What To Look For In Project Management Applications

What To Look For In Project Management Applications

Technology is meant to be something that makes it easier to run your business, not one that makes it more difficult. It is not meant to complicate or to slow down business strategies, but to complement them. When properly utilized and taken advantage of, the right combination of devices, programs, tools, and other technology should make it easier to run your business and focus on the part of your business that makes you money. Technology can save you time, stress, and labor costs. Below we’ll look at several of those helpful technologies.

Why You Should Use Task-Management

A web-app that a lot of business owners can seriously benefit from is task-management software. Task-management can create scalable processes and help sustain growth in the long-run, as well as save on labor costs and ensure problems get resolved. When a business is just starting, it is easy to keep track of all of your customers and projects. If you only have 1-2 employees and less than 10 customers to keep track of, it can be easy to just use simple pen and paper and to just tell your employees what to do in person. But when your business starts growing, and you suddenly have more employees and a few dozen different jobs, projects, and customers to manage, suddenly things can start slipping through the cracks. Even if you can get all the work you need to do done, it will require a lot more effort on your end. You will have to keep track of all of the open jobs.

Common Task Management App Features

The best project management software should combine several already existing program needs and put them in one place. This means that your customer help desk, billing and invoicing, and appointment scheduling could all be combined into one. The following shows what you should look for in suggested software.

Task and Project Management

Task and project management applications should have the ability to:

  • Create projects and assign specific tasks related to the project to specific employees
  • Record any notes related to the project and record extensive logs for any costs incurred from services or materials (proper usage of field notes should also save you labor costs by encouraging the sharing of knowledge and discouraging people doing the same work twice to rule out a specific problem)
  • Store files related to the project. This feature is offered by some applications, but normally with somewhat limited storage space and feature functionality. A solution often used is using a CRM/Project Management Suite alongside something like a Google Drive

Customer and Ticket Tracking

These applications should be able to:

  • Use the task and project management features to distribute workload
  • Track when customers come in and what their problem is
  • Organize the support tickets that come in

Billing

Billing applications can vary, but should include these features:

  • Send invoices and track payments
  • Compile accounting reports for end of the year taxes and reports

Communication

Many applications are also meant to improve communication between employees in a business, and feature abilities such as:

  • Alerting employees to company policy changes
  • Allowing employees to put in maintenance requests

Helpful Software To Be Covered:

  • Slack
  • Google Drive
  • WORKetc
  • Basecamp
  • Salesforce
  • Trello
  • Each one of these has a few unique features, and while some are complete suites of software that cover almost every aspect of business management, others are very basic and mainly just handle the management of specific tasks and projects. We will be going over the differences in the following articles.

    If you would like more information about tackling your project management tasks efficiently, contact tekRESCUE in San Marcos, TX.

project management, software
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