Life is speeding up
Life continues to move at an ever increasing pace. The fastest car in the world now travels at 270 mph, the world record for the marathon is close to going sub 2 hours, Jimmy John's can get your sandwich to you "Freaky Fast", whatever that means, and we can now communicate with anyone in the world within a matter of seconds through email, cell phones, text, social media, and Skype amongst other things.
Doing more, with less, and doing it faster
This fast-paced life, the need for things yesterday, being forced to multitask, and an ever growing list of responsibilities means that the need to be connected and organized has never been so important. Remote workers, multiple communication platforms, different time-zones, working from the field or out of a hotel, and the increased need for collaboration mean that systems need to be streamlined to avoid complete chaos.
Staying connected with remote workers
Growth at companies typically is a sign of great times ahead. Your business model works perfectly, you have an incredible staff in place, your customers love you, and the work keeps coming in. However, this means that there are a lot more items to be dealt with, which means more staff, new office buildings, remote workers, and increased complexity in everything that you do. Unless you have top notch organization and communication systems in place, your growth may become a burden that actually ends up shrinking your book of business. For this reason it is imperative for you to have task management and collaboration tools to keep all of your team on the same page, and prevent things from falling through the cracks.
Assigning tasks in Trello
This situation led us to look for software solutions and we first used Trello. This was a great resource for task management, but had deficiencies when we were trying to assign certain components of projects to individual project managers.
Let the competition begin...
With this ever increasing speed, combined with the desire for quality service, on-time project completion, and the ability to collaborate with colleagues all over the world, the need for support with organization has never been greater. With that in mind we take a look at the top 7 apps that can save your day and wash away all of your collaboration concerns.
Our top 7 apps
(1) Asana
Asana's website says, "Run your day, your team and your company." This task management software can work for personal task management as well, but its larger focus and company-oriented tools make it better suited for project management at the team or department level. It syncs across computers and mobile devices and integrates with many third-party programs, including MailChimp and Evernote, to create a versatile system.
Like most task management apps, Asana lets you set up tasks, organize them into lists or projects, set due dates and assign them to other members of your team. It has a search feature to let you find tasks by task name, project or people involved. You can also add tags to any project to make grouping and searches easier.
One of my favorite features is that it has recurring events so as soon as you complete this week's trade blog and check it off, next week's immediately appears. We also use Asana for our grocery list, home maintenance to do list, tracking birthday and Christmas gifts, and to make sure our bills are paid on time.
This service is free for up to 15 members, and the Premium platform is available for approximately $8 per person, per month.
(2) Trello
Trello is known for visualizing project tasks on a cardboard-like dashboard that’s great for managing quick and simple everyday assignments. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, Trello is a great way for teams to collaborate visually on any project.
This tool is free for personal use, and $9.99 per user per month for the business platform.
(3) Microsoft teams
Teams is a platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. The service integrates with the company's Office 365 subscription office productivity suite, including Microsoft Office and Skype, and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products.
(4) Zoho
Zoho Projects is one of the best-known tools for simple project management, that can help teams streamline their upcoming work and tasks. Zoho projects can be integrated with Zoho CRM and other tools to manage almost every aspect of your agency in one system. Up to 20 projects will cost you $25/month, with unlimited projects being available for $99/month; CRM and other additional features come with an extra price but all features can be integrated very simply.
(5) Microsoft Project
Helps to streamline project, resource, and portfolio management. This project tool is used by 20+ million users. From $30 month/user for cloud platform, from $1,159 for on-premise software (for one PC)
(6) Smartsheet
Is excellent for managing and automating collaborative work. As you would guess, Smartsheet is based around a series of integrated spreadsheets, within which you can see live sheet updates, set access permissions, and receive notifications of project updates. Smartsheet is trusted by over 50% of the Fortune 500 and is available from $15 month/user for teams.
(7) Google Docs
This is one of the best team project management tools because almost everyone that does anything on the web has a Google account. And with a free account you get shared spreadsheets, documents, presentations, email, and storage (that is if you consider access to your information so you can be marketed to, free).
And the winner is...
After having used all of the above tools in some way shape or form over the past few months, the team at Service That Solves unanimously award the best organization and collaboration app crown to Asana, with Teams and Google Docs also making the podium.
Do you have a nomination not featured here?
If you have a different tool that you love please share it in the comment box below. We are always looking for better and faster ways to do things! Please share any other workplace collaboration ideas that you have, as well as things that may not have worked so well.
If you enjoyed this post and are interested in looking at technology tools that help you with productivity, finances, and scheduling, please be sure to check out this great article from our friends at Cloudwards.