Our Favorite Tools for Project Management

It can be overwhelming to manage a large book of clients and keep your projects in order, however over the years we have learned about what works for our agency. Over the years we have tried different software systems, and we have come up with a few systems that enhance our team, which ultimately helps our clients.

So what are our top 3 project management tools?

Slack – Hands down, this is our lifeline. Slack is a team messenger service that is way more collaborative than email ever could be. Slack allows you to create individualized channels with specific team members who are invited to share and message on that specific project. So if one of your team members isn’t on a particular project, they won’t be forced to see the channel or be distracted by questions that do not involve them.  Slack also allows us to invite our clients to specific channels, this helps us have better (and more timely) communication and collaboration that includes file sharing and video chat features.

Jira – Wait, did I say slack was our lifeline? I mean…it’s Jira, definitely Jira. If it’s not on the sprint board, it’s not getting done – simple as that. Jira is a an agile project management software that allows us to fully plan out our team’s workflow (we refer to them as Sprints) and then track each specific task from planning, to development, to QA, to deployment. It’s amazing for accountability because the entire team is able to see where each individual project currently is at in the development process.

Confluence – This one took our team a while to fully embrace. It wasn’t until we started getting larger, and more complex, software projects that we realized we needed to house all the content we were using during projects. All the notes and emails that usually would be with one or maybe two people on a team, now reside in its own space that everyone on the team can access. We keep processes, release notes, decision logs as well as all our our meeting agendas and minutes all within the project Confluence space. And since Confluence and Jira are both Atlassian* products, we can easily integrate them to help tie our projects together more efficiently.

 

*Please note, Standard Beagle is not affiliated in any way with Atlassian, we are just fans of their products.