The purpose of project management tools is to get things done, and not just about using the tool. Infact the more time you spend using the tool, the more counter-productive it gets in the actual tasks.

Project managers struggle if they lack the understanding of priority and productivity in work. For medium to large size organization, the project managers maintain at least a robust communication channel to keep all the concerned team members including the client’s on the same page.

In such procedures, a slight recklessness would impact bigger consequences that would affect the whole company. Cloud-based management tools can help you streamline your business and help you stay ahead in your competition.

The benefits of online tools are their availability and scalability. These days, tools can be accessed from any digital devices and you no longer have to rely on different services for email, chat, video conference, documentation, etc.

Here are the productivity tools that help you stay up in the game by giving an effective environment for project management.

1. Zoho Projects

Zoho has gives a complete package for managing all aspects of an organization. With more than a decade, the company is satisfying 150,000 consumers by giving them a productive platform to streamlining their businesses.

Zoho gives full control for managing teams, accounts, leads, projects, etc. Once you start using the intuitive UI of Zoho, the CRM becomes your own and be your one-stop solution for all your organization needs.

Zoho secures all your data including leads, companies, accounts, etc. Its user interface and the featureful dashboard will make your life easy by giving easy navigation and self-explanatory elements.

best project management tools

Zoho is one of the few CRM software in the market which offers a multipurpose platform and you, as a user, no longer need to rely on other service providers for different purposes like email, chat, documentation, account tracking, team managing, etc. Zoho optimizes your Sales pipelines by segregating all the channels.

Zoho offers bot which is based on Artifical Intelligence, named Zia which gives you trends and best practices to help you improve your on-going professional practices. Zia continuously observes your routine tasks at Zoho and predicts anomalies, conversions, trends, etc. It can save you time too by automating your daily tasks.

If you wish to tweak the design of your dashboard, Zoho lets you do so with its capability to customize the layouts through which you can utilize its featureful tools as per your convenience. You can also collaborate with different modules and establish a relationship between them to super-charge your project development.

Zoho has free and paid versions, the small businesses can leverage the free version of the tool and organize their routine tasks. However, to access the advanced functionality of the tool, you have to go for the paid version.

2. Asana

Asana is your one-stop solution that makes managing tasks fun and interactive. The platform gives your team an opportunity to stay on the right track and prioritize their work so they never miss any deadline.

As you grow your business, the roles and responsibilities of resources would increase too and Asana brilliantly mitigates such queries by giving you an excellent user interface to stay updated and know the current proceedings of each project.

Asana allows you to merge all your properties across all the digital platforms under one roof. You can manage marketing, advertising, sales, client retention, customer services and remarketing activities along with team management, process integration, initial briefing and task assigning responsibilities.

Once you make any changes or assign tasks to your members, they get an email notification about their association with the on-going project. You can upload attachments, videos, images, documents to streamline your project development phase. A project manager can also comment on the on-going work to show his view or suggest edits to improve existing situations.

The software ensures real-time updates with its cross-platform access compatibility. You can log in to your Asana account from mobile or desktop browsers to work from anywhere and anytime.

3. HubSpot  

HubSpot’s CRM has the potential of transforming your online business to ranging success. The platform fetches user interactions and simply complex demographics to show where are your prospects, what they have been looking and how they are interacting with your online properties.

HubSpot CRM gives you profound insights through which you can identify lucrative platforms for better customer acquisition and find potential buyers for your products. Through this platform, you can categorize your consumer types, run independent campaigns for them and identify key areas to focus.

The CRM literally reveal the expectation and your prospects’ heart through which you can win them through your marketing and advertising efforts. Similar to Google Analytics, HubSpot gives you complete insights into your website visitors and campaign performances.

Through HubSpot, you can monitor and edit on-going campaigns and improve your sales funnel to help your ROI. You can integrate your email accounts like Gmail and Outlook to access all your conversations at one place. The platform makes sharing and making documents and spreadsheets become easier. If you wish to track the engagement like who is seeing your documents, you can request email for accessing the documents.

HubSpot gives you readymade templates for communication and outreaches your prospects and team members. Moreover, you can also integrate your social media accounts to get the respective data like retweets, responses, messages, inquiries, comments, mentions, etc.

HubSpot CRM can also automate your daily tasks and email scheduling through which you won’t forget important and routine task of your projects. Finance online awarded HubSpot as the best CRM software of 2018.

4. Hive

Hive is an interactive cloud-based project and team management software. With its distinctive capabilities, it can help you organize your project execution, manage your time and make your workforce productive.

With its three dashboards, Hive introduces you to enormous opportunities to improve your workflow and attain maximum efficiency. Hive gives you real-time analysis and development about your own and team’s situation. You will be notified whenever your team members perform specific actions. You can add, edit, message or assign tasks to any of your members using Hive.

For big projects, it is necessary that all the team members know the basic and mandatory details of the project along with the company’s rule and regulation. Hive provides you a robust platform to manage such things flawlessly. Moreover, Hive understands that all users have different requirements and style of working. Hence, Hive provides you custom reporting in various forms like Pie Chart, Gantt charts, and tables.

You can create a template to automate important and redundant tasks. The template is a set of steps which has to be performed to complete a task, you can make custom templates for your projects to automatically complete desired operations.

Communication between peers is extremely crucial and imperative for better process execution. Hive provides a robust framework where you can create groups of team members or individually message your colleagues to talk. You can send attachments in the chats through GoogleDrive or Dropbox account. You can also integrate Slack or Zoom account for the smoother communication process.

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an easy-to-learn highly effective project management tool. This cloud-based tool gives you information and suggestion while using its dashboard. With its robust and excellent knowledge base, you will get a throughout understanding of how to get the most out of this productive tool and channelize your workforce for the profit-oriented approach.

Your customer support will be a lot smoother and easier once the Freshdesk is there. The tool is best suited for organizations who engage heavily in customer support and have a dedicated team of customer support agents who constantly resolve customer tickets.

Through Freshdesk, you can optimize your team’s performance by knowing which individuals need to improve in his working style by getting custom reports and dedicated information about the performance of your team members.

As a team leader, you will get complete information about how many tickets are successfully resolved by all agents and who is handling how many average customers query a day. Based on such advanced data, you can filter best and underperforming resources to manage your team properly.

The customer support staff usually have redundant work every day; so to make their jobs fun, Freshdesk has taken a unique approach to entertain and achieve productivity. They have gamified the whole concept of resolving tickets.

After every successful ticket resolve, the team member will get points and the highest performing employee, the one who has most points, will be rewarded or compensated for its optimum performance. This way, your internal customer support staff gets a healthier environment and keep them on their toes to entertain maximum customer support tickets.

6. Basecamp

Communication is the key behind smoothening or complexing tasks in any organization. Basecamp, which was previously known for 37Signals, streamlines your complete life cycle from onboarding clients to assigning tasks and from meeting deadlines to storing important attachments at one place, Basecamp has got it all.

Traditional email communications can be tiresome when the thread becomes longer and recipients are three or more. You may get stuck in CC and BCC mistakes and end up messing the whole thread. Moreover, finding a particular email thread from thousands of email conversations is a time-consuming and boring procedure. Basecamp resolves such problems by streamlining everything.

For example, you are supposed to send the same message to your client, designer, account manager, and product manager to keep them updated about the recent plans you have proposed. This information has attachments in the subsequent threads or in the initial conversations. The thread becomes complicated when the new receipt is added and the existing one gets replaced due to various reasons.

Furthermore, all the recipients are included in multiple projects to miss the priority of the tasks and unintentionally avoid the deadline.

All the potential problems discussed in the example is resolved by Basecamp. You can choose the sender and choose the priority of the task. They will be notified in emails that you have sent a message in Basecamp. If they wish to revert in the thread, they can easily do so from their 3rd party email providers and the conversations will automatically reflect on Basecamp threads.

Moreover, you can find the attachments and no need to worry about storing them locally because the cloud storage of the platform will always save all the files shared in the conversation. Basecamp also provides whiteboards which are editable documents through which all the associated people can edit and put project details at one place.

7. Quire

Quire can take your task management skills to the next level. You can write your upcoming tasks on a tree-based format where you can add branches important tasks and further include subtasks for each to attain efficient end result.

The tool allows you to add relevant people for each task through its interface. You can attach files and talk with your team members through chat functionality of the tool. Moreover, you can integrate third-party services like GoogleDrive, Siri, etc.

On the iOS application of Quire, you can take a photo of an idea and instantly turn it into tasks on the platform. You can import tasks and flag them to give them a visual appeal to be found out easily from the tree. Moreover, you can add multiple people to your tasks and assign them their jobs.

Moreover, if you wish to track the evolution of a task to better plan your upcoming projects, you can check the history of all the tasks ever assigned on the platform.

Conclusion

In order to get more stuff done, you can use any of the above tools.

If you are planning to go for any particular tool for your streamlining your business, you can go with the trial versions of the desired tool and see how things work for your business.

If you are currently using either of these cloud-based team management software, share your experience in the comments. If you know any other tools that one must try to stay up in the business, share them too in the comments.

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Sidz is a college drop-out, "musician turned digital geek", a spiritually grounded minimalist, father of 2, and husband of a loving wife. He founded the Internet Lifestyle Hub in 2018 to fix the education and employment system for good. Currently, he is helping over 20,000+ coaches, teachers, and experts digitize their knowledge. He’s an international best-selling author of the book You Can Coach and is on a mission to help 1,000,000 people live a lifestyle of freedom!

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