Project Management Tools
An overview and review of some useful project management tools.
Last updated on February 1st, 2024
Good project management is about listening to opinions, understanding problems, asking questions, motivating team members and working out solutions. No technology can replace those core skills, but there are a whole range of tools available that can make managing a project easier and more efficient.
I’ve tried out a fair few tools during my project management career and stuck with some of the best. Here is an overview of the tools I use with my teams during the project lifecycle.
Smartsheet
A couple of years ago Project Managers had to almost exclusively use MS Project to build project plans. It was somewhat clunky, every time a small detail on the plan changed the entire timeline had to be exported as an excel doc, formatted and then resent to the client.
Luckily with web-based project management tools such as Smartsheet all of that manual process has become a distant nightmare. Now when you update the timeline your client can see the effect of any changes in real-time. Team members can also collaborate on Smartsheet which is very useful if you have more than one Project Manager on a workstream or somebody is stepping in to provide holiday cover etc.
The learning curve with Smartsheet is straightforward, although there are one or two quirks that still need working on.
Alternatives to Smartsheet include Team Gantt and Mondays.
Azure Boards
Microsoft Azure Boards is a planning and tracking tool for software development teams. The product can be configured for any project set-up and comes with built-in scrum boards. Team members can create user stories, bugs and epics with all the usual fields including tags, story points, iterations (e.g. sprint 3) and related work.
For projects that have multiple work items the built in ‘queries’ function allows an easy way to filter specific views. For example a user can set-up a query which shows just work items that have a specific tag e.g. ‘UI Design required’.
Azure Boards also have multiple extensions that can be added. We have been using the retrospective and calendar extensions.
Cons
ADO has an Organization settings > Project settings hierarchy and many of the useful configurations are within Organization settings so if you don’t have the right access privileges then you are stuck with certain set-ups. (e.g. State names not matching columns etc.).
Trello
There comes a time in every project where a Digital Project Manager needs to get very granular with tasks to push the project over the finishing line. When that time comes Trello is the tool I turn to. Tasks are listed out on cards and each card can be assigned to a team member with a due date and attachments added. When tasks are completed cards can be moved to a different list (e.g. ‘For QA’) or archived. The user interface is super simple and a Trello app is available for IOS and Android.
Slack
Slack is a project communication tool that is fast becoming the main method of communication in many organisations (even overtaking email).
Slack users can join project specific channels or have one-on-one conversations. It has a video calling and screen sharing functionality, and dedicated channels can be set-up that integrate with issues raised on JIRA boards and development builds pipelines.
While Slack works brilliantly for team communication, it is still useful to send more formal projects via email, that way you can more directive about who needs to read it.
PlanIT Poker
This is a great tool from Code First that allows virutal/distributed scrum teams to estimate story sizes collaboratively. Individual scoring tasks can be set to a maximum time limit and its easy to see who has contributed and who hasn’t.
Confluence
Every project, however, big or small needs things documented. Whether that’s a selection of ‘How to’s’ or meeting notes. Confluence is a great space for team members to work on things collaboratively.