You probably have a favourite undertaking administration instrument. It’s the one you’re conversant in and does all of the stuff you need. Celeste in gross sales and Ira in IT have favorites, too. All three are totally different, and since they’re all SaaS and use free trials or cheap licenses to draw clients, everybody can run the one they need.
They’ll till there’s a merger or acquisition or somebody in IT or procurement instantly notices a bunch of comparable apps deployed throughout the group. Now, everybody goes to be utilizing the identical undertaking administration instrument. How have you learnt if it’s going to meet your wants?
So long as it has these 9 options, you may nonetheless handle your initiatives and maintain the staff related. We’ve ranked them from most to least widespread so that you just would possibly want a extra subtle utility or a higher-priced model of the instrument.
Job administration
With regards to undertaking administration, process administration is the desk stakes. Any undertaking administration instrument you’re prone to take into account can create, assign and prioritize duties associated to numerous advertising and marketing initiatives.
They may all will let you set deadlines and observe the progress towards completion so everybody on the staff understands the place their varied advertising and marketing initiatives stand. An necessary side of process administration is its means to interrupt down massive initiatives (suppose lengthy, multichannel campaigns, for instance) into smaller, extra manageable duties assigned to numerous staff members.
Kanban boards
Kanban boards allow you to visualize the workflow of your staff’s advertising and marketing initiatives. You may transfer the duties which might be half of a bigger undertaking from stage to stage (e.g., to-do, in progress, full) so you may observe your staff’s progress.
What’s usually under-rated about Kanban boards is their means to determine bottlenecks and perceive what’s inflicting delays rapidly.
Dig deeper: 5 methods to make use of undertaking administration information to boost operational finest practices
Gantt charts
Many undertaking managers love Gantt chart. For advertising and marketing groups, Gantt charts will enable you to plan and schedule your initiatives utilizing a visible timeline. They make figuring out dependencies between your duties and monitoring milestones simpler.
Like a Kanban board, Gantt charts enable you to observe your staff’s progress and alter timelines as wanted.
Some skilled undertaking managers choose Gantt charts, whereas others choose Kanban boards. It’s a private desire, and your staff may have its favourite. That’s why a undertaking administration utility lets customers select their view is efficacious to many groups.
Calendars and timelines
One of many causes undertaking administration instruments are important for advertising and marketing groups is their means to maintain everybody on the identical web page. That’s particularly necessary with at this time’s dispersed workforces.
Mission administration instruments with shared calendars will assist your staff coordinate schedules, deliverables and deadlines. Like most calendars, undertaking administration instruments will will let you set alerts and reminders so everybody is aware of important dates.
One of many causes groups profit from undertaking administration instruments is their means to assist individuals work collectively effectively. Actual-time collaboration is nice, however as talked about earlier, many groups have members in numerous places and time zones.
Your undertaking administration instruments have to help real-time and asynchronous collaboration, make it simple to share information, and gather suggestions. The flexibility so as to add feedback and talk about throughout the platform will assist overcome the obstacles of a dispersed staff.
File sharing and doc administration
Together with collaboration options, groups want a central repository for undertaking information and paperwork. In advertising and marketing, this could embody all the pieces from textual content to pictures to audio and video.
Ideally, this centralized repository will even have entry controls and model management, which make it simpler for groups to collaborate on information (so long as you bear in mind to set the entry controls correctly).
Reporting and analytics
A lot of the concentrate on undertaking administration is on constructing issues — creating campaigns, growing property and extra. However as your advertising and marketing is aware of, that’s just the start. Your staff and undertaking administration instrument’s job isn’t over when the marketing campaign launches.
Your undertaking administration instrument ought to observe the efficiency of your initiatives so you may measure ROI and determine optimizations. That’s to not say you may’t use your undertaking administration instrument to trace spending and allocations through the construct section. You may. That’s particularly necessary when working with businesses, contractors and freelancers.
Customized workflows
Each staff has its personal workflows and processes. They may drive you loopy and really feel like pink tape, however they’re a truth of life. You want a customizable undertaking administration instrument that may be tailor-made to your wants.
These embody functionalities like customized templates for recurring duties or initiatives. Using AI in these instruments means it is possible for you to to save lots of time by automating repetitive duties.
Integrations
Once we discuss monitoring marketing campaign outcomes in your undertaking administration instrument, it’d sound like a redundancy you may stay with out. You most likely have that information in your CRM, social media administration instrument, or advertising and marketing automation platform.
Nevertheless, once you combine your instruments, that information turns into obtainable on no matter platform you’re engaged on. Syncing information between instruments eliminates the time and errors from manually shifting information from one platform to a different.
