects aims to improve, but also the productivity of teams. To this end, you will find tools including resource utilization charts, global timers and timesheets. There is also invoice software integrated into the system. This ensures accurate billing and invoicing.

Should you choose Zoho Projects or Jira?

If your project includes a large number of sprints, Jira could be an ideal project management software. Zoho Projects, on the other hand could be used for more straightforward projects. You should also check the pricing for these two tools before making the final decision. Some tools may offer quite a lot of features even in their free version while others would have you paying even for those.

What Zoho Projects and Jira lack

There is no doubt that both project management services discussed here are useful in their own ways. Indeed, certain features- like the variations of reports that Jira provides- are nothing short of stunning. But still, one critical feature is missing from both the tools- the ability to objectively measure the amount of time someone spends on a task. Without this metric, it’s impossible to make a realistic evaluation of when you could deliver the project.

If you are wondering if any project management software provides this feature, the answer is I’m Productive. In fact, you could get an accurate prediction of project delivery time with just a click on a button in this tool. The platform even employs a powerful AI to this end. Learn more about this incredible workflow management service by visiting their website.

Basecamp vs Zoho Projects

Basecamp vs Zoho Projects - A comparison to help you decide which project management service to choose

Basecamp and Zoho Projects are project management services that are rich in features. However, which one of these should be your pick, the one that would help with managing your specific project? Read on to find out. 

Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects provides all the run-of-the-mill functions that make a project management software useful- including the ones to create tasks, assign them to team members, set end dates for them and also create budgets for the tasks that you created. These functions run smoothly as well- without significant crashes or other problems that plague some competing services.

But if you were to ask what’s unique about this project management service that differentiates it from other tools, it should be the automation option. Simply put, you can automate all your document processes using it- including access control and revision tracking. It also provides a document management feature.

Using this, team members could easily share documents amongst themselves. Other useful features include those for issue management. As the name makes clear, these help you resolve issues or errors in a task. What's more, you could also make use of the reporting module to easily prepare business reports and management summaries.

To ensure detailed project management, Zoho Projects lets you create not just tasks but also sub-tasks for each milestone. These, of course, can be assigned to different team members. If you have ever been involved in a complex project, you would know how crucial incorporating subtasks in a project management plan is.

Team members can communicate efficiently with each other, thanks to the different channels of communication available in Zoho Projects. These include stream, feeds, wiki, chats and forum, with each channel providing a distinct use. For instance, feeds help you stay updated about the latest announcements or when new tasks are created. Chat rooms, meanwhile, can be created to exclusively discuss upon a topic.

Team members can also share knowledge easily using the project management service, thanks to the fact that they could create a page where useful documents and other types of information could be shared- the other members of the team could access the contents of this page as and when they require.

 Basecamp

Basecamp brings a plethora of features that help you manage projects efficiently, not least of which are the to-do lists. With these, you could split tasks down into different projects, split up projects into various phases, set due dates, assign tasks to team members and even add notes. And that’s not all there is to it either. If performing a task requires access to certain information, you can attach the relevant files to each entry.

These lists also support collaboration. For instance, if an entry becomes overdue, all team members involved in the same can be notified of the fact. Managers could take a look at the activity view to get an overview of the tasks that are done for the day, and which are overdue. Individual team members can view all their different tasks in a single place, thanks to the “my stuff” menu.

Another significant advantage of this workflow management software is that it supports real-time communication. In fact, it brings multiple ways to do the same- including group chats, pings and message boards.

While group chats can be used for internal communication amongst a team, message boards could be used for communicating to a larger number of people, like when you need to share an announcement. The ping feature is handy when it comes to virtual one-to-one conversations, and conversations among a small number of team members. The presence of such tools eliminates the need to switch to third-party services for communication, thereby saving time.

Talking about saving time, Basecamp also provides Automatic check-ins so that you can schedule posts that will be shared with team members automatically; this will free you from attending redundant status meetings. This workflow management tool also provides you space to share documents and other relevant information with team members.

Should you choose Basecamp or Zoho Projects?

Now that you have seen what the two workflow management tools bring you, you probably can judge which will suit your project’s requirements better. Having said that, Basecamp does offer a better interface plus some useful features for real-time communication and project tracking that make life easier for project managers and team leaders. That nudges us towards recommending it. 

What Basecamp and Zoho Projects lack

While both project management tools come loaded with features, they don’t provide a way to accurately measure the time duration team members spend on a task. This in turn makes calculating the prospective time when you could deliver the project impossible.

I’m Productive is a workflow management tool that helps you do this. In fact, the service even incorporates an AI which helps you predict the project delivery time so that you could have predictable revenue. You don’t have to perform any complex calculations to get the estimate either. You just click on a button and the AI will deliver the result for you.

 Please visit the I’m Productive website to learn more about the service.

 

Zoho Projects vs Asana

Zoho Projects vs Asana - Learn which project management tool works best for you

Which project management tool would serve your requirements better- Zoho Projects or Asana? Our comparison takes a deep dive into the features of both these workflow management services, so you get the answer to that question!

Zoho Projects

There is no dearth of good features in Zoho Projects. Among other things, you can create tasks, set deadlines for them, assign them to team members and schedule tasks. However, what makes Zoho Projects stand out is that it automates document processes. These processes include search and retrieval, revision tracking and access control.

The project management service also gives you a portal that you can use to share documents with other team members. To help you resolve errors in tasks, the tool brings you issue management features. To create business reports and summaries, you get reporting module and dashboards.

One of the biggest advantages of the Zoho Project is that it allows for comprehensive project planning. No detail or milestone needs to be left out of the plan. For every milestone, you can create tasks and also subtasks, and then assign these to team members. Recurring tasks could be set up automatically.

No project can be performed smoothly without efficient communication between team members. The creators of Zoho Projects certainly seem to understand this, as you get many channels to communicate on this project management service. These include chat, activity stream, forum, wiki and feeds.

You can start distinct chat rooms dedicated to a distinct topic while feeds keep you looped in about the latest updates like a new announcement or task creation.

Good communication should also be complemented with knowledge sharing if a project development is to be carried out successfully. To this end, using Zoho Projects, the team members could create a separate page where they could save all the documents and any information relevant to the whole team in the context of the project. The team members could then access the content from this page.

Zoho Projects also helps improve a team’s productivity. To this end, it employs features including timesheets, global timers and resource utilization charts. Invoice software is also embedded in this workflow management service. This helps you get accurate billable and non-billable hours. This in turn helps you be sure that your final invoices reflect the sum that is rightly due for someone.

Asana

We mentioned before that Zoho Projects is feature-rich. But that’s not to say that Asana lags on that front. On the contrary, Asana has one of the most expansive lists of features among project management tools. Even with its free plan, you get unlimited projects, teams, file storage and more. This means, that if your team size is less than fifteen, you probably wouldn’t even have to switch from the free plan. To make things even better, Asana also allows you to integrate the time tracking tools which work best for you, without paying an additional cost.

Another way in which Asana delights its users is with the different project views it brings you. These include calendars, lists, Kanban boards workloads, portfolios and timelines. The types of views are significantly higher in number than what you get with most other project management services. This means that every team member could choose a view that supports their requirement. If you feel that another view might be better at any point, it’s easy to switch to a different view. Given how every team member’s nature of work could be different, you also get the option to customize the project dashboards so that you could see on it the information that is the most relevant to you. 

You could also automate workflows, processes and repetitive tasks in Asana. A level of customization is possible with this as well. For instance, you can design custom rules and actions for automation. Doing so is easier than you may think, given how the workflow can be built graphically. The kind of automation can also be customized- depending on your requirement. For instance, you could automate so that the next task in the flow would automatically be assigned to the relevant team member when the time comes.

Should you choose Zoho Projects or Asana?

Both workflow management services discussed here offer a comparable set of core features. But in terms of sheer ease of use, Asana- with its elegant design and highly intuitive interface- scores higher.

What these services lack

Whereas features like time tracking are possible, neither of the services brings a tool that could be said as conclusive in that regard. For instance, how do you make sure that you only count the actual hours someone spends doing a task and don’t end up counting breaktime too?

 I’m Productive is a project management service that comes with a timer that helps you measure the time spent on tasks accurately. This is in turn used by its powerful AI- along with other metrics- to calculate when you can deliver a project. In fact, you can get that prediction with just a click of a button.

Learn more about this comprehensive project management tool by visiting their website.

 

Clickup vs Zoho Projects

Clickup vs Zoho Projects - which service would suit best your project management requirements?

Is Clickup the better project management tool compared to Zoho Projects, or is it the other way around? Find the answer by reading our comparison below.

Zoho Projects

Create and assign tasks to different team members, set due dates for the tasks you created, schedule tasks, and create a budget as per the provisions…many are the things you could do to aid project management using Zoho Projects. While such functionalities are more or less common across project management services, what makes Zoho Projects special is that it can automate document processes- be it revision tracking or search and retrieval or access control, they could all be easily automated.

The heart of any good project management process is teamwork. Zoho Projects supports teamwork with the document management feature. This provides you with a portal through which you can share documents and files with other team members. Further, teams could also resolve errors using issue management features. Users can prepare business reports and management summaries using the dashboard and reporting module.

To facilitate good communication, the project management service brings multiple communication channels team members can use. These include chat, feeds, wiki and more.

Each channel has its advantages. For instance, feeds keep you updated about new tasks, announcements or other things related to the project. Chat rooms provide you with distinct channels to discuss a unique topic. You can set up the chat rooms with just a few clicks as well.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the tool is that you can plan a project thoroughly using it. It does not just task you can create but also subtasks under each milestone, and then assign them to relevant team members. The provision for subtasks is especially useful for complex tasks. And if recurring tasks are involved, Zoho Projects lets you automate them.

The tool also encourages knowledge sharing, for you can create a distinct page for saving documents and information related to the project. The team members can access it as and when they wish.

Your team also stands a good chance of improving its productivity with Zoho Projects, thanks to tools including time sheets, global timers and resource utilization charts.

Clickup

Clickup enables flexible project management according to your requirements, thanks in large part to the different views that it affords. To manage your priorities, you can use the list view while the calendar view is ideal for checking timelines. Gantt view meanwhile helps track progress.

Clickup also facilitates collaboration among team members. For one thing, team members can comment on a task or a document that is relevant to them. They could also get instant notification in case of any changes that are of their concern. Also, they can obtain all the important bits of information about a project from the dashboard.

Such conveniences are welcome, what makes Clickup even more useful is the fact that the tool’s features can be customized to support various processes in agile software development. Using the service, agile teams can customize for sprint management, bug tracking and product launches. Scrum dashboards can also be created, and the progress can be viewed using various agile charts. Further, software developers could collaborate on programming code. They could highlight syntax while native integration with Git is also possible.

Clickup efficiently supports remote work. To begin with, you can share documents over it, make reminders for important tasks and also view task progress no matter where team members are geographically located.

Should you choose Zoho Projects or Clickup?

For projects involving a small team, Zoho Projects should be an efficient tool. However, for more complex projects with a higher number of sprints, Clickup could be the better project management tool. This is especially true in the case of agile software projects.

What Zoho Projects and Clickup don’t bring you

Neither of the workflow management tools brings you a truly efficient way to measure the time someone spends on a task. Yes, time-tracking features may be present. However, the accuracy of the time measured is open for debate.

For one thing, how do you ensure that the break times are not factored in during the evaluation? The automatic timer in the project management service, I’m Productive measures that time duration accurately. The tool also comes with an AI which helps you predict project delivery with precision. The aforementioned time duration is just one aspect considered for this evaluation. The tool even lets you get the prediction with a single click- so you can be sure of the project delivery date.

Please visit their website to learn more about this workflow management service.

Trello vs Zoho Projects

Trello vs Zoho Projects - Learn which project management service you should choose

If you were to choose between the project management services, Trello and Zoho Projects, which should be your pick? Read our comparison below and make the right choice.

Trello

In Trello, cards represent the tasks that need to be performed for the successful completion of a project. Thanks to a highly intuitive interface, you can easily label or move these cards through multiple work stages. Further, you can simply click on a card to reveal the card’s back- there, you would find comments and descriptions related to it. You could add team members to a card, include checklists, set up due dates and also attach any files that need to be consulted while carrying out a task in the card.

The project management service also allows you to link a card simply by pasting a URL as the card’s title. If the URL is that of a board, the card will directly link to the relevant board. Users could also clone cards so any changes made in the original card would reflect in them too. This feature eases collaboration to a great extent.

To view projects at various stages of their completion, Trello provides multiple views.

The timeline view is one of them. Using it, you can see how the different steps in the project come together to form a whole over a period of time. You can also add or change the start or end date for cards. You could group together cards according to list, member or label. This helps you see the corresponding workload.

 Meanwhile, the table view gives you a list in the style of a spreadsheet. This is particularly useful in the case of projects which cover multiple boards. You can easily sort and filter the cards in the table view. 

 Another view that you get in this project management tool is the dashboard view. This is useful when you want to view the progress of a card or gain insights into the performance of a team.

 The calendar view, as the name suggests, brings you a month-wise view of the card. You could also alter the start and end dates of tasks in this view by simply dragging and dropping them.

 One more view you get in this workflow management software is the map view. It essentially represents information on a map, that you can comprehend easily.

 Zoho Projects

 Instead of cards, Zoho Projects lets you create tasks. Not just that, you can schedule the tasks, assign them to different team members, create budgets for tasks and also set end dates for them.

 One standout feature of this workflow management software lets you automate document processes. These include access control, and search and retrieval. Members of a team could also share documents with each other using the document management feature. This feature brings you a portal that facilitates document-sharing.

 Meanwhile, the issue management features help teams resolve any errors in the tasks. These are features are highly valuable from a collaboration perspective.

Also, to create business reports and summaries, you can make use of the reporting module.

 By now, you must have got the idea that Zoho Projects has an exhaustive list of features which help with project management. In fact, the features are so many that you could plan a project from start to end down to the tiniest details.  For instance, aside from tasks, you can also create subtasks for each milestone, and also assign them to team members.

 Zoho Projects also provides excellent support for communication amongst team members. The different media channels that you get for the same include feeds, chat, wiki and more.

 Each channel can be used for a distinct function. For instance, you can create individual chat rooms to discuss particular topics. Feeds, on the other hand, help you stay on top of the latest like a new task created or an announcement. 

 Sharing knowledge is also easy over Zoho Projects thanks. You could create a page where documents and other relevant information could be saved. Team members could then access this page whenever they seek some information.

 Should you choose Zoho Projects or Trello?

Trello probably has a slight edge over Zoho Projects with its visual appeal and ease of use. However, the primary advantage you gain with it is the cards feature which allows you to define a card as a task or something else, depending on your project requirements. But if your project is more straightforward, and involves conventional tasks, then, Zoho Projects is not a bad option.

What they lack

Trello and Zoho Project bring a great set of features that facilitates project management. However, neither of these project management services helps you accurately predict the time in which you could deliver a project. I’m Productive is one service that can help you with the same. In fact, the service is integrated with an AI solely for that purpose.

All you have to do is click, to get the prediction. To learn more about this workflow management tool, please visit their website.

 

Notion vs Jira

Notion vs Jira - Find out which project management software is better for you

Is Jira the better project management tool in relation to Notion, or is it the other way around? To find out the answer, read our comparison right below.

Jira 

Jira offers you all the features that are seen as essential to a project management service. As you may well imagine, these features are common across services of a similar nature- ranging from creating and tracking tasks or their equivalent to marking one as finished. Suffice to say that these features function well enough in Jira- you wouldn’t be added by frequent software crashes or allied problems. But one feature which helps Jira stand out from its competition is Sprints.

Just as the physical world we inhabit is built around infrastructures like roads and bridges, our technological world has software for its backbone. It is no exaggeration to say that more software products are created these days than ever before. One key reason is that even companies that are not in the software business may need software development teams to support their business. As anyone involved in software development could tell you, sprints are an important- almost indispensable- part of many a related project.

This, added to the fact that more companies are adopting agile practices now makes the Sprints feature in Jira handy for a large number of companies. (Agile methods strive to make sprints run smoother, among other things). The feature helps you guide a sprint efficiently even as it fosters teamwork.  

While that’s a high point for Jira, the project management tool disappoints with its interface. This is even more pronounced given that an intuitive interface design is a priority for just about any software these days.

In certain areas of the tool, you are faced with a cluttered interface. This inadvertently forces you to spend more time than is reasonable before you could master how to use certain features. If you are willing to spare that kind of time, Jira does have impressive features to help you in your project management journey.

Notion

Similar to Jira, Notion too brings you all the essential features for efficient project management. The software is built solidly enough that it affords smooth functioning without unwanted hang-ups. Considering that many workflow management tools d have issues like getting stuck while you are using them, that’s commendable.

But smooth functioning and inclusion of essential features are not the only ways in which Jira and Notion are similar. Like Jira, Notion’s interface to leaves a lot to be desired.

 The placement of information feels haphazard in places and that can slow down your use of the tool- regardless of the efficacy of the underlying infrastructure. But if you can get over that hiccup, Notion certainly rewards you with a wide set of features that should suffice for managing a typical project.

Should you choose Jira or Notion?

Both Jira and Notion are equally useful when it comes to managing projects of a typical nature- ones that are low on complexity and in the number of sprints. However, if it involves a large number of sprints, Jira is just the tool for you.

Should there have been more to these services?

Anyone who has been in charge of a project would tell you that a worrying element is uncertainty you sometimes face regarding when it could be delivered. Contingencies and dependencies are part of any project. But even the best-laid plans would be thrown off course if team members face unexpected troubles that slow them down.

A key metric to predict project delivery time is the time duration team members already spent on their tasks. This historic data would help accurately predict when the project can be delivered.

That might sound like a simple idea. But surprisingly enough, there is no way to precisely measure the duration someone spends on a task in many of the project management tools- including Jira and Notion. But the platform called  I’m Productive helps you do exactly that.

 In fact, the tool even has an AI which lets you get an accurate prediction of project delivery, that too by just clicking on a button. Visit their website and learn more about how I’m Productive could help with your project management requirements.

Jira or Monday.com

Jira or Monday.com? Make an informed decision on which project management tool to choose

For managing your project efficiently, should you choose Jira or Monday.com? To know which of these project management services fits your purposes better, please read out the comparison below. 

Jira  

To manage any project, a certain set of functions and features are essential. And you can rest assured that you will find them in Jira. Many of these are akin to what are present in other workflow management services. So, then, you may be wondering why you should choose Jira over others?

Jira makes a compelling case with its Sprints feature.

A sprint is a unit of extended action, that forms a link in a chain of similar sprints. Cumulatively, the sprints would give rise to a final product or update in a software product.

Sprints are of particular importance in the current age owing to two reasons. One is that many businesses have software development as part of their functioning even if they don’t sell software or related services. This means now more companies use sprints- a frequently used model in software development processes- than ever before. The second reason is that many companies are adopting the agile model for software development. if you are familiar with agile methodologies, you would know that efficient sprints are a focal point of agility.

Each sprint is a self-contained unit in that each has its own stated outcome and actions. By nature, sprints are highly collaborative in nature, and owing to the typically large number of tasks involved, can be complex to manage. Jira, by offering a dedication to sprints makes like easy for team leaders and managers in that respect.

While Jira scores a point in its utility with Sprints, it falls short in another respect- the interface.

Whereas the aesthetic of Jira’s design is admirable, the functionality is a different matter altogether. In fact, certain areas of the workflow management tool come across as cluttered, so it may take a few tries before you could actually learn how to make use of some of its features. That’s an unwanted overhead but which is, unfortunately, a part of Jira. However, if you could spare enough time to master the said features, then the tool does offer great utility.

Monday.com

The word pulse comes with some heavy associations. It brings to mind ideas of the heart, of the central aspect of a system, of vitality.

 Monday.com is one project management tool that has gained popularity a little late in the day compared to its peers. But its rising popularity owes a lot to pulses-  a feature that is central to it.

On Monday.com a pulse can be just about anything in the context of a project. Typically, the principal item in a project is supposed to be a task. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, there are times when this idea is limiting.

Unfortunately, many project management tools come with tasks as the central unit. This limits their use if your project calls for more flexible definitions of units.

Given this, Monday.com has an edge over many other project management services. Once you create a pulse- it takes just a few clicks to do so- you could set a deadline for it and also assign team members. You could set dependencies in the event that a pulse could be acted upon only after another action. Aside from these, you can also easily set the status for a pulse.

Should you choose Monday.com or Jira?

If your project contains multiple sprints, and especially if the sprints are complex and contain large numbers of tasks, Jira is a good option for you. Monday.com allows a fair amount of flexibility, as mentioned before. So, if you think that your project is distinct in some ways, perhaps Monday.com would be the better workflow management tool for you.

What’s missing in Monday.com and Jira?

While one of these project management tools has the distinction of having sprints as a unique feature, the other brings pulses that offer flexibility in how you define the fundamental action item in your project. Those are commendable aspects. But neither Jira nor Monday.com enables you to measure accurately the amount of time someone spends on a task. This in turn limits your capability to measure the estimated time in which you would be able to deliver the project.

I’m productive positions itself as a strong alternative to other project management services in this context. With its powerful AI, you can predict project delivery dates precisely with just a click of a button. Visit their website and learn more about how I’m Productive can help you with your project management requirements.

Basecamp or Notion

Which project management service is better for you- Basecamp or Notion? If that is a question you have been thinking of late, you are at the right place now! Here, we take a close look at what makes these workflow management services special along with their advantages and disadvantages.

Basecamp

We are naturally driven to things that are unique. And if that uniqueness is combined with functionality, all the better. Such is the case with Basecamp, at least how the different pieces of information are presented on the platform. For in this project management software, you get clusters called camps. Each camp is a distinct unit of information, and each comes with six tools which you can use to manipulate the information. Some of these tools are similar in nature to the ones that you get in other workflow management platforms.

However, there are two specific tools that are quite special and which ought to be discussed here. One of these tools comes with the rather whimsical name, campfire. The tool is used when team members need to discuss with each other in real-time, the idea being synonymous with how folks who gather around a real-life campfire would talk with each other.

This tool brings two advantages. One is that enabling real-time communication also supports efficient teamwork. For instance, a team member can call upon another to clarify a doubt so that he or she could proceed smoothly with the task they have been doing. The second advantage is that it saves time, by freeing you up from having to go to another service that is dedicated to communication each and every time you want to discuss something with a team member.

Now, we shall move on to the second tool included in a camp that is of distinctness. This tool is called check-ins. If you have assumed it has something to do with those office meetings we have all come to call ‘check-ins’ you have guessed correctly. By helping you schedule posts which could be sent out to team members in a periodic manner, it frees you up from routine status meetings, so that you could attend to more important matters.

Having discussed those two special tools, it should be said that the biggest factor that makes Basecamp stand out from other project management services is another- the hill chart. In fact, the hill chart is unique to this workflow management service.

You must surely be familiar with to-do lists. These lists which we maintain to keep track of tasks are doubtless useful. But there are instances when they fall short of meeting their intended purpose- for example, in the case of large and complex projects.

You could say that a hill chart is a 2-in-1 chart. For it incorporates two parts- the uphill and the downhill halves. In the former, you are still trying to understand how best to perform a task. In the latter, you have decided on how to do the task but are yet to finish doing it. By simply looking at a hill chart, you can know to what extent a task has progressed- is it still in the early stages or is it now close to execution. 

Notion

There are certain features without which no project management service is useful, let alone complete. These include the features which help you create and maintain tasks or their equivalent and track them. The good news is all such features are very much present in Notion. And the service is obviously built on solid software infrastructure, for you don’t have to grapple with problems like the tool crashing frequently.

On the flipside, Notion’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. Many parts of the software feel cluttered compared with many other workflow management tools. The layout often leads to confusion- so much so that it can slow down performing a task efficiently. That kind of time investment is totally uncalled for, especially since one reason we use these services is so that we could save time. But if you can spare this extra amount of time which the service inadvertently demands of you, then, you would Notion rather useful. 

Which of these project management services should you use?

For straightforward and relatively simple projects, Notion is a useful project management service. If, on the other hand, your project is complex and involves a higher number of tasks, Basecamp could be ideal.  

What’s missing in Basecamp and Notion?

In order to evaluate the time required to deliver a project, you should be able to measure the time team members spend on their tasks accurately. Unfortunately, that’s one feature which is missing from both Basecamp and Notion.

The project management service, I’m Productive, meanwhile, helps you do that. In fact, the tool even comes equipped with an AI that gives you an accurate prediction of when the project can be delivered. You just need to click on a button to get that estimate. You can learn more about I’m Productive by visiting their website.

Monday.com vs Basecamp

Monday.com vs Basecamp: Know which project management service is better for you

Reputed as two of the most user-friendly project management services, Basecamp and Monday.com are on the radar of many managers and team leaders who are on the lookout for a suitable service of their kind. However, when it comes down to it, which of the two workflow management tools would suit you best? Please read on to find out.

Basecamp

Basecamp takes its own distinct route when it comes to presenting information to you. The information is grouped together in different siloes known as camps. You could manipulate things in these camps using six different tools. While the bulk of these tools bear resemblance to the average tools that you get in most project management services, two of the tools are rather special and deserve a special mention.

The first of these is a campfire. The word conjures up an image of people sitting in a circle around a glowing source of warmth, talking with each other. That ethos is not far different from what this feature does: it enables real-time communication between users.

The obvious advantage of the feature is that it supports efficient teamwork. But that’s not all the benefit either. For it also frees you from having to switch to a different platform for communication whenever you wish to communicate with a fellow team member; thereby helping save time.

Automatic check-ins are the second feature that’s of particular use. As you may have guessed from its name, the feature helps you automate certain posts that could be shared with team members in a periodic manner, so that you wouldn’t have to attend redundant meetings for status updates.

No discussion of Basecamp is complete without mentioning Hill Chart- a feature that is unique to the service. The hill chart looms in significance particularly since to-do lists may not be all you need to keep track of all the tasks that would need to be performed to finish a project. This is especially true in the case of large, complex projects.

A hill chart consists of two parts. In the first part, you are still trying to find out how to execute a task. In the second part, you have decided how to do that, only you need to execute the task. The former is the uphill part and the latter, is the downhill half. A hill chart graphically presents both the uphill and downhill parts in a single frame so that it becomes a handy visual tool to view task progress.

Monday.com

With remote working and distributed teams becoming more a normal part of the routine business, the number of project management services is also on the rise. The fact that more businesses are involved in software production now than before also plays a part in this. In this context, Monday.com is one project management tool that began to get popular a little later than the others. And there are some very good reasons for its rising popularity- not least of which is its bug-free performance and smooth interface.

Monday.com also brings you some very useful features that make workflow management easy for team leaders and managers. But perhaps, the key reason why the service is seeing so much interest from users is the high flexibility it provides. And nowhere else is this flexibility more evident than in the pulses which form a fundamental feature of Mondy.com. The idea is that a pulse could be anything you want it to be including tasks in a project. Essentially, the nature of a pulse will be dictated by the requirement of a project.

You can create a pulse without breaking a sweat too- with just a few clicks. You can also set the deadline for a pulse and assign team members to it. If ensuring that the order of the pulses or tasks doesn’t get jumbled up is a concern, Monday.com helps you set dependencies for each pulse. This way, you could know when one task/pulse could only be embarked upon after another is done. Also, for a pulse in progress, it’s super-easy to set the status.

Should you choose Basecamp or Monday.com?

Basecamp triumphs with its unique features like hill chart view and a set of truly special tools like automated check-ins. It’s certainly a friendly project management tool which helps smoothen the whole process. If your project is of a straightforward nature, with fewer levels of complexity, then, it should be a good choice. If, on the other hand, the project is rather distinct in nature, and demands a high level of flexibility in how you manage it, Monday.com could be the better choice.

What these services lack

Useful as their features are, you wouldn’t be able to accurately measure the time a team member works on a task in either of the workflow management services discussed here. And that in turn hampers your ability to accurately predict when the project can be delivered. But you can do so with the project management service, I’m Productive. In fact, to make that prediction, all you have to do is click on a button- and the powerful AI that is incorporated in I’m Productive will give you an accurate prediction. Know more about this fascinatingly useful project management service by visiting their website.

 

 

 

Basecamp vs Jira

On the face of it, the story is simple- you have a project, the project has tasks and the tasks have to run in a certain flow for successful project completion. However, each project could have its own set of requirements and nuances that make it different from others.

Such considerations are extremely important when choosing a project management service that would suit the project. For one workflow management tool may help a certain kind of project more than another. Here, we take a look at Basecamp and Jira, so you can see which of these project management services will work best for you. 

 Basecamp

One of the most striking differences that Basecamp has from Jira- or any other product management services, for that matter- is the manner in which information is presented. For this tool, the information is collected in clusters called camps.

Camps and different tools

Each of these camps comes with a set of six tools. Some of these tools are similar to the ones you get in other platforms that help in workflow management. These are useful, even necessary tools. But the ones which truly make Basecamp stand out from the rest are two in number.

One of these is known as Campfire. The name of the tool itself tells you what it does-  helps you communicate with other team members in real-time, similar to how a group of people sitting around a campfire can. A major advantage of this tool is that it cuts down the need to use a distinct communication platform whenever you need to connect with someone who is working along with you on a project.

Another tool of significance is Automatic check-ins. Once again, the name probably gives you a clue as to its nature. Using it, you can schedule posts that would get automatically shared with various team members periodically. Repetitive status meetings could thus be avoided.

Hill Chart

Aside from such useful tools, Basecamp brings you a unique feature- which is the Hill Chart. It functions on the premise that the to-do lists may not be enough at times to keep abreast of all the tasks that are involved in huge projects. Hill Charts incorporate two facets of task progress. One is the uphill half in which you still need to find a way to perform the task. The second, downhill half is the one in which you have already decided how to do the task, but you are yet to execute the same.

Combining both these elements Hill Chart gives you a holistic view of up to what point a task has progressed in its journey towards completion.

 Jira

Jira also brings a host of features that are essential to good project management. Ranging from the prosaic to the cutting edge, many of these are similar to functions you would find in other project management platforms. However, one feature which is quite special is Sprints.

Sprints

Sprints are more or less ubiquitous in companies across industries. Yes, the idea of sprints is most relevant to software development. But then, an overwhelming number of companies have software development as part of their operations even if they are not necessarily software service providers. For instance, a company that produces cameras may need to develop software that supports the different functionalities in the device.

This means that companies from a wide spectrum of industries would find the sprints feature in Jira useful. It’s not just members of the same team but distinct team members that could fruitfully collaborate using this feature during their sprints.

Interface

Such significant and useful features don’t prevent Jira from one flaw- a less than the intuitive interface. Don’t be surprised if you are going to need a few attempts on the platform before you could find out how to use some of the functions. And that’s possibly time which many don’t have in the fast pace of contemporary work environments.

On the other hand, if you can put in the time to master the use of these features,  Jira will prove a useful ally in your project management journey.

 Should you use Basecamp or Jira?

Basecamp offers certain distinct elements like camps and hill charts which make using it readily different from other services. Such features also make the platform simple and easy to use. Jira, on the other hand, triumphs largely because of its Sprint feature. If your project is straightforward including a lesser number of sprints, you could probably go with Basecamp. Otherwise, Jira could be a viable option.

Do these services lack anything important?

The distinct features aside, the two platforms discussed here lack a tool to measure precisely the time that someone spends on a task. Unless that measurement is accurate, you wouldn’t be able to accurately predict when a project can be delivered. In the project management service, I’m Productive you get a powerful AI that helps you do exactly that. In fact, you can get the prediction with just a click, thereby helping you gain a predictable revenue.

To learn more about how I’m Productive can help with your project management requirements, do check out their website.

 

Trello vs Basecamp

Trello vs Basecamp - Find out which project management tool you should use

Choosing the right project management software from the different options out there can be hard- especially when the choice you have to make is between two very compelling candidates like Trello and Basecamp. But our comparison will help with your decision-making, as we give you here the features that make both these workflow management tools distinct.

Trello

In Trello, tasks are presented in the board view. In this view, the tasks would be segregated in cards and not lists. This system of arranging tasks is efficient in that you can simply drag and drop tasks from one to another column based on the progression of the tasks in the workflow. For example, if a particular card is for a task which is presently in progress, it would be shifted to the one for completed tasks after it is finished.

To aid workflow management, Trello can also be used to create and manage content calendars and also to plan agile sprints. But that’s not to say that Trello is only for individuals who wish to design and own such processes. The platform also fosters team work; for instance, it is possible to add multiple users to a board. You could also give each member varying levels of access depending on their job requirements.

Features to help you manage the workflow

Also, depending on the permission that they have been granted, the team members can commend on the cards. This is a nice collaborative feature, especially in the context of remote working. Needless to say, this is also a handy feature for managing distributed teams in a live environment.

The creators of Trello understand that each task comes with its own set of requirements- including dependencies; which is why adding dependencies for tasks is one of its features. Aside from dependencies, some tasks also require referring to certain files for their efficient completion. In Trello, files can ne directly attached- either from your computer or the internet.

To keep track of the tasks to be performed, very few things compare with checklists in efficiency. Trello has you covered on that front as it is quite easy to create checklists in the tool. And you can also set deadlines for the tasks.

 An advanced feature

One of the more advanced features in Trello is called Butler. It lets you automate workflows, thereby helping save time. Using this feature, you could set up automated actions for different actions. For instance, you can automate in such a way that a Software Development card would get shifted to Optimize as soon as a particular team member is tagged in a comment. The benefits of such automation are two-pronged- it reduces the time taken for project completion and also minimizes errors born from human interventions.

Basecamp

One of the most obvious ways in which Trello differs from Basecamp is in the interface- or rather in how the information is listed in a minimal manner, one in which information is grouped in what is known as camps.

The different tools

So you can get the most out of camps, each of them comes with six different tools. While many of them are similar to features and tools you get in other project and workflow management platforms, two tools make Basecamp stand out.

The first of these is called Campfire. As you must surely have guessed by the name, it allows team members to communicate with each other in real-time, much like how a bunch of people can sit around a campfire and share a story. This means you wouldn’t have to switch to a dedicated communication tool each time you wish to communicate with a team member.

Automatic check-ins, on the other hand, help you schedule posts that will then be shared with different team members in a periodic manner. This frees you up from attending redundant status meetings.

A unique feature

An important feature that is unique to Basecamp is the Hill Chart. This is included because to-do lists are sometimes not enough to keep track of tasks in large, complex projects. In Hill Charts, task progress has two distinct parts. In the first one, you are yet to define your approach to tackling the task. This is the ‘uphill’ part. In the other- ‘downhill’- part, you have finalized how to perform a task, you just need to execute it.

A Hill Chart gives you an integrated view of both these parts- a visual representation which lets you see exactly where a task has reached at the present moment in terms of progress.

Which service should you choose?

Trello is useful for managing workflows that are more or less straightforward, with minimal complexity levels. For more complex projects, Basecamp may be the better option.

Do the tools lack anything significant?

Neither Trello nor Basecamp helps you get an accurate measure of the time a team member spends on a task. Significantly, this also deprives you of any chance of accurately predicting the time in which a project could be delivered. I’m Productive is a workflow management tool which measures the time spent on a task with precision, without counting the time someone spent on breaks. Further, a powerful AI helps you predict when project delivery is possible at the current rate of progress, with just the click of a button.

To learn more about this powerful workflow management tool, please head to their website.

 

 

 

 

Jira or Trello

Jira or Trello - which project management service should you choose?

Jira and Trello are two project management services that offer some compelling features to efficiently manage workflow. Here, we take a close look at what the two workflow management tools offer you, so you can decide which would be ideal for your purposes.

Jira

It’s impossible to talk about Jira without mentioning its Sprints feature. As is rightly being said of our current century, almost every business is a software business now. Even if a business is not directly involved in producing software, it is bound to rely on software generation to support its main line of business.

Car-makers are a good example. When certain features crucial to customer satisfaction like GPS and Smart Assist are heavily software-reliant, they just cannot ignore the value of good software development.

Almost every software development process involves sprints. Which makes the Sprints feature in Jira valuable for companies across industries. Team members and indeed different teams could collaborate efficiently during sprints using Jira’s feature that is dedicated to the same.

However, even as the inclusion of so useful a feature makes Jira a smart workflow management tool, there are certain fundamental areas in which it falls short. Not least of which is the interface.

It would have been great if Jira’s interface was more intuitive than it is. While it’s understandable that one might need guidance to figure out how to use certain functions, it shouldn’t be the case with many functions that you would frequently need to use. Unfortunately, that’s the case with Jira.

Having said that, if you are willing to put up with the first few times when you feel a little lost as you learn the ropes, Jira is a useful product management service, especially with features like a roadmap included in it.

Trello

In Trello, you get a gamut of features to help with your project management requirements. In this tool, tasks are represented as cards and each card could be moved around with a click from one column of tasks to another. To give you an example, you could move a card for a task in progress to the column for completed tasks after it has been successfully executed.

This simplicity of representation is in stark contrast to Jira where the interface can tend to get head-spinning at times.

It’s also straightforward in Trello to assign cards to relevant users. The users could also be granted different levels of permission, depending on which they could comment on a card. This helps smoothen team collaboration. Also, for efficient task completion, you can add dependencies to cards.

You can also attach files that need to be accessed for the completion of a task. The files can be attached from your computer or the world wide web. You can set deadlines for the tasks and also create and maintain to-do lists to ensure no important tasks are left unfinished.

Other features in Trello let you create and manage content calendars and also development roadmaps.

But the standout feature in Trello is Butler. With this, you could automate your workflow easily, designing a set of actions to be done against a condition- for instance, a card could be moved from development to optimization column when someone is tagged to it.

Such automation not only makes it easy to manage the workflow but also reduces process durations.

Should you choose Trello or Jira?

Trello offers a rather decent set of functionalities coupled with a clean and intuitive interface. Add to that the presence of a feature like Butler and it is hard not to make a case for it. But as was mentioned before, if a project is heavily reliant on sprints for efficient completion, then, Jira could be a better fit for you.

Do these services lack in anything?

You cannot argue with the fact that both Jira and Trello offer some carefully constructed features for project management. However, one crucial element missing in both these workflow management services is a tool to accurately measure the time someone spends doing a task. This is important as, without this metric, your prediction for project delivery will be wide of the mark.

I’m producing project management software that incorporates just such a feature. Not just that, it also comes loaded with a powerful AI that helps you predict the project delivery date with high accuracy, with a click! To learn more, check out their website.

Jira vs Clickup

In the constellation of project management services, Jira and Clickup are stars that shine bright- not least because of their popularity. No doubt, the two workflow management tools have earned their success in the market with useful features. But if you were to choose between the two project management tools, which would you choose? Our comparison below can help you.

Clickup

One of the biggest positive aspects of Clickup- and one which users are instantly attracted by is its simple interface design that’s also extremely efficient.

For one thing, all tasks are grouped under the phases they belong to. The phases are numbered in the sequential order in which they should proceed for the successful completion of a project. This ensures that you don’t spend your valuable time assessing tasks from another phase instead of focusing on a task in the current, urgent phase.

You also get to see the status for each task against the respective task name. The statuses include Complete, Ready and In Progress. The creators of Clickup have gone even further to simplify matters for you- presenting, the colour-coding of the statuses. Green color means a task is completed, purple means it’s ready and blue indicates that the task is in progress.

This idea of simplicity also extends to the process of adding new tasks. To add a new task in Clickup is so simple you have to hit the +button that’s given under the tasks in each phase, and then enter the name of the task. That’s all there is to it- yes, really!

Once a task is created, you can also set its due date. Another important feature lets you enter a budget against a task- provided the task in question is something that you spend money on. Additional features can also be added. There is another + button for it- located on the extreme right over the list of tasks. Clicking on it will yield you a drop-down list. Select the appropriate action you need from that list.

Clickup also gives you multiple view types- including List, Board and Gantt. As you must have come to imagine by now, it is simple enough to switch between these views as well. All you have to do is click on the appropriate tab on the horizontal pane at the top of the screen.

 Jira

Perhaps, the single most important feature which drives many users to Jira is Sprints.

Now, as you probably know, sprints are not just desirable but required for the completion of some projects. In many scenarios, undertaking more than one iteration is the only practical way to finish tasks. This is especially true in the contemporary stage of affairs in the business world when apps and other digital products come in versions. Getting from one version to the next usually takes multiple sprints. Jira, by bringing you the Sprints option proves an excellent platform in which teams could collaborate during their sprints.

However, there is one area in which Jira lags compared with Clickup, and that is the interface. In fact, the usage dynamics of the different features in Jira can be so complex the first few times you use it, that it could feel a tad disorienting. But useful features like a roadmap make the service attractive.

Pivot to Jira or Clickup?

As mentioned before, Clickup offers simplicity as a core user-centric value, from the design to how you can use different features. This level of simplicity also lends to great adaptability from the get-go. When multiple users need to move to a new system, such ease of adaptability might be a factor which project managers and team leaders would look for. And such considerations certainly make Clickup a solid choice.

Jira, on the other hand, has features like Sprints which make it useful in certain cases. If your requirements demand such features, Jira is a good choice, especially given how the tool is technically robust, with issues of the system crashing or other inconveniences rarely happening.

Should you look beyond these two services?

There is one excellent reason why you may want to look beyond these two services- useful as they are. And that reason is the inability of both these tools to accurately measure the time a team member spends on a task, sans the time they spent on breaks. If you cannot accurately measure that value, you will not be able to predict the project delivery time correctly. It is only too evident that scenario could be potentially catastrophic.

I’m Productive is a project management tool that helps you measure the time someone spends working on a task with precision. You can predict the project delivery date with the aid of a powerful AI, that too just with the click of a button. Head to their website to learn more.

Monday.com vs Trello

A project management service can make lives easier for managers and team leaders. The catch is, that you need to choose the one that’s ideal for your requirements. With so many cross-over features among competing services, you need to look at the distinctive features that make them unique to properly evaluate them.

Here, we look at what makes Monday.com and Trello two of the more popular workflow management services. This would help you determine which service will work better for you. So, without further ado, let’s look at the comparison.

Monday.com

Among the many project management tools out there, Monday.com started gaining traction rather late in the day. But the platform is fast becoming popular, backed by a solid infrastructure that prevents frequent breakdowns which plague some of its peers. The intuitive interface design also helps, while there are many features that make it a good asset for workflow management. Add to all these factors a high level of flexibility it brings to your task management, and you can see why many people are gravitating towards Monday.com.

An example of the flexibility that the platform brings is the feature of pulses. The coolest thing about pulses is that they could be anything that you want to be, according to the project requirements. While the average project management tool helps you create projects and tasks, Moinday.com gives you the opportunity to do way more than that.

It’s simple to create a pulse too- all it takes are a few clicks. Once a pulse is created, you can assign people to it and also set its deadline.

In the cases of complex projects, it is all too easy to get the order of the tasks- or pulses- wrong. But with Monday.com, you have a better shot at keeping the flow in the right direction- thanks to the fact that you can set dependencies for pulses. For instance, if Pulse 1 could be completed only after you have finished working on Pulse 2, this fact becomes discernible by just looking at the interface-assuming you have set the dependencies correctly. It is equally easy to see the status of a pulse that is currently in progress.

Trello

In Trello, there is nothing like the pulses that you get on Monday.com. But you do have the option to create tasks, and these tasks can be viewed in the board view. This means that the tasks would be arranged in cards and not in lists. This system is so simple that you can just drag a task from one column and drop it in another. Say, if a card shows a currently ongoing task, you could move it to the card for finished tasks once it’s done.

You can also create content calendars in Trello and plan sprints for agile projects. Trello has pretty good features that encourage teamwork- a case in point is that you could add more than one user to a single board. Also, different team members could be given different access permissions as per the requirements of their job.

It supports a good level of team interactivity as well. For instance, a team member could comment on a card if he or she has been given the necessary permission. This, of course, is a feature that’s particularly valuable for remotely working teams.

Like with Monday.com, you can add dependencies for tasks too, though of course, in the case of Monday.com, the dependencies could be added to anything that you may have defined a pulse as.

It’s not just dependencies that are needed to finish a task in many cases- you may also want to refer to the information contained in certain files. In Trello, you can directly attach a file. You can do this from your computer system or from the world wide web. Other features in Trello help you create checklists and also to set task deadlines.

However, one of the more ingenious features in Trello is another- and it is called Butler. It’s a feature with which workflows can be automated. Put another way, you can define a series of actions that would be automatically performed against a condition. For example, when a certain team member gets tagged in a comment, it may indicate that a software development card needs to be moved to optimize the card. Using Butler, you can automate this process, so that you wouldn’t have to do it manually each and every time. Needless to say, this helps save valuable time.

Should you choose Trello or Monday.com?

The flexibility that Monday.com brings to the picture with pulses is certainly of value. This is especially true if your project has its own parameters that make it quite distinct.

The bottom line is that if you desire high customizability in your project management, Monday.com is the better project management tool for you. If, on the other hand, the project is more straightforward in nature, Trello probably has all the required features for you.

What the tools lack

Anyone who has been responsible for project delivery would know how important it is to accurately judge when you would be able to deliver the project. To do this, the primary parameter you need to know is the amount of time each team member spends on a task. I’m Productive is a workflow management tool which helps you do exactly that. In fact, you can even predict the estimated project delivery time with a high level of provision with just a click of a button- thanks to the powerful AI that is incorporated into the system.

To know more about this comprehensive project management tool, head to their website to learn more.

Clickup vs Basecamp

Clickup and Basecamp are two project management tools that offer powerful ways to track and manage workflow. If you are wondering which of these project management tools will suit your purposes better, here, we bring you a useful comparison.  

Clickup

The interface of Clickup is straightforward, with the menu bar to the screen’s left and tabs including Homepage and Notifications on it. You can also add a goal easily using the menu bar- just click on the Goals tab to do that. Also, the moment a notification arrives, it pops up on your screen.

Features

Clickup gives you a horizontal menu bar at the top of the screen. If you click on list-view on it, the tasks would be displayed as a list one under the other.

You will also get an Assignee option against every task. As you surely guessed, by clicking on this option, you can assign the task to a team member. Other options you get are the ones to set task priority and due date. If the task is backed by the spending of money- say, marketing through social media- you also have the option to assign a budget. The budget that’s been spent so far will appear for each task as well the amount of money available to be spent yet.

Tasks

You get three categories of tasks in Clickup.

The first category is Ready tasks. These are tasks that are yet to be started. These could include tasks that have been conceived but which you are yet to assign to a team member. Once you have assigned a task to someone, and that person has started on it, the task is catalogued as In Progress. Once the task is completed, it comes in the Complete list.

There is one other way in which tasks get demarcated in Clickup. This is based on the different phases of a project, with tasks falling under each phase being grouped together.

Views

As mentioned before, you get the option for a List view which you can easily access from the top horizontal bar. However, there might be instances when the List view is not ideal for you. For such cases, you have the option to switch to Board view. This too can be accessed with just a click on the top horizontal bar.  

 Like in the list view, tasks are divided into Ready, In Progress and Complete categories in the Board view. Moving a task from one board to another is simple- you just drag and drop the task. For example, you can drag a recently concluded task from In Progress to the Complete board.

Adding a new task too is easy enough. You just need to click on the plus sign you will find towards the screen’s bottom. After that, enter the task name and then select the board to which the task belongs. You can also add a description of the task. Then, click on ‘Create.’ The task will now be added to the chosen board.

Another useful feature in the Board view lets you incorporate to-do lists.

 Basecamp

Basecamp has a rather unique manner of presenting information- grouped into what are called ‘camps.’

Camps

You will get six tools in each camp. Even as some of them are similar to what you get in other such services, two tools stand out: Automatic check-ins and Campfire.

Campfire facilitates communication among team members in real-time. The idea is that you needn’t keep switching to a different platform or tool every time you wish to connect with your fellow team members. Automatic check-ins, meanwhile help you set up posts that can be scheduled to be shared with team members periodically. This relieves you from having to set up and attend status meetings that don’t serve any other important function.

A unique feature

One way in which Basecamp scores over its peers is with the Hill chart- a feature that is unique to the platform. This feature is included with the understanding that mere To-do lists probably won’t be enough to keep track of tasks in large, complex projects.

Hill chart works under the principle that every task has two parts- an uphill drive when you are still figuring out how to tackle the task, and the downhill dive which comes after deciding how to perform the task but before actually doing the task.  The hill chart will present both these halves in a graph-like representation. This helps you gain clarity about where exactly you are in the task-progression

Which tool is better for you?

Clickup has a more comprehensive set of features. So, opting for Clickup wouldn’t be such a bad idea for end-to-end project management. However, if your project would benefit from specific features like Hill charts which only Basecamp has, that tool would be ideal for you.

Is there anything these tools lack?

Neither tool brings you a wholly reliable way to measure the amount of time a team member spends on a task. And that’s just one of the aspects in which I’m Productive help in project management.

Accurately measuring time spent on a task also helps predict when the project could be delivered. In fact, I’m Productive lets you do this with the aid of a powerful AI. With just a click of the button, you can predict when the project will be finished, based on historic data about the task-finished rate. You can learn more about I’m Productive from the website.

Clickup vs Monday.com

From niche digital tools, Project management services have now become indispensable in streamlining processes and improving productivity. Monday.com and Clickup are among the leading choices in project management and workflow management services. Take a look at how they compare against each other.

Monday.com

Monday.com is fast becoming one of the more popular project management services. That’s a testimony to the tool’s robust yet easy-to-use design and also the myriad features it brings you. But more than anything else, perhaps it’s the flexibility it affords that makes it a valuable partner in your project management journey.

For example, let’s look at the idea of ‘pulses’ in Minday.com. Pulses could be many things, depending to the need of the project. Many project management tools only allow you to create tasks or projects. In this context, you can see how expansive Monday.com’s approach to project management is with the idea of pulses.

Creating a pulse is simple, possible with just a few clicks. Related features include assigning team members to a pulse and setting the deadline for it. While setting up tasks/pulses, it’s easy to mess up the order- especially true with very complex projects. To avoid this, Monday.com allows you to set dependency for a pulse. If Pulse A can only be finished completely after finishing Pulse B, you will get to know it simply by viewing the Monday.com interface. Also, it’s extremely easy to view the current status of a pulse once it is in progress.

Clickup

Clickup shares some level of similarity with Monday.com in terms of the visual aspects. For instance, both workflow management tools have their main menu bar to the left of the screen. In Clickup, tabs for both the Homepage and Notifications are on the menu.

As for views, you get the list-view and board-view among others. You can toggle between views by hitting on the relevant tab. Clicking on List-view would show you the tasks in a list format- with the ‘Assignee’ option appearing beside it. As its name suggests, you can use this button to assign someone a task.

Like with Monday.com, you can also set the date the task is due on. Also, you can set the task priority in cases where precedence is important. Other useful features include one for assigning budget to a task. And Clickup is sophisticated enough to show what’s left of the budget to be spent yet, at any point in the project lifecycle.

In task view, the list of tasks is divided into three- falling under Ready, In Progress and Complete categories. Tasks that are yet to be launched, and for which you haven’t assigned anyone come in the first category. The second include those tasks that have been started but are yet to be finished. The finished tasks come under the Complete section. Tasks are also displayed according to the phases of a project.

Pricing

Both Monday.com and Clickup come in free and paid plans. Free plans are meant for individuals or small teams while the paid plans can be used by mid-level to big organizations, depending on the plan you pick.

But the free plans for both services do offer a good many features to facilitate project management- unless the projects are too complex. The biggest caveat is the number of users the free plan supports. For instance, with Monday.com, the free plan is meant exclusively for individuals while in Clickup, up to five users can make use of the tool.

Which one to choose- Clickup or Monday.com?

If you are planning to get the free plan, Clickup is the way to go. The features you get for free are comparable in both workflow management tools. But Clickup supports up to five users for free while Monday.com can be used by only a single user.

Other than that, the validity of choosing one over the other would largely depend on your individual requirements. There are certain features in Clickup which are conducive to managing complex problems, that may not be available in Monday.com. In such cases, it’s better to opt for Clickup. And do check out their pricing before choosing either of them. For Enterprise plans- meant for huge businesses- you would have to contact the sales teams. The price and features for the all other plans can be found on the respective websites.

However, a pivotal measure these two project management tools lack is the ability to accurately predict the time one takes to finish a task. While some variant of the same may be available, the measurement is never as precise as it should be- like for instance, it doesn’t discount the time someone spends on breaks during a task.

 I’m Productive is a project management tool that helps you achieve such accurate assessments. This in turn lets you predict the project delivery time without error. The tool helps you do this with the aid of a powerful AI. But that’s just one way in which I’m Productive becomes a reliable project management service. To know more, please visit their website.

Remote working woes - Productivity issues in the new normal

Among the most palpable effects of the current pandemic is a sizeable population of the global workforce moving away from office spaces and to remote working. It’s been about eighteen months since this shift began. In that period, a lot of stock-taking has happened about the pros and cons of the model among professionals and industry watchers.

Except for a select few, almost the entire business world seems to believe their workforce will eventually return to offices at some point and then it will be ‘business as usual’ in more ways than one. Already, many employees in the US and elsewhere have opted for a hybrid model in which people work for two or three days a week in the office and at home on the other days.

People seem to be divided about the idea of remote working being good or bad for business. While some point out factors like reduced infrastructure cost to justify remote working, critics say it reduces productivity and takes out the joy of teamwork. Some- like Anand Srinivasan, the value investor and author- even paint remote work ethos in a negative shade. In a Youtube video, Srinivasan claims(via a survey by an Asian firm he apparently studied) that people remotely work for 30% more than when they were in the office, but only to be 20% less productive than before.

Critics cite- and anecdotal evidence corroborates this- some key reasons for the drop in productivity during remote working. Let’s see what they are.

More time spent on online meetings

This seems to be on the top of everyone’s list of complaints regarding remote work. The meetings wouldn’t have been so bad if they were fruitful. But as is the case with meetings most of the time, they mostly serve only to take the employees away from doing their work.

Disruption of work

In business parlance, meaningful work is said to be ‘focused work’ or when you are ‘in a flow.’ For this type of work, it’s essential to be able to function without distractions- like phone calls and someone walking up to you for a chat. When you are working from home, the chances of distractions are high compared to an office. This reduces the amount of time one actually spends on meaningful work.

 Hard to collaborate

Technology has made it at least nominally feasible to collaborate while working remotely. But still, many mainstream applications available for such collaborations don’t serve the entire collaborative needs of teams. Even when these tools are comprehensive, they tend to become complex. Using these tools itself then becomes a time-consuming activity.

Managers are unable to ascertain actual productivity

Managers and Team leaders tend to be the most anxious in a remote working environment. It is harder to monitor the efficacy of an employee in a remote setting. This is especially true given ethically thorny scenarios like remote surveillance. The repercussions of this issue are huge. For instance, to over-compensate for a lack of confidence in their subordinates’ productivity, Mangers tend to assign even more work to them- even if the added load is not crucial or time-sensitive to the project at hand.

This in turn results in reduced productivity even if the subordinate work longer.

Is there a solution?

With new variants on the rise and uneven vaccination rates, remote working is expected to continue in many parts of the world for some time yet. Even after the pandemic is over, a hybrid work model is expected to continue to some extent.

In other words, companies would continue to contend with the above problems.

I’m Productive is a project management tool that could help you effectively tackle the issues. For instance, creating a task and assigning team members to it is extremely simple in it. You can also view in real-time the status of a task at any time you wish to. It also makes collaboration easy since you can comment on a task and also attach documents that you or your team members may need.

Perhaps, most importantly for Managers, the tool helps you accurately judge the amount of time someone spends on a task. To ensure the time measured is precise, factors like the time someone is on break while working on a task are excluded. A person could just hit the pause button while taking a break and when they resume the task, the clock would also resume.

Using such accurate measurements, the powerful AI incorporated into the tool could predict the project delivery time without error. This in turn gives you a more predictable revenue cycle.

Head to their website to learn more.

Clickup vs Notion

As project management tools, both Notion and Clickup come loaded with useful features. But before choosing one over the other, we recommend you read the comparison of these project management tools below.

Interface

Clickup has a strong advantage over Notion with the sheer simplicity of its interface. For instance, for every project, tasks would be listed out according to phases- phases 1, 2, 3 and so on. This not only gives you a complete view of all the tasks included but also the order of the progression of the tasks for successful project completion.

What more, you can view the relevant status above each task name. These include Complete, Ready and In progress. To make things even simpler, the statuses are colour-coded, in green, purple and blue respectively.

Tasks

Just as viewing tasks and getting an overview is simple in Clickup, it’s also easy to add a new task.

Just click on the + button beneath the tasks in the relevant phase. Then, enter the task name. Now, a new task has been created. You can set the due date and budget in columns against each task, as also the amount you have already spent from the budget. If you want to add even more features, click on the + button on the extreme right above the tasks list and choose the relevant action from the drop-down list.

On the top horizontal pane, you also get different view options. These include List, Board and Gantt. To switch from one view to another, just click on the relevant tab. Without much exaggeration, you can say that adding and viewing tasks don’t get simpler than this.

This is especially true when you compare Clickup with Notion.

In Notion, tasks under a project are represented in a row in the default view.

Against each task, you will find the three-dots icon. Click on the icon, then choose the Edit option from the drop-down menu. From here on, things are somewhat similar to Clickup. You can change the task name, assign someone to a task, enter a link and also assign task status - whether it’s finished, in review etc. On the whole, Clickup is handier when it comes to creating and maintaining tasks.

Pricing

There are four pricing options in Clickup. These are Free Forever, Unlimited, Business and Enterprise.

The Free Forever plan lets you use the project management service without paying anything while giving you unlimited tasks. But the catch is it gives you only 5 ‘spaces’- meaning, only up to five users can use it. If you have a small team, that should work fine.

The Unlimited plan would cost you $5 per member per month. As the name suggests, you get both unlimited tasks and spaces in this. The third option, the Business plan comes with an even bigger set of features and costs $9 per user per month. The enterprise plan meanwhile is meant for very large businesses. For pricing, you would need to contact their sales team.

The notion also comes in four pricing options- Personal, Personal Pro, Team and Enterprise.

Out of these, Personal is a free plan. Aside from unlimited pages and blocks, you also get the option to share with five guest users in this plan. Personal Pro, meanwhile, costs $4 per month. In it, you can enjoy everything that you would get in the Personal plan, along with unlimited file uploads, unlimited guests and version history. The Team plan costs $8 per member a month. In this, you get everything you could enjoy with the Personal Pro, along with Unlimited team members, Collaborative workspace, Advanced permissions and Admin tools. The Enterprise plan is meant for huge businesses, and the pricing is made available upon contacting their sales team.

A key takeaway here is that the free plan in Notion- Personal- allows only one user while its equivalent in Clickup allows up to five users.

Which one should you choose?

For individual users, Notion is a good enough option. However, in our opinion, in terms of the ease of use and the features you get even with the free plan, Clickup is the better option.

What they are missing

While these project management services may have time tracking capabilities to some extent, to predict project delivery time accurately, you need to track the time a team member spends on a task, without counting their break time etc. This is one of the crucial elements missing in these project management and time management tools. And that’s also a feature that makes I’m Productive a particularly useful project management service. The tool employs a powerful AI to accomplish the same.

To learn more about I’m Productive and how it can help you achieve predictable revenue cycles via accurate prediction of project delivery dates, check out their website.

Trello vs Clickup

Project management and workflow management could get out of hand if you don’t have the right system in place. Here, we compare two powerful services for the same- Trello and Clickup. Before deciding which one to use, take a look at our comparison between Trello and Clickup below.

Space/Board

Creating a board is very straightforward in Trello. You just click on the New board tab in the dashboard. In the resulting pop-up, you add the board title. Also, to create a board, you can either use a template or start from scratch. To use a template, just click on Template beneath the Boards tab on the left vertical panel. You will then see a number of templates you can use. Click open the one you wish for and tap on ‘Use template.” Add a title and then the relevant team to the board. Then, click on Create and you are done.

You also get the option to make a board private or open for your entire team.

In Clickup, the equivalent is to create what’s called Spaces. However, the process is somewhat more complex than creating boards in Trello. First, click on the Spaces tab on the vertical panel on the left of the screen. A pop-up will then prompt you to create a space.

Like with Trello, you can use a template or start with a blank plate. You can choose from over a hundred templates like Architectural Design, Education and Blog Management.

You also get to set space as private or public as per your requirement. Another related feature is setting task status- this includes Kanban and Scrum. You can also create a custom task status.

You can add apps to a space in the ClickApp window. The features you get here include time-estimate among others. Further, you can choose from different views- including, Calendar and Map views.

As you can see, the spaces system is a little more complex than setting up a board in Trello. However, spaces do include more parameters, making them more useful for handling complex projects.

Card/Task

In Trello, you can create a new card by clicking on a card and then adding a title. You can also add a description or activity and also comment on it. You can add team members and labels to a particular card. Other options include checklists, due dates, adding attachments and a cover.

But an even more powerful tool for customizing your card is Power-ups. These are essentially add-ons you can incorporate into a card depending on the task requirements. For example, if a task is extremely time-sensitive, you may want to add the time-tracking feature. To do that, click on Power-ups, then type” time tracking” in the search bar on the resulting page. This will yield you the relevant feature. Click on it and tap on the add button. Click the Allow button to finish the process.

In Clickup, you can create a new task essentially with a couple of clicks. Once a new task window is clicked open, just name it and then hit the Save button. You can also add a task description and create sub-tasks to it. For tasks involving many steps, you can create a To-Do list. As for tracking the time for a task, you get the feature automatically on the task feature. So, unlike in Trello, you don’t need an add-on for that.

Custom fields and views

To add a custom field, in Clickup, just click on the + button on the top right of the screen. From the resulting dropdown, choose from the options including Email, Formula, Files and more. This is a feature which you don’t get in Trello.

The View tab in Clickup will yield you Calendar, Board and Map view among others. To choose one, just click open the View tab and then choose the appropriate view from the resultant drop-down list. Trello has more or less similar options when it comes to view. Especially for simpler views like Kanban and List views, Trello is effective.

Integrations

To choose integrations in Clickup, you just have to click on the relevant tab from the left-hand vertical panel. This will reveal the integrations available. However, you will notice that these are only limited in number.

That is not the case with Trello. Here. you get add-ons, browser extensions, connectors and power-ups among other things to integrate. Most significantly, the number of integrations is significantly higher than in Clickup.

Which one is best for you?

Now, you have seen what these two project management and workflow management tools have to offer. But which one will suit your purpose? Our verdict is that for small projects including one to three people, Trello is a good choice. For complex projects that feature a lot of figures and tables etc, and in which users perform multiple tasks, Clickup is the better option. Having said that, if you intend to use a mobile app, then, you may want to pick Trello. Clickup has quite a few bug issues and also editing things are hard to accomplish on the mobile version of the app.

Both the tools come with free and paid plans. Each plan offers a distinct set of features. So, you should check out the prices and features on their respective websites before making the final decision.

Is there anything missing in these services?

Both the project management tools discussed so far offer time-tracking for tasks in their own way. But the accuracy of the mechanism may not be all you would want, especially if you want to predict the project delivery time without error. For instance, the time measured shouldn’t include the breaks a team member takes in the course of performing an action. Such errors inevitably lead to the wrong prediction of project delivery time.

I’m Productive is a project management and workflow management system which employs advanced Artificial Intelligence to measure the time one spends on a task accurately. To know how I’m Productive helps you attain a predictable revenue cycle with accurate project delivery estimates, head to their website.

Asana vs Jira

When it comes to project management and workflow management tools, Asana and Jira are among the most favoured. There are good reasons for this. However, how do they compare against each other? If you want to decide which of the two you should use for your project management needs, we recommend you read the following before making a decision.

Tasks

Asana affords simplicity in terms of creating and tracking tasks. You can create and name a task with just a couple of clicks. Once you do that, you can easily assign the task to a team member or team member. Setting deadlines and altering the approval status for tasks are also easy- thanks to the highly intuitive design interface. You can also set the priority for a task- as high, medium or low. Add to these the fact that you can create sub-tasks under a task, and it is extremely hard to stay disorganized with your tasks with Asana.

This is especially useful if you work with a large team, with different team members working on multiple tasks.

Projects

As for projects under which the tasks are created, Asana gives you various templates to choose from- these include Marketing Strategy, Creative Requests, Marketing Project Plan, Editorial Calendar, Event planning and more. You also have the option to start with a Blank Project.

This makes Asana a powerful tool for project management. However, one significant element that’s missing in Asana-and one which is an advantage for Jira- is sprints.

Sprints

Many projects finish on multiple sprints. Indeed, there are certain projects a company might run through multiple iterations to finish. Sometimes, a project could be running over a protracted period of time deliberately- for instance, when an app goes from one version to the next. In such cases, multiple sprints are all but guaranteed. For projects involving sprints, Jira could be a good option.

But having said that, it should also be noted that Jira’s interface is comparatively more complex than Asana. For instance, In Asana, to move a task from one section- say, Planning, to another(like Under Review) you need just drag and drop it. The equivalent solution in Jira is a tad more complicated. These could cause hiccups in how you use the tool, especially during the initial phase. But Jira does provide certain features like a roadmap and project pages which Asana doesn’t.

Which one is the better option?

The differences in interface design and the feature lists are palpable enough in Asana and Jira. But except for in very particular cases, team leaders and Managers could put either of the tools to good use for their purposes. But pricing is a significant factor when it comes to the two systems as they offer quite disparate offerings in similar-sounding plans.

Let’s start with Asana.

Asana comes in three separate plans. One is the Basic plan- which is free of cost. The second is Premium which pushes you back by $10.99 per month and then there is the Business plan that will cost you $24.99 per month.

The Basic plan, though free supports unlimited tasks, projects, messages and activity logs. You also get unlimited file storage- with a cap of 100MB per file. That’s quite a generous offer considering you get all of that for free. One drawback is that the Basic plan only supports up to 15 team members. If your team size is bigger than that, you would need to upgrade to the Premium plan. Organizations of considerable sizes would do well to take up the Business plan.

Now, let’s contrast these features with Jira.

Jira comes in four different plans- Free, Standard, Premium and Enterprise.

The Standard model is $7 per user and the Premium plan is $14 per user. With the free plan, the maximum number of users that can be supported is ten, and the features it offers are also limited compared to Asana’s offering. So, if you have a small team size and are planning to use a free plan, you should definitely go for Asana.

The Standard plan supports 20,000 users and has an abundance of features. For instance, you get 250GB of file storage with the plan. You get support for just a single project with this plan though. To include more number of projects, you would need to upgrade to the Premium plan. The Enterprise plan would serve big businesses well.

Do these tools lack something crucial?

You can easily tally the pros and cons of Jira and Asana in relation to the price and your requirements. But there is one crucial feature which both these tools lack, which you should also consider when contemplating using a project management software: the ability to predict the project delivery date accurately.

Many figures need to be accurately gauged in order to get the right prediction- for instance, the exact duration that a team member spends on a task, without considering the time they spent on breaks. I’m Productive is a tool that helps you achieve such accurate predictions, in addition to serving you as complete project management and workflow management tool. To achieve precise project delivery time prediction, it employs powerful artificial intelligence.

To learn more about how I’m Productive can help you deliver your projects on time, please visit their website.

Please note that the prices and features listed here are based on information available at the time of creating this post. Do check such parameters for yourself on the websites of the respective service providers before making your purchase.

Asana vs Monday.com

Asana is already among the most popular project management and workflow management tools. But of late, Monday,com has been gathering a steady buzz, thanks to the significant market share it’s been gaining in the field. This has resulted in more people being curious about the efficacy of one in relation to the other.

Such a comparison between two efficient project management systems could help you decide which one would suit your project management wants.

Tasks

Monday.com is a little quirky in that it doesn’t give you the option to create tasks. At least, not directly. Instead, you can create what are called pulses. These pulses could be tasks, among many things. You can give the pulses name and assign the team members responsible for them. You can also set a deadline for a pulse. And if the pulse is dependent on another, you can set dependency accordingly. Once a pulse is in progress, it is easy to view the status as well.

Asana, on the other hand, takes what could be called as a classical approach when it comes to tasks. First you would be prompted to create a project. You can give the project the name you want, and once the project is created, add tasks to the same. The rest of the operations are more or less similar to what we saw in Monday.com. To begin with, you can assign a task to particular team members, and set the deadline for each task. If any files are required for finishing the tasks, you can attach them. You also have the option to comment on the tasks. So you wouldn’t get confused about the order of tasks later on, you can also make a task dependent on other tasks.

Workflow

Visualization plays a key role when it comes to managing workflow. Both Asana and Monday,com does this in their own way.

In Monday.com, all the Pulses that you created are displayed in a list. However, above them you get different visualization options. These let you toggle between different views. The views  include pie chart, gantt chart and map view. Such views are helpful  when you want to gain a project overview and you don’t have time for a detailed study.

Meanwhile, in Asana, you get to see your tasks in multiple views. You get the options to view tasks in a list, a gantt chart, a Kanban board and a calendar. Similar to Monday.com, you can easily shift tasks by dragging them across the screen, and also alter the deadlines if you want. These functionalities are available in all the views.

Portfolios

Like with tasks, in Monday.com, you don’t get a traditional mode for portfolio view either. Instead, you can create groups for the pulses. Each of these could be used for typical project management. But if you wish, you can use them for project management too.

To do this, you need to create a separate group that would contain your portfolio. First, create a pulse for each project. After that, add the pulses to the group you have created before.

In Asana, the portfolio management feature is more straightforward in nature. It is very similar to the feature that allows typical project management. However, the portfolio management feature allows you to zoom out of your daily work area, affording you a broader picture.

Integrations

At present, Monday.com gives you more than 20 integrations. That is over and above its own API. The integrations in Monday.com includes Google Drive, Slack, Jira and more. Asana brings you more than a hundred integrations in addition to an API. The integrations include Mailchimp, Dropbox and Slack among others.

Pricing

You can try Monday.com for free for two weeks with their 14-day free trial offer. They bring the system with four different pricing plans. Asana comes with a free option. Up to 15 users can use the system for free. You also get three different paid options. On the whole, Asana is pricier than Monday.com.

Which system is better for you?

With its straightforward features and more number of integrations, the case can be made for Asana being the better of the two. But that’s not to say Monday.com is a weak option. Far from it. Ultimately, the price point and the user interface might be the key features that make or break the deal for you.

There is no doubt Asana and Monday are extremely useful project management and workflow management tools. However, both the systems lack certain features like one that could help you accurately predict the project delivery. The deadlines we set are always prone to human-error, after all.

I’m Productive is a powerful project management and workflow management tool which comes embedded with AI Predict feature. With just a click of the button, you get the most accurate prediction of date of project delivery- at any point in a project’s lifetime. To know how I’m productive helps you do that and more, please visit their website.

Asana vs Basecamp

Asana and Basecamp are two of the most popular project management tools. Going beyond the popularity though, how do they fare when compared with each other. And what are the features that make each unique? More importantly, which would suit your project management requirements more?

Let’s find out.

Asana

The first thing you notice about Asana is its clean and clutter-free design with a decisively modern aesthetic. More than just eye-pleasing, this also lends to easy navigation: no small benefit in a tool which you would use multiple times in a workday.

Once you create an account in Asana, you can easily create teams with the clicks of a few buttons. Adding users to those teams is also equally easy. You can also create projects in Asana. Within projects, you can make and organize tasks. Each task can be assigned to different team members as and per the requirement. And you can also set deadlines for these tasks.

Tasks and allied features

Once you have set up the tasks, you can then track for task updates- so that whenever the task status changes, you would be in the know. In the comments against tasks, you can mention other team members, if you need to rope them in for insights or to gain their help in completing the task.  If there are important files team members could use for the completion of tasks, you can upload those files too.

One key feature Asana offers in the context of tasks is the ability to make a task-dependent on other tasks. This way, you can be sure that the flow of tasks is never jumbled up. The order of precedence can be set from the outset itself.

Task views in Asana

Typically, tasks are displayed in a list form in Asana. However, you also have the option to switch between multiple views so that projects can be displayed according to your wants. For instance, if you aim to see which tasks to do next, opt for the timeline view. On the other hand, if you want an overview of the tasks, then, the chart-view would be a better option.

 Basecamp

You will find many of the same features in Basecamp, as in Asana. But that’s not to say there are no differences between the two either.

To begin with, there is the user interface. While Asana lists the important tabs vertically on the left-hand side, Basecamp offers a more minimal interface. Eschewing a top-down listing of information, here, you get information organized into ‘camps.’

The tools in camps

Each camp comes equipped with six tools. Many of these tools are common across project management solutions. However, two of these make Basecamp rather unique. These are Campfire and Automatic check-ins.

As you may have deduced from the name, Campfire can be used for communicating with other team members in real-time- a virtual version of gathering around a campfire for a conversation. This way, you can forego the overhead of switching to another tool whenever you need to talk with team members.

Using automatic check-ins, you can set scheduled posts to be shared with various team members. The primary function of this feature is to help you save time from attending unimportant status meetings.

Hill chart

Hill chart is a feature that is exclusive to Basecamp.

To-do lists are the go-to tools for keeping track of work in many scenarios. Much as that works, for larger projects involving thousands of tasks, mere to-do lists wouldn’t be the most efficient way. This is why Basecamp has added the Hill Chart feature to their to-dos.

The idea is that each task constitutes two parts. The first is the uphill run in which you devise your approach. The second part is the downhill slide in which you know how to perform the task- you just have to execute it. The Hill Chart aspect integrates both these aspects so you get a graph-like view of where exactly you stand in relation to a task- going up the hill, still seeking a solution, or riding downhill as you inch closer to the finish line.

Which will work best for you?

With similar features available in both, the differentiating factor could well be how comfortable you feel using them. A try-out by signing up for the free version could bring you greater clarity. Having said that, Asana does offer more app integrations than Basecamp. Though key apps for  Automation and Time tracking etc. are available in both, currently Basecamp falls short in number. So, if your project management is apps-intensive, you may want to side with Asana.

What both Asana and Basecamp lack

One area in which both tools lack is in building Gantt charts. At present, there are no in-built tools for creating them. But you do get the option to integrate with apps that could help you do the same- Instagantt app in Asana and Ganttify in Basecamp. However, these are third-party apps which would set you back by a few bucks.

On an even more fundamental level, the apps lack such features as precise measurement of the time that someone spends on a task, sans the time they spent on break. Such errors in measurement would result in the wrong prediction of when the project could be delivered.

I’m Productive is a viable alternative to both Asana and Basecamp. It comes with powerful features like AI Predict: with just the click of a button, you can accurately predict the time required for project delivery, at any point in the project’s lifetime. The tool uses a powerful AI to accomplish this. The AI takes into account multiple parameters while avoiding human errors in its calculations.

To learn more about how I’m Productive can help you get accurate project delivery prediction and thereby a predictable revenue cycle, please visit their website.

Trello vs Asana

A frequent question that’s asked in terms of project management is which is a better tool for the same. Here, we take a close look at two such tools- Trello and Asana- so we can find which one works best for you.

Trello

Trello is based around a board view of tasks. This means tasks are arranged as cards rather than lists. These cards can then be dragged around to different columns depending on where in the workflow they are at a given moment. For instance, if a card represents a task under progress, it can be moved to the column for finished tasks once it has been completed.

This simplicity leads to easy workflow management. 

There a quite a lot of things that you could use Trello for. Among the most common of these are managing a content calendar, creating and maintaining development roadmaps and agile sprint planning.

Trello also supports collaboration and teamwork. You can add different users to a board. You can also grant them different levels of access permission, depending on the level of involvement they need to have in a project.

Other features

Assign: You can assign cards to certain users depending on the need. So, if a card represents a task, it can be assigned to users depending on who should need to collaborate for the efficient completion of the task. This could also be a way of nurturing teamwork.

Comment: Different users can comment on cards depending on whether they are granted permission or not. This helps nurture teamwork, especially when people are working remotely. This could also be effectively used for team management.

Add dependencies: Each task in a project is bound to be unique, with its own set of dependencies. Considering this, Trello lets you add task dependencies.

Make checklists: Very few things help you keep track of the things that need to be done in a project like checklists. In Trello, creating checklists is as easy as it gets.

Attach files: For efficiently completing a task, you may need to access certain files. Such files can easily be attached- whether from your system or the web- quite easily.

Set deadlines: You can easily set the deadline for each task in Trello.

Butler: Butler is a feature that lets you automate the workflow. Essentially, you can customize automation against certain actions. For example, you can create an automation to shift a card on software development to the optimization list once a certain user is tagged in the comment. Such automation not only minimizes the time taken for completing a project, but also offsets any potential human errors that may happen in such cases.

Trello comes in different subscription plans, The free plan gives you an unlimited number of cards along with a set number of Butler commands. For the security-conscious, you also get the benefit of two-factor authentication. There are also two paid plans, which give you access to more advanced features like app integration and additional views.

Asana

Contrasting with Trello, Asana gives you both list and board views.

But the tool is more than just a workflow management system. It is a full-fledged project management tool. That said, you can make tasks and add them in a board view. You can also create reports and set goals using Asana.

Asana also has both free and paid plans.

Even in the free plan, you can make projects and view them in three different views: list view, board view and calendar view. To create projects, you can start with a blank project, or choose from the many project templates available. You also have the option to import the project from spreadsheets.

No matter how the projects are created, you can then add tasks, assign those tasks to subordinates and set deadlines on the tasks.

You can group the tasks according to sections, and designate certain important tasks as milestones. Asana offers great flexibility in that you can filter tasks as per your requirement.

The paid plans would let you collaborate with even more team members- thereby possibly enabling greater team management. With a paid subscription, you can also get more advanced features. The Rules feature is a case in point. Similar to Trello’s Butler, it helps you automate workflow.

Another advantage of a paid plan is you get more task views- like timeline views and dashboard views. You could also get access to the Portfolio feature. As the name implies, this helps you with Portfolio management.

As you see, you get a rather exhaustive list of features in Asana. Depending on your requirements, you can use the software either for workflow management or project management.

Trello or Asana- which will work better for you?

If your sole requirement is workflow management, then Trello might be a good fit. However, for more complex project management, Asana is almost always the better option, considering the gamut of features it provides like multiple task views and portfolio management.

What both the tools lack

Both Trello and Asana offer some interesting set of features that assist project and team management. However, neither tool offers certain specific features that would help accurately predict project delivery. For instance, none of these tools helps you measure the actual amount of time someone spends on a task accurately. And if you cannot count that accurately, you are bound to make mistakes estimating the project delivery time.

I’m Productive is a tool that integrates such features which help you accurately predict project delivery, and thereby help assure a predictable revenue. To learn more about how I’m Productive can help you in ways none of the other tools in the market does, please head to their website.

 

Teamwork Makes Your Business Easily

What Does Successful Collaboration Look Like?

Good collaboration is when colleagues are totally joined in achieving a similar objective. The groups may have very different duties and responsibilities, however, they function admirably both as a unit and with different divisions or groups inside the business.

The consequence of a good collaboration effort, of course, is a business that twists and arrives at new milestones in a month.

Effective team collaboration and employees of businesses require both solid communication, interpersonal skills and good friendship bonds whether working under a similar rooftop or practically. There’s a balanced flow of sharing thoughts and criticism and groups hold themselves and others accountable for taking care of business in a unified fashion.

Collaboration requires change and making a team quality

Our work has additionally featured that a significant boundary to the coordinated effort is that numerous offices consider that powerful cooperation can be undertaken without the need to change existing authoritative structures, administration or initiative models. To put it plainly, offices consider that collaboration can be undertaken on our standing and without the need to surrender anything.

We have additionally seen that this approach is more prevalent the larger the organisation is another significant observation has been that it is never the situation that the intrinsic inspirations are equivalent and that by and large, the advantages arising out of collaboration don't fall proportionate to the gatherings' commitments.

In summary, our research and analysis of tasks that have included effective coordination lead us to presume that the essential components to successful cooperation include:

1. An agreed common purpose

2. Shared power

3. Strong leadership

4. Good communication

Key of Collaboration Skills

1. Active Listening

How about we feel free to be good employees besides this one because, without strong active listening skills from all Collaboration teams, the chances of good Coordination are slim. Clear communication requires self-awareness because employees need to understand their preferences and still strive to hear the worries of others.

Strong attentive people are fantastic communicators, both verbally and with composed communication. Knowing how to do the task efficiently is essential for team collaboration.

So how can teammates improve their productivity and skills for better results? They just need to do simple things on time:

1. Be present on time

2. Don’t interrupt

3. Try to work done quickly

4. Ask follow-up questions

2. Organization

Administrators and team leaders should strive for good communication with their Collaboration team and other departments to ensure that organization doesn’t deteriorate.

A few benefits of an organized team:

1. Better productivity

2. Higher representative confidence

3. Lower employee turnover

How Can Leaders Foster These Skills in Team Collaboration?

Team collaboration is certainly not another idea, however, that doesn't mean it's simple. It involves more than avoiding struggle and ensuring people can work together. Good team collaboration is about colleagues working together in an effective and imaginative way to produce quality business results.

1. Set up the Best Leaders in the correct position

Collaborative teams are driven by the best collaborative leaders who are centred on connection as much as they are on tasks. Successful team leaders have the correct mix of technical, social and organisational skills that guide groups to the best outcomes.

2. How to manage a collaboration team working remotely?

You may definitely know this, however, working remotely is important for the new difficulties for a project manager. you are one of the individuals who have as of late set out on the distant work experience, have confidence, there are advantages to working from home. However, as with any method of working, you must be keeping watch for disadvantages. That is why we are offering you some knowledge to manage your remote work team.

3. Use Software adapted to working remotely

The first and not the least proposal is to adopt software that meets your team’s needs. Need to speak with your partners by means of a video meeting? It is conceivable, with software such as Zoom or Skype. Are you looking for Task management software? An online solution such as “ Improductive” will permit you to Collaboration tasks among your team meats. But Ensure your collaboration team is comfortable with the productive tools you are proposing.

More Tips to Enhance Your Collaboration Skills

1. Construct and look after trust

Trust is a key component we as a whole need to set aside weakness, however, it is difficult to fabricate, and simple to lose. It is not based on words but on activities and evidence. Only when it works can a team raise and essential the necessary issues to win.

2. Give acknowledgement and prizes

These drive human conduct, and human conduct drives results. acknowledge validates individuals, their motivation, and their life. Intangible rewards can have a considerably more prominent effect than substantial ones, but they should be significant.

3. Make learning experiences

We all have a desire to learn and develop, or we and the team become exhausted and lethargic. The best learning opportunities are experienced and shared with a focus on three styles: see and read, hear and repeat, and contact and feel.

Collaboration skills are the soft skills developed between people and collaboration teams in order to interact, connect with and synergize while working towards a common goal. Please head to their website.

There can be several skills that fall under this umbrella term, such as:

1. Improve productivity

 

2. Group discussion

 

3. Emotional intelligence

 

4. Emotional intelligence

 

5. Time management

 

6. Critical thinking

 

Being A Project Manager Is Like Being An Artist

How to become a good team leader?

What do you think as an initial step you have to know to become a good team leader?

We should look at the fundamental accomplishment secret.As a partner, you would have been concerned more about your prosperity and your work yet to turn into a decent group pioneer you ought to be concerned more about your group's accomplishment and group associate's calling.

Being able to work effectively on, and lead a group is basic in the present place of employment market where each worker is closely estimated. Coordinated effort is furthermore essential, in school, sports, and gathering exercises.

Being a decent group pioneer includes associating and talking with your team. With an inspirational mentality, some ingenuity, and a free psyche, you can be an extraordinary team leader.

Take responsibility

We're all human, Mix-ups will happen. Yet, it's not in every case simple to take ownership of mistakes and be open to criticism and change.

Business advancement incorporates confronting difficulties that don't for the most part work out. Be happy to stand up for your teammates and their decisions when desires aren’t met. This will inspire your representatives to feel they can accomplish what's required to achieve the association's objectives.

You have to help and help your gathering. Give them the certainty to confront difficulties and make some commotion without being rebuffed.

Try not to censure or gripe about people or your partners.

This technique to demotivate your colleague is to continually censure them or gripe about them. On the off chance that they commit an error, place it in a setting with the things they constantly progress honorably. Highlight the positive and use mistakes as open doors for continued improvement.

How Self Awareness can help increment your Productivity?

Self-awareness is the capacity to recognize and understand the effect of your conduct on yourself and others around you. Mindful individuals know decisively what they're doing and why they're doing it. They also understand the outcomes of their activities on others. While mindfulness is critical for compelling correspondence and fruitful group initiative, it's also an essential factor in your profitability.

Self-awareness might be the missing bit of your productivity
 
If you wind up stuck in an example of wasteful propensities, wasteful timetables, and oblivious elements, at that point improving your mindfulness can be an approach to opening better lead and better results Over time, the upgrades that you cause will mean numerous business benefits, including expanded efficiency.
 
At last, mindfulness will break down your collaboration just like your exhibition and you won't develop until you keep an eye out on your abilities.
 
How would you realize you're spending an excessive amount of time on work progress?
 
Track your assessed time is the most ideal approach to screen the work progress and Estimate what amount of time it will require for you to finish tasks in the achievement.
 
At that point, screen the in-progress time you spend on that task in an undertaking and contrast it with the assessed season of your tasks in milestones.
 
Checking your time can assist you with being more aware of the stream during the workday. Track your assessed time is the most ideal approach to screen the work progress and Estimate what amount of time it will require for you to finish any tasks in the achievement.
 
At that point, screen the in-progress time you spend on that task in an undertaking and contrast it with the assessed season of your tasks in milestones.
 
If the estimation hour is extended in the project task, improductive is giving a notification to you from the project milestone.
 
How to fix the time allocated for each task?
 
The time allocation is based on the task priority and analysis of how much time is required for finishing the particular tasks.
 
During some random workday, employees may battle with choosing or prioritizing their tasks. Team leaders relieve this stress by assigning tasks dependent on departmental needs.
 
Catching the advantages of this imaginative solution, chiefs keep employees focused on the most significant things first. At the same time, team leaders can monitor the completion of tasks.
 
The benefits of team collaboration
 
The most quantifiable advantages are less time spent and more money saved. It is nothing unexpected that effective teams finish important tasks quicker and fulfill time constraints more effectively than individual workers do.
 
Modern innovations changed how groups team-up.They permit individuals to approach the comparable information from any spot on the planet, which is critical for organizations with for the most part groups. Video conferencing ordinarily diminishes the time spent on gatherings and discards costly outings for work.
 
Another advantage comes from using a team Chat. This is a powerful solution for group chat and personal chat. Using it in improductive for correspondence, however, you will be intrigued by how valuable the joint effort work of a program is.
 
The ability to share enormous records effectively, boundless discussion history, numerous reconciliations with other coordinated efforts, and profitability apparatuses bring all the data you need in one spot, making bunch messengers gigantically mainstream today.
 
 
 
 
 
 

How to Scale Yourself And Get More Productivity Than You Thought Possible

What Is Productivity?

Productivity is the strategy of planning out your accessible time and controlling the measure of time you spend on specific tasks so as to work more efficiently. Successful productivity comes simpler to certain individuals than to other people, but everyone can develop habits to improve their production skills. Without strong productivity, your work and prosperity can endure, and it can lead to:

  1. Producing low-quality work
  2. Missing deadlines
  3. Expanding your stress levels
  4. Ruining your work-life balance
  5. Hurting your expert reputation

How To Manage Your Productivity?

Productivity is significant in light of the fact that it helps you control your workday so you can fabricate your business without bargaining your work-life balance. Here are the advantages of appropriate time for the executives:

1. IMPROVE YOUR PERFORMANCE

At the point when you figure out how to shut break from your day for all your significant tasks, you’ll have a superior idea of everything you have to accomplish and how long each task should take. When you have a schedule to follow, you’ll probably find that you invest less time deciding what to work on or procrastinating and additional time getting down to significant work. Productivity can assist you to focus on just the fundamental task in front of you and keep away from time-consuming distractions.

2. PRODUCE BETTER WORK

When you’re not continually racing to meet a time constraint, you can spend more effort and think about your work. Productivity helps you prioritize your tasks so that you ensure you have enough time accessible to finish each task. The quality of your work increases when you’re not rushing to finish it in front of a quick-moving cutoff time.

3. COMPLETE THE WORK ON TIME

Properly managing your productivity includes assigning every task on your milestone. Numerous people use the time to allow themselves a few days to finish a project or finish it ahead of the due date to provide a buffer for any challenges that might arise. If you allocated the time needed to complete your work, you’ll be able to hit your deadlines every time.

4. IMPROVED CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Productivity can assist you to become a more dependable worker who consistently submits great work by your due dates. This in turn will make you more significant as a specialist and improve your professional reputation, which can assist you with finding new chances to extend your career.

5. BOOST YOUR CONFIDENCE

When you manage your time appropriately and effectively meet your deadlines, you’ll feel a sense of achievement and confidence in your capacities. Completing your daily task is a huge motivator that can drive people to further improve their production skills and take on new work opportunities.

How To Create Collaboration?

Here are the straightforward steps on how to encourage collaboration in the work environment so as to improve company interactions and development:

1. SET GOALS

Targets for the company should include both short-haul and long-haul plans. Smaller goals increase cohesion in the workplace and keep employees on target for future plans. All employees should have equivalent admittance to the results and reports of organization goals so that everyone keeps up a comparable attitude. Collaboration goal examples include reflecting on the progress that will give the organization thought on how to push ahead most efficiently and remain successful.

2. COMMUNICATE CLEARLY

Working in a collaborative team environment requests shared obligation. All people are responsible for completing collaboration activities and meeting company goals. It’s essential to address any uncertainties that may emerge. Making information straightforward is one of the easiest approaches to ensure clear communication between people in the organization. Technology has prompted a sharing economy where collaboration is empowered. In contrast to email, a formal method of communication that rapidly gets swarmed, companies can utilize apps to build cooperation among groups and among people.

3. ENCOURAGE INNOVATION

Employees should regularly come together to think of new ideas and reconsider old methods of finishing tasks. This will promote responsiveness to issues that may need to be addressed and will persuade people to attempt new methods for getting things done. If goals are feasible and everyone feels motivated, innovation leads to increased productivity and business development

4. IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATIVE TEAMWORK

Makes friendly teamwork for a smoother and looser structure
Inspire the workforce and makes the healthy collaborative environment
Empower flexibility and consequently permit the business to react to change quicker
Upgrades critical thinking by developing a combination of various solutions and capacities
Supports enabled method of attempting to eliminate any constraints

The Do's and Don'ts Of Success

  1. DON’T want what you don’t want. It's anything but difficult to fall under the spell of another person's fantasy or be seduced by the scorekeeping of others' goals. Don’t let fear, jealousy or social pressure cloud your vision.
  2. DON’T overlook what's really important. Greater is possibly better in the event that it makes the grin all over more extensive and more splendid, and fills the excursion with happiness. Live today as you need to be recollected at long last.
  3. DO the best things. At the point when confident with the decisions that are the hardest to make—when your dreams, ambition and drive are begging you to do a certain something while your heart is instructing you to do another—remember that the only way you’ll have an enduring smile is if you maintain your qualities.
  4. DO confide in your gut. Don’t hold up until you’re 70 and filled with regret.
  5. DO keep your determination. Numerous business people fail not as a result of their thought, their skills or the market, but because they surrender when the highest point is close enough.

Ways To Increase The Productivity

Being more productive at work isn't advanced science, yet it requires being more purposeful about how you deal with your time.

1. Track and cutoff how much time you're spending on tasks

You may believe you're great at checking how much time you're spending on different tasks. However, some research suggests only around 20 per cent of individuals can precisely assess the progression of time. A tool like Rescue Time can help by telling you precisely how much time you spend on everyday tasks, including in-progress tasks, Finishing tasks and resolutions.

2. Take standard breaks

It sounds irrational, but taking planned breaks can really help improve concentration and improve the quality of thinking. Some examination has demonstrated that taking brief breaks during long tasks helps you to maintain a constant level of performance; while working at a task without breaks prompts a consistent decrease in performance.

3. Organize your assignments ahead of time

By posting your tasks arranged by priority, you can ensure that you finish the entirety of your most important tasks during the day.

To know more, please visit their website.

Task Management Software

What is a Milestone in I’m Productive?

A project milestone is a task management tool that is used to plot a point in a venture plan. These milestones can observe the start and finish of a venture, and imprint the fulfillment of a noteworthy time of work. milestones can be used to represent whatever has begun or completed, anyway it's chiefly used as a booking instrument.

Track Your Progress with Milestones

I'm Productive milestone is having the option to screen and track the workstream of booked errands. milestones are an approach to perceive how far you've come in the venture, How much time you used in the task. By taking note of the finished milestones, you can screen the work process separation you are from the cutoff time of your venture.

How to Create the Milestones and Task?

Think about your project milestones as minutes in time—rather than goals, expectations, or tasks. Accordingly, you ought to make milestones to make accomplishments to address noteworthy checkpoints in your task.

Investigate your task timetable, and pinpoint data in the portrayal or significant minutes. For example, if you’re planning one project, you’d likely create milestones to represent finalizing the complete project and create the division of many tasks and assign it to the employees.

Steps to Create Task into the Project’s Milestone

  1. Log in and access improductive products from your System
  2. Create a New project milestone from the taskbar
  3. In Milestone, Click the New task button
  4. Give the title of the task
  5. Add the description of the tasks
  6. Allocate the Estimate time based on task quality
  7. Assign the task to the employees
  8. Note the priority of the task
  9. Mark the technology what the employees do in this task
  10. Finally, save the task to the project milestone

Milestones vs tasks

Tasks are the structure squares of your task milestone, and they set aside some effort to accomplish and complete the venture. milestones have no length and are more like lines in the sand that mark a gathering of tasks as finish and make the tasks.

Why are project milestones important in your Company?

Milestones are incredible in that they exhibit forward advancement in your project plan. They help motivate and adjust your group by empowering everybody to see your cooperation progress and judge needs. What's more, they assist you with checking cutoff times, distinguish significant tasks, and perceive likely bottlenecks inside the task milestone.

On the off chance that you some way or another ended up taking the tasks from your venture course of events, the milestones would at present give a diagram of the period of each task.

Need to Complete the most important tasks

This is the most important thing for managing work in the organization. Every day, identify the two or more tasks that are the most crucial to complete on time and do those first.

When you’re done, the day has just been a success. You can proceed on to other things, or you can let them hold up until tomorrow. You've Completed the basics.

Create a day by the day task list

Start every day with a rundown of the errands you need to accomplish. At the point when you get into work, record your day by day plan and arrange those tasks properly. As you finish those errands, scratch them off the milestone task. Welcome the inclination of accomplishment you get with each check, and prop the energy up!

Prioritize your tasks in milestone

Working out the top list of tasks is a certain something. But you have to know about how to prioritize those tasks. Prioritize the most important to work on the tasks first. These tasks may be those that are expected sooner or set aside more effort to finish.

On the off chance that a task requires more opportunity to complete, break it into more modest tasks to cause it to feel less an ideal opportunity to wrap up. From that point forward, you can sort out your tasks based on noteworthy, due date, or requester.

There are a couple of various techniques for organizing that you can apply to your task in project milestones

  1. Priority High Tasks are the most important tasks.
  2. Priority low tasks are less important tasks.
  3. Priority medium tasks are needed to complete.
  4. Priority critical tasks must be complete ASAP.

Do the most critical tasks first in the morning

Whenever you've made your task in milestones, Separate into your most significant task in the milestone. If you have a more critical task that might take all day for completing the tasks, break it down into smaller tasks.

Finishing those more modest errands can assist you with feeling more cultivated as the day goes on and you feel that you finished the task effectively.

Track your time

Track your assessed time is the most ideal approach to screen the work progress and estimate what amount of time it will require for you to finish a task in the milestone. At that point screen the in progress time you spend on that task in a venture and contrast it with the assessed season of your errands in milestones.

Checking your time can help you with being more mindful of the stream during the workday. What's more, with the ideal time the board arrangement, you can follow time for each task and keep a foundation set apart by continually spending time on a venture. You may even discover an apparatus that causes you to make and view reports of your time reliant on a venture, errand, or team.

Step by step instructions to relegate task to a colleague in Improductive

There are a few stages to permit an task to your accomplices that will be secured beneath:

  1. When making a task in venture milestone
  2. The task is allocated to the group meats name in the drop-down rundown.

How to fix the time allocated for each task?

The time allocation is based on the task priority and analysis of how much time is required for finishing the particular tasks.

During some random workday, employees may battle with choosing or prioritizing their tasks. Team leaders relieve this stress by assigning tasks dependent on departmental needs.

Catching the advantages of this imaginative solution, chiefs keep employees focused on the most significant things first. At the same time, team leaders can monitor the completion of tasks. To know more, please visit their website.

Your team leader can distribute work task based on:

  1. Skills
  2. Service level
  3. Priority of task
  4. Capacity of task
  5. Work schedules

 

People Need Goals For Achieving The Success

Build and Improve Professional Relationships

You invest a lot of time with your teammates, so it is essential to fabricate great relationships with them. All things considered, a group union relies upon creating working connections, as individuals consistently work better together if there's an individual component to their relationship.

Having positive expert connections can set up the establishment for your authoritative achievement. Because every person’s role in your association either directly or indirectly influences your performance, it’s significant for you to uphold these working connections so you can work in amiability with others.

To improve your expert connections, help various individuals from the group at whatever point you can, and participate in straightforward correspondence with your partners.

Improve Your Time Management Skills

All through your master calling, you'll face cutoff times and battling tasks that battle for your thoughts reliably. As your workload increases, it might appear to be difficult to have the option to get everything achieved.

In these examples, your ability to manage your time will be tried. Having powerful time the board capacities will help increment your efficiency and
productivity, decline your pressure and license you to have greater occasion to give to various tasks.

Instances of Professional Goals for Project Management

We should investigate the momentary objectives first. They’ll be exceptionally relevant to your present position, and advancing in it. They show that you have to extend your adequacy in the shoes you as of now fill.

Improve Project Productivity and Performance

When you’re a project manager, completing projects in time is the most important thing in the world.

This objective is particularly huge if your group has been battling to complete projects in a group.

When defining this work goal, you should give specific attention to:

  • The causes behind poor performance
  • Regions for development

For example, you could understand that your primary obstacle is how you set the degree during the project arrangement stage.

Improve Team Communication and Collaboration

There is reliably an occasion to improve in group correspondence and joint effort, which makes this expert objective one to gain ground toward.

Once more, when you set your objective to be an effective group joint effort, you have to know how accurately you'll upgrade it. You should understand the hidden causes and your inspiration for development.

Develop Your Project Management Knowledge

This is an astonishing proficient objective for the first-time.

In the event that your top administration concluded that you ought to be a pioneer for ventures taken care of inside your association, they need to see you playing the role of employment really.

Improving your PM abilities will likewise assist you with taking care of activities better and improving your presentation.

In some cases following up on this objective is as basic as taking a free online course, or investigating Project Management locales.

Boost Your Contributions inside Your Role

This objective causes you to do the most you can in the employment you have at present.

For instance, your association may be dealing with the board just in the feeling of finishing ventures.
Nonetheless, you can contribute and extend the effect of your part by:

Training and retaining team members

  • Devising new innovative and collaborative-oriented answers to ensure long-term peak performance
  • Working with top administration on contriving new objectives for your group
  • Performing competitor research
  • Revising old performance reports to make new performance improvement systems

Improve your work-life balance

Making a sound work-life balance is key to driving a cheerful and gainful lifestyle, it can viably influence your prosperity and even your work. Construct practical limits between work and your own life, regardless of whether that is adhering to an 8-hour working day, not taking work home, or fighting the inspiration to browse work messages on your vacation day. Using these procedures will help forestall wear out and you'll likely discover you complete more when granulating ceaselessly. Work all the more productively.

Challenge yourself

In some cases people underestimate themselves. The absence of certainty or conviction in your abilities and a fundamental dread of disillusionment can keep you down. Exactly when you challenge yourself and step out of your standard extent of shared characteristic, you will find that you can do what you figured you demonstrated incapable. The more you challenge yourself at work the more you will learn and make. Try not to fear disappointment, you will gain from mistakes!

Work on your weaknesses

Proficient improvement isn't tied in with chipping away at your characteristics. Recognizing your shortcomings and chipping away at them can be truly outstanding things you can achieve for your business. Nobody is great, however, that doesn't mean you can’t attempt.

Communicate better

Imparting viably will help you in each aspect of your life from expert to individual. Good communication empowers you to relate well to your bosses, colleagues, customers, and clients, extending the types of chances accessible to you.

Productivity

Being gainful grinding away can assist you with keeping up your presentation also, accordingly, distinguishing goals that will help you convey results is a critical introductory advance for all experts. Profitability objectives allude to your capacity to dependably work to specific norms or cut-off times that might be constrained by the customer or the business

Efficiency

In a comparable vein to profitability, productivity alludes to your ability to achieve in the workplace. However, what makes efficiency diverse is that it is pivotal in advancing your calling. Effectiveness objectives need to do with the speed, precision, and consistency with which you can convey solid results to a high necessity. To know more, please visit their website.

 

Soft Skills Benefits Your Productivity

Continuous Skills Improvement for Superior Results with I'm Productive

In a Company, employees should improve their knowledge and skills day by day. The Quality result is about the quality of employee skills. So the employees need to improve their performance and skills.

Tips for a Better Work Performance

1. Set Milestone in Improductive

Setting milestones in Improductive can help you achieve both improving your skills and producing quality results. We have a characteristic propensity of going for giving a chance of learning a ton of things and building up testing objectives.

It's alright to be intense when setting achievement errands to improve work execution and refreshing the aptitudes to the undertaking itself. The issue is that enormous undertakings can get overpowering. By breaking those enormous individual and expert tasks into more modest areas, you'll remain roused during every Success in delivering great quality items.

Setting singular achievements to examine your objective is likewise extremely valuable with regards to keeping resolve and energy step up. Monitor your undertaking progress, permit yourself to make the most of your prosperity, and offer it to your group.

2. Manage Interruptions while doing a work

Do you know how frequently during the day you're interrupted? Interferences come in different manners and shapes and figuring out how to stay away from and improve work execution.

It doesn't make a difference whether you have been hindered by a partner going to your table, by your boss during a gathering talk, or by your family upsetting you. Interferences are hazardous. They cause you to lose connection and lose the legitimate time you've recently allotted to an undertaking in achievement and start the work.

Creative Problem-Solving

What is Critical Thinking?

Basic reasoning is the capacity to investigate an idea impartially and the capacity to think in a sorted out and balanced way to comprehend associations between thoughts or realities, thinking about the fundamental realities and points of view to arrive at a sound, obvious result. In other words, it’s “contemplating thinking”—identifying, analyzing, and afterwards fixing defects in the manner in which we think.

Those who have Critical thinking abilities can do the following things:

  • understand the logical way of task
  • identify, create and evaluate arguments for Critical tasks
  • detect irregularities and basic mistakes in reasoning
  • solve issues efficiently
  • identify the significance and significance of ideas
  • Keep the goal in mind
  • Ask questions and gather information about a task
  • Evaluate the facts of the situation and solve it quickly
  • Consider the short- and long-term consequences of implementing each task

How to Be a Critical Thinker?

To become one requires time, practice, and tolerance. Be that as it may, something you can begin doing to improve your basic intuition abilities for unravelling the basic assignments regularly. It will help for developing the business without any problem.

The basic process of critical thinking

  • The typical phases of critical thinking are:
  • Find and investigate critical task
  • Arrange and co-operate
  • Test and change
  • Integrate and apply

Impress Teammates With Your Critical Thinking Skills

Employers value workers who realize how to think fundamentally. Critical thinkers carry creative solutions to Critical tasks and help organizations to advance and remain competitive.

Critical thinking models exist in all aspects of the working environment, from the corporate chief offices to the business floor. Whether you’re the chief or an assistant, realizing how to think critically enables you to make positive commitments to the organization.

How to Manage a teammate's Performance?

Regardless of whether you're a group chief or a worker yourself, it's essential to survey partners' presentations. Employees improve their exhibition step by step. Employees improve their performance day by day. That’s why we are completing the critical task quickly and improving our business growth in a short time. The team leader should have more responsibility to manage their team performance itself. So that they follow these steps.

Understand the purpose of horrible showing

It's most likely safe to state that colleagues don't get up close to the start of the day, "great!" Today I won't put forth a valiant effort, put forth an attempt not to meet my objectives, and for the most part perform "ineffectively".

Understanding the causes behind horrible showing is an essential introductory advance toward improving worker execution in a day. Because if you don’t know the reason, you can't successfully treat the indications.

Start by having transparent discussions with employees. During execution examination, ask them what moves them and gets them amped up for work, and what holds them down.

  • try not to comprehend their work and obligations
  • Don’t have the assets they have to perform ideally
  • Keep the friendship bond for motivation

Update the Skill Set in the task itself

The Team Leader has created the tasks in a week milestone for the employee in the I’mproductive app. The undertaking ought to be allowed to the worker dependent on the capacities of the representative aptitudes.

The Employee should also update his skills to the I’m productive before the team leader has created the task. To know more, please visit their website.

Processing Of Task Creation:

  • Create tasks based on employee skill sets.
  • Add the description of the task.
  • The task is assigned to a suitable employee.
  • Update the skills in a task itself.
  • Fix the priority of the task.
  • Allocate the time based on task priority.
  • At last Update the task to the milestone. 

 

Motivational Teamwork Quotes

Inspirational Quotes About Teamwork

1. "Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there."– Virginia Burden

2. "None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful." – Mother Teresa

3. "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." – Harry Truman

4. "It takes two flints to make a fire." – Louisa May Alcott

5. "The way to achieve your own success is to be willing to help somebody else get it first."– Iyanla Vanzant

6. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." – African Proverb

7. "None of us is as smart as all of us."– Ken Blanchard

8. "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success."– Henry Ford

9. "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself."– Henry Ford

10. "The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team."– Phil Jackson

11. "Collaboration allows teachers to capture each other’s fund of collective intelligence."– Mike Schmoker

12. "It takes two flints to make a fire"– Louisa May Alcott

13. "Unity is strength. . . when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved."– Mattie Stepanek

14. "To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless"– Mike Krzyzewski

15. “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs

16. “[Teamwork] is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie

17. “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

18. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.” – Winston Churchill

19. “It takes two flints to make a fire.” – Louisa May Alcott

20. “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success.” – Henry Ford

21. “If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it.” – Bear Bryant

Helpful Quotes About Building A Successful Team and Business

22. “A leader must inspire or his team will expire.” – Orrin Woodward

23. “Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do.” – Max De Pree

24. “Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.” – Sara Blakely

25. “Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.” – Casey Stengel

26. “A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of others.” – Norman Shidle

27. “Together, ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results.” – Becka Schoettle

28. “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” – Rosalynn Carter

29. “Everyone is needed, but no one is necessary.” -Bruce Coslet

30. “On this team, we’re all united in a common goal: to keep my job.” -Lou Holtz

31. “Many of us are more capable than some of us, but none of us is as capable as all of us.” -Tom Wilson

32. “With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.” -Tahir Shah

33. “When he took time to help the man up the mountain, lo, he scaled it himself.” -Tibetan Proverb

Moving Quotes About Pushing Yourself

34. “You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces of the floor and move on.”– Tupac Shakur

35. “I demolish my bridges behind me…then there is no choice but to move forward.”– Fridtjof Nansen

36. “A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back – you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.”– Jodi Picoult

37. “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”– Walt Disney

38. “If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling back.”– Sam Waterson

39. “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.”– Thomas Edison

40. “In A Challenging Situation When Everyone Around You Feels Lost, Make Sure You're Prepared To Step Up And Lead.”― Wesam Fawzi

41. “Be Brave And Push Through Challenges... Because You Can.”― Wesam Fawzi

42. "Greatness is what happens when you aren't afraid to relentlessly push yourself to tear down all your walls of limitations.”― Edmond Mbiaka

43. “Be Around People Who Push You To Be More.”― Wesam Fawzi

Persuasive Quotes About Persistence

44. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” –Thomas Edison

45. “The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.” – Henry Ward Beecher

46. “Let me tell you the secret that has led to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” – Louis Pasteur

47. “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” – John Quincy Adams

48. “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.” – Walter Elliot

49. “The difference between the difficult and the impossible is that the impossible takes a little longer time.” – Lady Aberdeen

50. “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” – A.A. Milne, “Winnie-the-Pooh”

51. “I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.” – Abraham Lincoln

52. “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein

53. “Through perseverance, many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.” – Benjamin Disraeli

54. “If for a while the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived.”― Jeffrey R. Holland

55. “Don’t be ashamed by your mistakes, they only prove that you try hard and never give up.”― Riley Czarkowski

56. “Perseverance is a virtue that cannot be understated.” – Bob Riley

57. “Failure is a bend in the road, not the end of the road. Learn from failure and keep moving forward.” – Roy T. Bennett

58. “As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.” – Dr Steve Maraboli

Inspirational Quotes About Overcoming Failure

59. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”– C. S. Lewis

60. “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”– Michael Jordan

61. “No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.“– Napoleon Hill

62. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”– Samuel Beckett

63. “The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”– Buddha

64. “An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practise shots.”– Charles F. Kettering

65. “Failure is an attitude, not an outcome.”– Harvey MacKay

66. “Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”– Suzy Kassem

67. “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”– Richard Branson

Inspirational Quotes About Personal Growth and Excellence

68. “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.” — Bruce Lee

69. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

70. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

71. “The only journey is the journey within.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

72. “They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” – Confucius

73. “We must become the change we want to see.” — Mahatma Gandhi

74. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Will Durant

75. “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”— Dr Seuss

76. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”— Helen Keller

77. “Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

78. “I will speak ill of no one and speak all the good I know of everybody.”— Andrew Jackso

79. “Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

80. “It is your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude.”— Zig Ziglar

81. “I’ve never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.”— Paul Harvey

82. “Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.”— Bruce Lee

83. “Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.”— Jim Rohn

84. “Let this be the criteria by which you measure all things: Is this an act of love?”– Unknown Author

85. “Optimists are right. So are pessimists. It’s up to you to choose which you will be.”— Harvey Mackay

To know more, please visit their website.

 

 

Track And Attendance Solution

Organizations are being controlled by remote teams due to any critical situation or this Covid-19. And all such associations whose working is reliant on timesheets, time following is an absolute necessity.

The precise time following is essential for associations to manufacture trust and develop their business without any problem.

Advantages of Time Tracking

There are not many favourable circumstances for doing your time following, including;

  • Individual and business encounters into time spent
  • Expanding efficiency
  • Improving adequacy and efficiency through learning
  • Quality overhauls, following a smoothed-out work process
  • Straightforwardness into work measures in errands

Perceive tedious Project Tasks

Each undertaking has very some degree of redundant assignments. As a Team Leader, you should survey the number of such tasks that are considered Finished. Next, estimate them as accurately as possible.

  • Time tracking is an incredible method to
  • Create reports of your team’s efforts
  • Monitor task progress in milestones
  • Review if your group is lined up with the client cutoff times
  • Increment perceivability of your advancement works
  • Comprehend your efficiency rates

Compose Your Time

Utilizing two measurements to examine your assignments is advantageous

  • How much will the task benefit the organization or association
  • What amount would we have the option to use on this errand?

Increment Employee connection and Productivity

By clarifying your participation procedures and Time following, and improving planning, you can hope to help worker confidence. An upbeat representative is a gainful specialist. Time-following arrangements can expand worker duty. Your representatives, chiefs, and HR office will value the improved profitability that time and participation highlights give. Increasing worker assurance can bring down your turnover rate. Each time that you need to recruit another employee, it will cost you in time and assets expected to prepare the worker.

Studies show that improving worker spirit is critical to extending efficiency. Right when you can keep your labourers drawn in and content with their movement, your odds of achievement increment.

What is Attendance Management?

Participation on the board is a lot of key activities and exercises associations make to manage representatives' unnotified nonappearances, leaves, and sporadic participation. The objective of the track participation plan is to guarantee that representatives are unsurprising in their participation and that the time that they spend at work is beneficial. A participation the executive's program incorporates the beneath segments:

Participation Policy

A plainly formed and realized participation strategy that portrays all principles and rules that labourers need to follow with respect to their employment participation.

Attendance Monitoring

Improductive to track and monitor attendance patterns of employees.

Non-attendance of the board program

A strategic non-attendance management program to handle both unavoidable and avoidable unlucky deficiencies.

Compensation system

Compensation framework to reward employees that come routinely. Employees who know about the advantages that they can benefit from the event that they normally come to work, apply less for leaves. For example, if there is a procedure to encash non-profited leaves, labourers will disregard taking avoidable leaves.

Difficulties looked by businesses in participating in the board:

Profitability Leakages due to non-participation

Sporadic participation, long time leaves, and incessant Absenteeism cause organizations to lose a lot of arrangements in venture culmination.

Work quality decays, collaboration suffers, and productivity diminishes due to low attendance.

What can an Attendance Tracking do in improductive?

The item that screens the consistent participation of the worker of affiliation is called participation following.

There are a ton of extraordinary application apparatuses for following representative participation, leaves, working hours, occasions, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It accompanies improductive programming.

Enables Remote Work Tracing

Proficient participation can engage the association to check the participation of any distantly working worker. This outcome in improved work viability regardless, of when the worker is telecommuting.

Analyse Attendance Records

Analyse attendance records to appropriately identify the extent of worker absence and any specific trends. So the employee has increased their productivity and maintained their attendance.

Utilize an improductive participation tracker

Overseeing participation physically has become a relic of past times. With an improductive participation tracker, each part of the participation of the executives can be mechanized. Representatives can log their working hours in any event, when they work distantly with their login Id. Worker non-attendances can be changed into days off. Moreover, the participation information of every one of your representatives can be merged in a solitary area. With it, you can deliver canny reports that show your laborers'participation designs. To know more, please visit their website.

 


 

Work With Your Smart Skills

What is workflow management?

Work Management is making and advancing the ways for data to complete things in a given methodology. Workflow Management incorporates finding repetitive tasks, outlining the work process in a perfect state, robotizing the procedure, and distinguishing bottlenecks or territories for development.

Workflow Management Practices Contains Three Basic

1. Unmistakably characterized work processes

There are regularly several work processes in each group and division. These work processes are tucked away among various apparatuses and representatives. The indication of good Workflow Management shows when the whole association knows about every one of these work processes.

There's no strain to robotize every single work process, yet they ought to be reported. At the point when the perfect opportunity arrives, you don't have to burrow through a hundred messages and programming to receive computerization.

A few work processes are characterized and noticeable, but some are not. However, you ought to continually attempt to recognize these work processes and record them.

2. Organized and smoothed out work processes

Your main concern is that work processes ought to be running at their best well-being. They ought to be lean, deft, and objective arranged.

For instance, start with client-confronting work processes like deals procedures and rebate endorsements, or worker-focused work processes like employing and onboarding. These are pivotal work processes that hugely affect an association. Auxiliary work processes are running inside these essential work processes. They ought to be given the following need and consistently be centred around serving their essential work processes. For instance, innovative solicitation work processes of promotion ought to be organized behind the significant deals work processes.

3. Ordinary checking and advancement

The best way to have profoundly productive work processes is through streamlining. Your first endeavour at building a work process, regardless of how shrewd and information-driven it is, will in any case be wasteful. Work processes on paper are great and barbaric. Work processes that run continuously are flawed and human.
An association that sudden spikes in demand for productive work processes are prepared to handle all business objectives without any problem.

Why You Need Workflow Management

Indeed, the work process of the board sounds extraordinary.

However, we're certain that you won't be sold on the thought since it "appears to be incredible".That is to say, even an employee wouldn't accomplish something except if she realizes that it has a few advantages.

So here are the five key advantages of the work process for the board:

1. Smoothed out procedures

In the work process of the board, you map out the procedures in a particular work process to get a significant level outline.

How does that help?

You'll have the option to spot superfluous or repeatable procedures that simply burn through your group's time and profitability.

2. Diminished manual work and human mistake

Suppose an employee needs to monitor her structure group's tasks.

Utilizing a spreadsheet for this is a manual procedure — where you need to invest energy physically refreshing the document every day!

In addition to the fact that this is repetitive and tedious, however, it likewise expands the potential for the human blunder. From wrong cutoff times to incorrectly spelt task names, a great deal can turn out badly.

Also, when that occurs, any task director will resemble an employee here:

Yet, with a Workflow Management framework, you can mechanize such procedures.

So rather than spreadsheets, employees can utilize the board programming to monitor their group's tasks naturally.

As most information should be entered only a single time, this reduces the possibility of any human blunder.

Additionally, it likewise accelerates the work process, boosting your organization's efficiency.

3. Better straightforwardness and responsibility

For most work processes the board frameworks feature all the information identified with a work process.

For instance, a task the executives programming shows you:

  • What undertakings your group needs to do
  •  When should everyone be done
  • Who's allocated to a particular tasks

The employee just needs to check her procedure on the board device to recognize what's going on in that work process. Whenever, she'll know precisely how everything is advancing, which additionally causes her to distinguish any possible barricades.

Furthermore, as you'll know who is answerable for a specific movement, there'll be better responsibility all through the group. Bid farewell to micromanaging your group!

4. Successful correspondence

Another advantage that accompanies work process straightforwardness is viable correspondence.

How?

When there's better perceivability over what to do, it's not hard to have everyone on a similar frequency about the task or undertaking. This helps colleagues better see each other's interests and questions rapidly.

Moreover, work processes make it very simple to monitor each colleague's tasks.

Andy, the employee's collaborator, won't need to continue thinking about what her supervisor needs her to do any longer! She just needs a look at Runway's undertaking the board framework to know her tasks.

5. Simple versatility

Suppose an employee has chosen to utilize a worker onboarding device to smooth out the onboarding process. Each time another worker finishes a stage, the device naturally directs them to the subsequent stage all the while.

How does this help with adaptability?

The loading up work process remains for the most part the equivalent paying little heed to the number of representatives joining Runway ("for the most part" because the procedure could be changed whenever for better ease of use).

Moreover, in a computerized work process, tasks no longer completely rely upon any person.

For instance, the employee doesn't need to depend on her HR chiefs to locally availability every worker totally — the procedure of the executive's programming will do a large portion of the hard work.

This, thus, opens up your staff and different assets for exercises that require their information.

How Do You Analyze A Workflow?

As we said before, if your business is losing the two tasks and customers because of an inadequate work process, you ought to consider utilizing a work process the board programming. In any case, before you hop to any sort of dynamic, you have to do a snappy examination of what you as of now have. Here are several means to help you with accomplishing your work cycle assessment.

Stage 1: Collect information

Break down the details and reports of the work process you need to analyze. Discover information, for example, all-out things started in the work process over a predefined period, several things finished, the normal time taken to finish everything, several things fizzled or dismissed, and several things that required extra assets for fruition.

Stage 2: Ask a lot of inquiries

The following stage is to begin posing the correct inquiries. for instance: "What is the reason for a procedure?" "Is it truly required?" "What's the most ideal approach to computerize it?" "What potential dangers should you expect, etc."

Stage 3: Implement the progressions

When you've broken down your work process and discovered responses to every one of your inquiries, actualize the progressions that should be finished with the work process. Consider utilizing the work process of board programming for more prominent proficiency.

Stage 4: Follow Up

Next, you need to break down and improve your work processes persistently. Stay aware of the most recent patterns and innovations and perceive how they can be fused into your work process and the boarding procedure to accomplish better outcomes.

1. Computerization to robotize repeatable procedures

What's a work process programming without computerization, correct?

That will resemble wearing an easygoing outfit while working in a manner magazine like Runway.

Improductive's Robotization highlight lets you computerize any monotonous undertaking to assist you with sparing time and spotlight on exercises that require your info.

At its centre, a Robotization resembles this:

At the point when a trigger occurs and a condition is valid, specific activity is performed naturally.

For instance, if an employee needs to set up a work process Computerization to leave an update on an employee assignment when its due date is close, it could look something like this:

Trigger: the due date is drawing nearer

Condition: is Andy the appointee?

Activity: leave a remark "Start right away!"

2. Due Dates for the following cutoff times

Cutoff times are too significant for any tasks — regardless of whether it's a Dexterous programming advancement venture or finishing Runway's 2020 issue.

What's more, missed cutoff times can have genuine outcomes (particularly if your customers resemble employees). Simply utilize Improductive's Expected Dates!

Due Dates let you set cutoff times for a particular undertaking, subtask, or Rundown in Improductive. You can either set a specific date on the schedule or simply type in the date as you'd typically state it so anyone can hear.

However, that is not all!

This assignment on the executive's programming additionally lets you:

  • Include Due Dates from anyplace in Improductive
  • Alter or erase a task's cutoff time
  • Channel tasks by Due Date
  • Intuitive tasks in the Schedule view to alter cutoff times

3. Track group execution with incredible Reports

On the off chance that the employee needs to realize how profitable the employee has been over a given month, all she needs is Improductive!

In this work process, the board arrangement gives you six exact reports for point-by-point breakdowns of your group's presentation.

You get reports like:

Tasks Finished Report: features the undertakings each colleague finished

Taken a shot at Report: shows the all-out number of tasks every part dealt with during a particular day, week or month

Workspace Focuses Report: gamify work processes to make them too a good time for your Scrum group

Time Followed Report: shows how long your group spends on their tasks

Time Evaluated: see your group's time appraisals to design future activities without any problem

4. Custom Status for fluctuating undertaking stages

In most work process the board programming gives you default task statuses that can't be redone as indicated by your undertaking needs. This can seriously restrict the adaptability you have to oversee ventures with shifting changes — like Deft and Scrum ventures.

That is to say, who needs an “ application testing” a stage for the recruiting procedure at Runway?
Fortunately, Improductive lets you make Redid Undertaking Statuses mirror your task needs precisely. For instance, employees can make a "designing" stage in the work process for a Runway magazine article.

A look at an assignment's status is sufficient for her (or any work process director) to realize what stage that particular undertaking is in!

5. Combinations to oversee work across different stages

Your work process programming isn't the main instrument you'll use in your office.

You additionally have correspondence applications, and document sharing stages, and that's just the beginning.

So how might you manage your work measures over these devices?

With Improductive's combinations, that is not an issue!

In this task, the board programming coordinates with huge amounts of outsider applications to smooth out your work processes across various stages.

To know more, please visit their website

Accurately predict project completion dates and track productivity with I’m Productive

In the list of things a project manager dreads, missing the project deadline is there at the top. The delayed project delivery could result in lost sales. It could also give your competitors the chance to launch their product ahead of you, thereby gaining market advantage. Then, there is the matter of your company’s reputation being damaged.

Reasons for wrong estimations of the deadline

There are primarily two reasons for a wrong estimation.

One is that you underestimate just how complex a project is: there is a huge gulf between the estimated tasks that are required to pull off the project and the actual number of tasks.

This is largely caused by relying on previous projects as the basis for estimates.

While projects may share superficial similarities, the fact remains that each project is unique. Unless you can analyze a deeper set of data than what is obvious, you wouldn’t be able to accurately estimate the project completion date.

Traditional analytics tools just aren’t capable enough to process such complexities of data.

Instead, in software development projects, the common methods used for predicting project deadlines include counting the number of lines of code and story points. But these values could be qualitative in nature, specific to each team and project. This means it would be hard to estimate these values accurately before the project begins. This in turn leads to the wrong prediction for project delivery.

Thankfully, we now have technology which is literally super-human in its ability to capture and process the complexities of a given scenario

I’m Productive, for instance, uses an Artificial Intelligence(AI) tool which replicates human estimate skill and then amplifies it by multiple counts. In the process, the tool makes use of data which would not be easy to process by an ordinary piece of software. The end result is a highly accurate delivery date prediction.

Using this prediction tool is easy. You just click on the “AI Predict” button at any point in the project’s progress to find out if a project will be completed at the predicted time.

The second reason why project managers end up with a wrong prediction is that they overestimate the output of their team members. Once again, the root of the cause is basing your analysis on previous projects.

The assumption is that the same issues that confronted the previous projects could only befall the new project. It’s also assumed the core specifications would remain unchanged and that resources would always be available whenever there’s a need. But the ground reality is often different.

This is why I’m Productive helps you track your team’s productivity in real-time. It’s not just the overall team’s output that you can view in real-time but also that of individual members. This tracking is non-intrusive as practices like taking screenshots etc., which affect employee privacy are avoided. Also, arbitrary data like the time someone goes on break is not factored in the system will automatically pause the timer when they go on break and when they resume work, so would the timer.

This results in an accurate view of productivity, which in turn results in accurate prediction of project delivery.

So, no more lost revenue from delayed project delivery. Instead, enjoy a predictable revenue cycle by accurately predicting project delivery with just a few taps on the screen! To know more, please visit their website.

How a team member’s Calendar View in I’m Productive benefits Project Management

A calendar view is a useful tool which gives you a comprehensive view of monthly performance metrics for a team member. Let’s see how you can access the view and all the metrics that you will get in it.

How to access the calendar view for a team member

At the very top of the window, you will get a strip bar with tabs that include the sprints for current projects. Click on the sprint of your choice. This reveals the list of the team members who are part of the sprint- their names and picture.

Each member’s status will be displayed beneath their name. If they are currently working on a task, it will be mentioned as ‘Active.’ If not, the status would be ‘A while ago.’

Simply click on the member for whom you want the calendar view of performance for it to appear.

Metrics in the calendar view

The calendar view has the following parameters:

Month and year- This will be displayed above the top right corner of the calendar. The arrow buttons to move to the following or preceding months are provided above the top right corner.

The number of hours worked- Within each day of the calendar, you will find the number which represents the number of hours someone has worked. If s/he was on leave on a particular day, it will be marked as ‘On leave.’

Total productivity- View the total hours worked during the whole month, listed beneath the calendar.

Average productivity/day- Another parameter that you can get beneath the calendar. The average productivity is given in the number of hours.

Time efficiency- Yet another element listed under the calendar is efficiency for the month, expressed as a percentage.

Color coding

A key design principle of I’m Productive is to help make sense of metrics as easy as possible. To this end, the elements are represented in a visual manner whenever practicable. Color coding is a tool frequently used in the process.

This can be seen in the calendar view.

Above the calendar: As mentioned before, above the calendar, each member’s status is mentioned as ‘Active’ or ‘A while ago.’

An active employee’s picture would have an accompanying green dot while someone who is not currently active will have a red dot beside their picture.

Within the calendar: In the calendar, ‘On leave’ will be marked in red. If the number of hours worked for a particular day is lesser than the Average productivity/day, that’s marked in red too. If that number is equal to it, it’s marked in orange. If it is higher than the average productivity/day, it’s marked in green.

This helps you get an overview of a team member’s monthly performance simply by glancing through the calendar view.

Why use the calendar view?

While a list view or a daily task view is possible- and sometimes beneficial- a calendar view brings its own set of benefits.

Rewarding the right team members

It is easy for project managers to get blind-sided by the current project or task performance while evaluating the effectiveness of a team member. But more important than performance in any one task is a member’s consistency. That’s something you will get to know only if you take a longer view of things.

A calendar view that brings performance metrics for an entire month is a good tool for evaluating the same. When it’s time to reward team members for their efforts, instead of going by the metrics for the latest task, you can judge based on performance over a period of time.

Mentoring

There are times when you should intervene to help a team member who may be struggling with their performance for a while. Or maybe, you see a consistently performing team member and wish to upskill him or her, equipping them with

In high-performing organizations, it is common enough for a Manager to mentor or guide his or her subordinates. The trick is in knowing which members need it and who can be left alone to guide their own tasks.

The productivity metrics in a calendar view wouldn’t be all that you need to make this differentiation. For instance, a member may be showing good productivity but struggling with inter-personnel relations in the workplace, something you would get to know only from other channels. But at the same time, without the metrics in the calendar view, you would not be able to make the differentiation either. To know more, please visit their website.

How spreadsheets and emails are limiting your project management

Spreadsheets and emails. For a project manager, both are useful- but only to an extent.

Here are how these tools hamper your project’s progress. Also, learn how to break free of their limitations.

Limited scope for conversations

Creating and running a project doesn’t just mean you fill information into tabular columns. It also means you have conversations with relevant team members, and record takeaways from those conversations. It also requires you to attach files that are relevant to the project or task.

On both these counts, spreadsheets fall short. You may end up using multiple sheets for different tasks, only to have significant bits of information spread across tools or pages.

You need a system that would not just allow you to do the above tasks, but would also let you collate the information and files in a single place. That’s exactly what I’m Productive provides you with. So, no more hopping around tools and spreadsheets looking for the data you want.

The black hole of a trail mail

Emails have become a mainstay online. While useful in many ways email is often a disastrous tool in project management.

The very idea of sifting through deep mail trails to find a nugget of information can be dread-inducing. Teams often use emails as a way of collaboration. You ask someone something over an e-mail. And back comes a response to the same mail. But the problem begins when the trail deepens.

But there is a solution to that problem- one which combines the power of arranging information into neat grids ala spreadsheets, with the collaboration that email allows. With I’m Productive, you can easily communicate with team members, and also use its simple interface to cluster information however you want to.

No fast way to create plans

A common pain point of using spreadsheets is creating charts and calendars. Sure, there are templates available for these. But even then, you will need to customize them according to your needs. Then, there is the inevitable formatting you’ll have to do. This is especially true in a project management scenario in which the new plans should be prepared on short calls. Many of these plans are designed to be improved upon depending on project progress and contingencies.

This calls for constantly updating the charts.

I’m Productive is designed with such challenges in mind. You can create project plans in a short time, with minimal effort. Making updates are easy as well.

Hard to manage multiple projects simultaneously

Despite the drawbacks of spreadsheets and emails mentioned before, nothing is more problematic than this: managing more than one project at the same time.

Handling simultaneous projects could feel like literal juggling- while your hands are already more than full.

The biggest challenge is knowing the status of individual projects. Another issue is with switching fast from one project to another. And you would have to see your team members’ workload from time to time. Spreadsheets and emails only go so far in helping you with these.

What can help is a powerful project management system like I’m Productive. It could help you gain all such insights- project status, individual workload, the tasks, the projects simultaneously running etc. on a single screen.

So, move beyond spreadsheets and emails. More efficient project management and a more predictable project delivery mechanism await you. To know more, please visit their website.

How to assign and track tasks with I’m Productive

Determining the scope of a project and identifying the right resources for each task are the first steps in project management. Then comes the part where you assign the tasks to the team members. One would think this should be easy to do. But not so- at least, not always.

The problem stems from the tools you use to assign a new task or project. These tools should find a balance between being simple and capable enough to analyze complex data.

Unfortunately, such tools are not common. Either they present a simplistic version of what they should be, or bring irrelevant data that doesn’t help with project management.

This is the backdrop in which we created I’m Productive- a tool designed to smoothen project management and help you predict project delivery accurately.

Smoother creation of tasks- and assigning them are part of what makes this work. Let’s see how.

Assign and view tasks

Creating a project or task is as easy as clicking on a few buttons and tagging each task to a team member. Once you have done that, you can see the list of tasks listed in a clutter-free interface. Each task name will be given against the person to whom it is assigned.

Above this list, find tabs for the current sprint and backlogs. Switch between these two, to see the tasks that are being run currently and those put on the backburner for the time being.

Get data for each team member’s performance

For each team member, you can get metrics related to tasks:

  • Finished tasks- This list gives you the tasks a team member has finished so far.

  • Track time worked in real time- Get the number of hours each team member has worked so far in the project. The timer would automatically pause when they take a break and resume once they start working again. So, only the actual time worked gets recorded.

  • To review- You can get the tasks that are yet to be reviewed as a separate list.

  • On review- As the name implies, you get the tasks that are currently under review.

  • Rejected- These are tasks that have been rejected as they didn’t meet the quality standards.

  • Tasks yet to be closed- Tasks that ought to have been done but which are still pending for some reason.

In cases where a project is running behind schedule, these data points help you see where the problem lies.

Productivity bar

For a quick overview of a team member’s progress, check out their productivity bar. It gives you the day’s productivity in percentage, along with the task being worked on now. Also, get the number of hours worked so far, and the estimated time when a task would be done. This makes it easy to determine if performance supports timely project delivery or not.

With these useful features, assigning and tracking tasks is as easy as it gets. To know more, please visit their website.

How to be better organized online

The refrain that our lives have migrated online has never been truer than in these past months.

Many professionals have been working more and more over the web even before the pandemic. Coupled with the increasing sophistication of the tools available on the net, the present crisis has resulted in a scenario where we work- from start to end purely online.

But how it be better organized online to increase productivity? Here are some tips.

Have a schedule

This may not sound like a profound insight. But the fact remains many of us adopt a come-as-it-does approach to work.

We tackle a task without having a clear idea of its priority for the current project. Put another way, we spend more time on tasks which are relatively less urgent at the moment.

So, have a schedule of tasks ready.

Using I’m Productive, you can organize tasks under different projects and set their priority. If you are a manager, you can assign tasks to your team members based on their priority and not just based on the availability of resources. You can even see if you are sticking to a task as expected, or are falling behind, with live status.

Declutter

Think of this as arranging a wardrobe. You keep the clothes you wear for occasions separately from daily wear. And what you rarely wear anymore, can be given away.

This last idea works especially well online: just remove those files you don’t need any more from the system.

It’s not rare to see files from previous projects cluttering a screen. This makes it hard to access the one that you want right now, from among the pile of documents.

I’m Productive lets you remove projects and associated files from the tool once their need is done. This makes sure that only files relevant to your present work populate your screen. You can segregate documents according to projects and tasks, and pull them up easily from a customizable interface.

 Take breaks

When talking about being organized online, many people think exclusively about the online space. But the fact is, to be organized in any realm, you need to take breaks when you want to.

Forcing yourself to work through such times only results in stress. A stressful mind is a chaotic mind- and it’s hard to stay organized in such a state. So, grab a cuppa, and enjoy some downtime.

Meanwhile, I’m productive would put the task on pause mode while you are on break, so only the accurate duration of tasks performed would be recorded.

Keep the most important docs handy

Frequently referring to a document is sometimes needed for a task. With I’m Productive, you can pin such docs on your window, so you have them for ready reference. This avoids unwanted delays in searching out documents.

Often, more than the number of tasks, the problem is the disorganized way in which we go about them. With I’m Productive, you can confidently do your tasks, being better organized online. To know more, please visit their website.

How to accurately predict project end-date in I’m Productive

Prediction is synonymous with forecasting. And the quality of your forecasting depends on how many data points you use in the process, and also how accurate those data are.

This is found to be the case when predicting the estimated delivery date of a project too.

You need the correct data points for this- the tasks that fall under the project, who is assigned a particular task, the amount of time one spends on a task, how many tasks are pending, how many are under review, and so on and so forth.

Getting all these data points accurately is rarely possible in an analogue environment. Even with digital tools, the data you get needn’t always be accurate. Case in point: the amount of time someone works on a task may have their break times also included.

I’m producing a tool that helps you get accurate data points for prediction. Not only that, the system’s advanced AI(Artificial Intelligence) gives highly reliable predictions in real-time for the end date of a project.

How to predict the project end date using I’m Productive?

To predict using I’m Productive is as easy as it gets. All you have to do is click on the “AI Predict” button and you will get a detailed graph of the project’s progression along with the end date at the current rate of progress.

The map’s Y-axis will chart the workload while the X-axis would have the time of progression- starting from the date on which the project began. The current date will be marked on the X-axis and also the predicted completion date and the project deadline. Both the latter dates are also mentioned in day and month format so that you can easily read them even if you don’t want to go deeper into the details on the graph.

Above the graph, you will also get an accurate prediction of when a current task will be finished at its ongoing rate of progress.

How I’m Productive gives you accurate prediction?

There are two ways in which I’m Productive to ensure accurate prediction.

1. Eliminating human errors

The planning fallacy is a term psychologists have given to the problem of people underestimating not just the time to finish a task but also the costs involved. The curious thing is this happens even when they know from previous projects that there is a high chance of the project going over budget or running late.

Delusional optimism is cited as the reason for this. Rational decision-making takes a backseat while unwarranted optimism becomes the basis for decisions.

Anchoring is yet another human error that hampers timely project delivery. Anchoring refers to the phenomenon by which we refer back to an original estimate each time we need to revise the forecast during a project run.

The original estimate almost always is made with over-optimism, and it rarely forms a solid yardstick to measure against the current realities of the project. Delays and other contingencies might have happened during the project run. But while reviewing delivery dates, Project Managers tend to fall victim to Anchoring- they still back the original estimate because humans are subconsciously affected by such estimates while taking decisions.

2. Using accurate data points

This idea was touched upon earlier: accurate prediction depends on getting the right data points. To use a simple example, we can look at weather forecasting. There are six primary data points that you need to predict the weather: wind, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, level of cloudiness and precipitation.

Even if you get one of these data points wrong, you end up with the wrong weather forecast. This would cause trouble for those who may have planned things for the day based on the forecast.

The case for predicting project end dates in a business is not any different. Multiple parameters should be factored in for accurate predictions. These include the tasks assigned to each person in the team, the status of progress for each task and the number of hours each person has worked so far on a task.

It’s not unusual to have errors in such data if the data gathering is done manually. With I’m Productive, you can be sure that the data points are precise. For example, consider the time a team member spends performing a task. The simplest way to calculate it would be to subtract the current date or time from when they started on the task.

Indeed, that is how most people- and even many digital tools- evaluate it. But I’m Productive goes a step further to ensure you get precise data.

The earlier-mentioned idea of evaluating time would not give only the time the person spent on the task. It would also include his or her break times.

But the timer on I’m Productive halts automatically when someone pauses their work and resumes by itself when they start working again. To know more, please visit their website.

Manage tasks easily with the simple task list view in I’m Productive

Achieving predictable revenue through predictable project delivery constitutes multiple elements. Even the simplest things have to be fine-tuned to get this end result. Things like task lists which get scant attention in how they are designed in the normal course of project management have ramifications on whether the project gets delayed or not.

In I’m Productive, even the littlest elements are evaluated closely so that you get not just a user-friendly project management tool, but one in which everything facilitates timely project delivery.

This is evident in the case of our simplified task list view.

Key attributes that make a simplified task list powerful

Two significant attributes make the list a powerful ally for managing your tasks.

Task sorting

Task sorting is arguably the primary factor to simplify a tasks-list. The idea is to categorize tasks, either according to the project they fall under or based on who is performing them, or by priority. I’m Productive allows all these kinds of sorting. But in the simplified task list, you get the relevant tasks listed for a project, because that’s the view most project managers wish to access most in the course of running a project.

In the list, you would get each task listed alongside the name of the person to whom it is assigned.

Prioritized listing

Listing out and segregating tasks is only the beginning of creating an efficient task list. Unless the tasks are prioritized appropriately, the list wouldn’t serve its purpose. In I’m Productive, assigning priorities to tasks is only a matter of a few clicks.

In the simplified task list, you will be presented with the tasks in their sequential- that is, prioritized- order. You can see the progress you are making on a task. And if you attempt a task before tackling a higher priority task, you can see from the list flow that it is not probably the wisest decision.

The attributes you find on the simple task view

The task view may be simple but it brings you all the most important attributes you want. Let’s look at what they are.

  • The name of the project- This would be mentioned in bold letters at the top of the task list, indicating the tasks that belong to this particular project.

  • Task names- The task names are listed beneath the project name. Each task name is mentioned alongside the name of the team member to which the task is assigned.

  • In progress or yet to start- This attribute is represented visually. While starting a task, the team member can hit the play button given against the task name. When the task is in progress, a pause button will be in place- and whenever you take a break, you can hit it.

  • The average working hours for a task- This is given in a number of hours, against each task name.

  • Progress bar- The progress bar for a task appears above the tasks list. This bar has the following attributes:

      • Task name

      • Team member to whom the task is assigned - His or her name and picture appear against the task name

      • Total expected hours to finish the task

      • The number of hours for which the team member has worked on the task so far

      • The number of hours h/she worked on it today

      • The status bar: You also get a visual representation of the progress in the form of a status bar. A horizontal white line represents the work that has been finished so far, and a grey line shows the work that is yet to be done.

Aside from these, you can view even more attributes using a dedicated side panel which you can access any time you wish to.

Why use a simplified task list?

A simplified task list has two main purposes.

Keep track of your tasks

I’m Productive delivers the most important attributes related to a task- like the number of hours it requires and the time you already spent on it- in a comprehensive, easy-to-understand view. This helps you get the lowdown on where you stand on the task in the shortest possible time.

Ensure both important tasks &immediate tasks are done

During the course of a project, it’s usual to lose sight of the tasks which are important but are not urgent. Without a list to keep such tasks in view, you may simply keep going from one immediate task to the next.

The important tasks may not be strictly urgent. But they demand you spend more time on them than the others. This makes it useful to tackle at least part of such tasks at the earliest so that when the point comes when they become both important and urgent, you would not be pressed for time. Maintaining a simple task list makes it easy to check the tasks that are lined up, and if any of them fall in the ‘important’ category. To know more, please visit their website.

How I’m Productive helps improve productivity for each user with custom tabs

In the initial days when the internet was only emerging into the public domain, the web was a rather unwieldy space. For one thing, you needed to type in the specific URL to visit a website. Also, the options to search out the information you need were next to non-existent. But then, innovations happened.

Search engines made finding information something you could do literally with one hand. And apps made utilities, not just efficient but more fun to use.

But throughout the Net’s evolution so far, one trend has remained static: delivering tailor-made experiences for users. In the current iteration of the web, that is perhaps the most visible streaming service. They bring you customized suggestions for your next view, based on viewing history. Ads are also shown to you based on your search history.

At I’m Productive, we think hard about how to make project management more efficient in the digital world. Customization being such a mainstay on the web, we naturally considered how we could use it, to make your work easier.

One of the ways we incorporated the trend is with customizable tabs.

As easy to use as a browser

Our idea was simple: make a project management tool that’s not just efficient but also easy to use. As easy as a browser.

Just like in a browser, you could add the features that you want as your tabs- projects, shortcuts or anything else that would help you with your job. This is possible not just for project managers but for all users. But how could it help with your project execution? Read on to find out.

Two reasons why custom tabs are necessary

There are two key reasons why custom tabs are more than just an ornamental feature

1. Every user is unique

This is the underlying principle based on which the customizing trend on the internet was set in motion in the first place. This is true with project management as well. Every team member would be doing a different task with distinct levels of complexity. This being the case, it would be illogical to assume they would all need quick access to the same features on their tabs. Supporting customization enables the users to do their tasks at the earliest.

2. Users improvise as they go along

No matter how rigidly planned out a task is, users almost always would encounter unexpected challenges on the way. Solving these challenges, you could say, is part of the fun of working. But to do so, you would need the right features or documents. It then makes sense to have these on quick-access. Adding them to the tabs is the easiest way to accomplish the same. Features that are no more needed could be removed from the tabs, and new ones can be added, as and when needed. To know more, please visit their website.

How I’m Productive’s smart notifications help improve productivity

We live in an age of notifications. Our phones, laptops, watches and the clock on the bedside table all keep notifying us about one thing or the other. It doesn’t take a great imagination to see how the constant deluge of notifications could be distracting. A Harvard Business Review report says an average employee checks e-mail seventy-four times per day and gets forty-six notifications on their phones in a single day. And that was two years back. One can imagine the numbers to be higher today.

A key problem is such constant distraction forces employees to switch their attention. Getting back to their task at hand would require some time, whenever they focus on a notification. Studies show productivity loss of up to forty per cent happens due to such task-switching.

The logical assumption- for improving productivity would be to turn off all notifications. But here is the curious thing: turning off notifications completely has been found to increase anxiety among employees rather than de-stressing and helping them focus on the work at hand.

The problem is an enemy we are familiar with in the internet age: the fear of missing out. This is especially true in the current times when many are working remotely. In such a scenario, missing a notification may mean missing an important meeting update or a message about a new project launch.

So, if notifications distract and they cannot be turned off, what can be done? One idea is to put them to good use. We call these smart notifications.

Instead of distracting, these could empower the workforce to be even more productive. I’m Productive brings such smart messages to each team member to aid them towards better productivity.

But what makes a notification smart? Before we answer that, let’s look at some examples of the smart notifications you get in I’m Productive.

Examples of I’m Protective’s smart notifications

Congrats! You have reached your productivity goal today’- Each team member sets a productivity goal for their day and once they achieve it, a message congratulates them on the same.

You are working more than your estimated time’- A reminder that someone is continuing to work beyond the estimated time in which they were supposed to finish a task. This helps them reorient themselves and expedite the task.

Sorry, you cannot work on multiple tasks at the same time’- ‘Multitasking’ is a term that’s used a lot these days. But the fact remains that the human brain views two different tasks as two different tasks. This means, it will have to constantly switch back and forth, which hampers productivity. Keeping this in view, I’m Productive delivers this message whenever it is relevant.

Your productivity for this week is too low’- A straightforward reminder, based on the number of hours a team member worked during the week.

What makes I’m Productive’s notifications smart?

Three elements make I’m Productive’s notifications smart. These are given below.

Personalized

By personalized, what’s meant here is not that the message should include the person’s name or something similar in nature. We all know the notifications we receive on our phones from brands, that start with our names. But when was the last time such messages actually felt personal?

What’s meant here is that the notification should be based on data that is relevant to the individual who is receiving it. For instance, consider someone working longer than is required of them. If they receive a message saying “Great job! Keep going!”, it could be taken to mean that the company appreciates them only if they over-work.

I’m Productive makes sure that whatever message someone receives is pertaining to data that’s unique to them.

Understand

Smart notifications are never truly smart unless they are easy to understand.

The information you provide should be relevant and straightforward. The use of these notifications is to nudge the team member to take appropriate actions based on a message. If the message itself is hard to decipher, that is obviously not possible. In fact, complex messages can have the opposite effect on empowering the person. If they take the inability to understand the message as a personal drawback, then, you have a demoralized team member in your hand.

I’m Productive to ensure such unwanted scenarios don’t arise. It brings messages that are succinct, expressed in as few and meaningful words as possible.

Timely

As mentioned before, the main purpose of smart notifications is to nudge the team members towards taking positive actions to help them maintain or improve productivity. But for this to happen, the messages should be delivered at the right time to the right person. For example, if someone is falling behind in work and a deadline is looming up, they should be informed of it before it’s too late. Otherwise, a heightened speed of working may not make any significant difference. In such cases, the old adage of a stitch in time is truer than anywhere else.

I’m Productive makes sure that the notifications your team members receive are not only relevant to them but are timely. These messages become actionable precisely because they are delivered at the right time. To know more, please visit their website.

How to ensure extra tasks are assigned fairly

The idea of one task per person has an elegance both Managers and team members can appreciate. But there are times when you simply must assign extra tasks. Maybe, a project is too big, or it is required to solve an unexpected problem.

Whatever be the case, delegating extra tasks should be done with care. You can cite two reasons for this:

1. You must make optimal use of resources. Simply adding another layer of tasks when it’s not necessary is counter-productive.

2. You must ensure employee morale isn’t affected by it.

I’m Productive and can help ensure these two criteria are satisfied. Let’s see how.

Ensuring optimal use of your resources

To do this, you need to know which team members are lagging in their tasks and why.

I’m Productive gives you task-progress data for each team member.

You can evaluate their progress in relation to the estimated finish time for a project. If the task delay will affect on-time project delivery, entrust part of the task to another person. If not, simply help the team member expedite the task without adding to it.

Helping maintain individual morale

For instance, for your team members’ performance, you can track real-time progress and get a calendar view. The latter helps you learn the history of work an employee has finished.

You should also look at their history of work before assigning additional tasks. In the recent past, if their workload seems to be on the higher end, maybe you can pass the task on to someone else.

In order to help you with the above points, I’m Productive brings the data you need in a clutter-free interface. You can use the tool almost like a browser. Add the tabs you want and pull up the information you need with just a click. You can also pin documents and performance-related data for easy reference.

With such features at your fingertips, assigning extra tasks wouldn’t be a cause for worry. To know more, please visit their website.

The productivity bar in I’m Productive: simple, clutter-free & an ally to finish tasks on time

I’m Productive is a tool which helps you predict project delivery dates accurately and thereby ensure predictable revenue. From big to small, many tools are used in this process. One of the simpler- but not any less important- tools is the productivity bar.

A productivity bar is a straightforward entity- as the name implies, it shows how productive you are. However, as is the case with anything simple, for it to be efficient, it should be designed with thoughtful considerations.

We will shortly see what makes the productivity bar in I’m productive efficient. But before that, let’s look at what is included in it.

 The elements in the productivity bar

The following elements are included in the productivity bar:

Current task: The name of the current task is given, along with whether it needs to be finished or is completed.

The total time required to finish the task: This is mentioned in hours as the unit.

The time worked on the task so far: Given in hours as the unit.

Color coding: In a blue backdrop, the amount of work done so far is visually represented as a horizontal white line. The work yet to be done is an extension of that line though that part is given in grey. This makes it easy to glimpse your progress without even checking the other metrics.

 What makes the progress bar in I’m Productive efficient?

I’m Productive’s progress bar is not only simple but also efficient. It is, in fact, an ally that helps you finish tasks on time. There are two reasons for its effectiveness.

Thinking lean

Lean thinking is a principle that’s adopted in various operational scenarios. It is applied in industries as varied as manufacturing and entertainment.

It is a method of optimizing processes by which only those elements which are required for a specific outcome are included in a process.

That may sound like an obvious thing to do. But the fact is that many processes have steps which could either be clubbed with another step or avoided entirely. Lean thinking helps identify the ‘waste’ in the process so that you can remove them.

This principle is applied in the design of the productivity bar in I’m Thinking.

The idea of a productivity bar is to help team members know how they are performing on their current tasks. Many elements could be included in a bar in response to that idea. For instance, you can have sub-tasks would the notion that would give a team member a more comprehensive view of progress. Or you can include the percentage of efficiency with which someone has been working on a task so far.

But the problem with such scenarios is that the added elements mostly just distract the team member rather than help them streamline their work process.

Adding sub-tasks in the productivity bar is unnecessary, for instance. The use of a progress bar is to see how you are coming along in a task. Having the progress notation for each sub-task would only overwhelm the user.

The efficiency of the work done so far is not helpful either. Past performance is not a foolproof indication of future performance. For example, the part of the task that’s been done so far may have been inherently more challenging than what’s to come. In this case, it is only natural that the efficiency per cent would be marked as lesser as it would have taken a long time to perform.

Such problems make a case for lean thinking to be applied in the very design of the productivity bar. In I’m productive, this is exemplified by the fact that only the relevant elements- the current task, the total number of hours required to finish it and the number of hours worked so far are presented in the productivity bar.

Accuracy of analytics

In the above section, we talked about lean thinking. But such powerful practices wouldn’t be of value if it is not backed by accurate analytics. Analytics- if done the right way- would prevent the need to rethink when a task would be finished.

I’m Productive uses advanced measurement software to ensure that the analytics that you get is precise. For example, look at the time that has been spent on a task- one of the metrics in the productivity bar.

I’m Productive ensures the accuracy of this metric by measuring only the time someone has actually worked on something, not counting the times they went on a break.

Whenever they take a break, the time counter comes to an automatic halt. The counter would resume only when the team member resumes the task.

As you can see, measuring such metrics wrongly can have serious implications, like assuming the task would be finished earlier than it actually would be. To know more, please visit their website.

How to better manage distributed teams

Over the last year, working from home has been the norm than the exception. Even as many of us are preparing to get back to the office, a large number of people would still be working remotely for the foreseeable future. This means managing a distributed team is something that you would need to stay on top of for some time more.

As many have learned hands-on by now, the challenges of managing a distributed team are different from managing a team in person. The good news is there are efficient ways to tackle these challenges.

Tracking the project’s progress in real-time

Imagine that the deadline for a project is looming up, and a stakeholder asks you for a status report.

While working from the office, you can just call up the team leads or team members to get the relevant info. But in a distributed work environment it’s never a given you would get hold of someone immediately. You may pass a message or even call a team member, only to have them get back sometime later. But it’s hardly professional to keep the stakeholder on hold.

Tracking made easy

I’m Productive is the right tool for such contingencies. For it gives you live tracking of tasks; you can just tap open the application and see the progress bar in real-time. This report is not based on any arbitrary value either. You can get a detailed view of the metrics- like the number of hours already spent on the project, the expected time to finish etc.

Non-intrusive tracking

This is made possible using the check-in-break-check-out feature.

The idea behind this is pretty simple. Once an employee logs in, the system’s intelligent timer would start on its own. It’s automatically paused when they either take a break or check out. And at the next check-in, it resumes without external intervention.

This means, with minimal supervision, you get all the information you need about task progress.

But that’s not to say I’m Productive breaches into an employee’s privacy. It’s a system that respects the same. Unlike many other tools of its ilk, it doesn’t capture keystrokes or screenshots of works in progress. It uses a transition tracking approach which gives you the precise time spent on a task without micro-managing and demeaning individual morale.

 Figuring out who is performing well and not

When your team members are working on different tasks across geographies, pinpointing the reason for a delay could be hard. You may have to get status reports from multiple teams leads before discovering the delay-causing silo.

I’m Productive provides you with accurate productivity reports for each employee. Among other details, you will find in the report is the time each team member is taking to finish a task. Extraneous data like the break-time that an employee takes is not factored in, so the data you get is as accurate as possible.

Once you have the measure of time each employee spends on a task, it’s easy to find where the delay is happening. After that, you can help the employee with the necessary help to finish the task at the earliest.

Designed to achieve predictable revenue

Both these aspects- tracking progress and locating bottlenecks- are designed to help gain predictable project delivery. The timely completion of projects also leads to a predictable revenue outlook for your company.

Getting back to the normal of working alongside your colleagues in the office may be invigorating. But for many of us, that day is still a bit away.

But in the meantime, managing distributed teams should be a smooth process, with I’m Productive. What’s mentioned here are relevant pain points and their solutions. In the coming posts, we would discuss even more ways in which I’m Productive would help make managing distributed teams easier.

Stay tuned, stay productive. To know more, please visit their website.

The types of workflow you get in I’m Productive

A workflow refers to a series of steps that are undertaken to perform an action. This sequence has scientific value in that you can repeat it to get the same result, every single time.

For a simple example, think of updating an older version of software on your computer. The steps you would take for it may look like this:

  • Buy the latest version of the software

  • Insert the disc into your computer’s disc tray

  • When the relevant prompt appears, give permission for the software to be installed

  • Give appropriate permissions- or deny them- according to each new prompt

  • After the installation is complete, the prompt asks you to restart the system.

  • Restart

  • Take the disc out of the tray

This simple series of steps gives you the assured result of the latest version being installed. But the sequence cannot be altered for the flow to be successful. For instance, you should not restart your system during the installation process.

Use of workflow

Businesses document their workflows so that they could easily see if there is a need to optimize them.

In our earlier example, you can perhaps add a step or two to make the workflow even better. For instance, before inserting the disc into the computer, you can add this: “Make sure there is enough power in the system so it wouldn’t shut down before installation is finished.”

If the system shuts down during the installation process, you would have to start over again. Meaning, a waste of time. But by adding this step, you can avoid such issues.

In businesses too, you can optimize a workflow to minimize the time taken to finish tasks and improve productivity.

Types of workflows

With I’m Productive, you can view different types of workflows according to your requirement:

The simple workflow or project workflow

This is the most comprehensive workflow for a project. As the name indicates, it helps you keep track of how complex projects are proceeding.

The simple workflow is particularly useful in the case of multi-tiered projects. When the project has different processes working simultaneously, to get an overall picture, a visual layout of the processes involved is ideal. That is exactly what I’m Productive brings you.

In this view, you get to see these parameters:

Task created- This indicates that a particular task has been created and is assigned to a team member

In progress- This shows that the task is currently in progress. Here, you will get to see the estimated time left in which the task will be finished, depending on the rate of progress so far.

On break- This indicates that the person who is doing the task is on break. I’m productive uses sophisticated measurement tools related to this. For instance, the timer that counts overall work hours automatically halts when someone goes on a break and will resume by its own once work does.

Closed- This indicates that the task has been reviewed and closed successfully

Review workflow

Review workflow, as the name suggests, has to do with reviewing a project. This would have the above-mentioned items listed out Task created, In progress, On Break and Closed.

But before arriving at the Closed point, you need to review the task. For this, there are two separate parameters:

On Review- This indicates that the task is currently being reviewed and final feedback is yet to be provided for the same. To distinguish ‘On Review’ from other parameters which are all given in green, this is color-coded in orange.

Rejected- Tasks that don’t meet the desired quality standards are typically rejected If that’s the fate of a particular task, it would be indicated in the Review workflow as ‘Rejected.’ Its color is red so that it clearly stands out from the other parameters.

Having these workflows helps you find out any bottlenecks that could potentially delay timely project delivery. You can then optimize the workflow or intervene as and per required, to help ensure that the project is delivered on time. To know more, please visit their website.

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