 Good evening, everyone. Good evening, afternoon. I'm losing my mind. I've been at WordCamp all weekend, so So I just wanted to Dive in a little bit today on picking your project management software Just so everyone is aware. This is a 10,000 foot overview talk. This is not nitty-gritty dirty details. I Want to make everyone kind of aware of that because sometimes people go, oh, okay, never mind not the talk I was envisioning So if that's the case it will not offend me if you check out someone else's otherwise. I'm really excited about diving in today My name is Sandy Edwards. I am a digital agency owner and a digital marketer I've been a website developer for five years I've been a project manager for eight years I've been a user for seven years and actually being a user is what turned me into a developer and basically with project management, I got tired of sending stuff to a developer and Waiting for three or four days to get the project back So I sat down one weekend on a Friday after work. I spent the entire weekend on code academy calm I came out the end of the weekend with my own personal website and I haven't looked back on Top of that if I can get my computer to work, right? I've been a mom for 12 years For anyone who's heard me talk before most of my talks are actually based on childhood education In the WordPress space. So this is a little bit outside of my normal realm I've been a homeschool mom for four years and you can find me on Twitter at Sunsand design I share a lot of really cool stuff both for project management digital marketing and also education So what really is a project manager? One of the biggest things is you're the team guide your job is to lead guide and direct your team from start to finish Sometimes you're even involved in the sale or up sale process You have to be highly adaptable. You have to be extremely detail oriented You're the delegator So when it comes to making sure that the project is moving smoothly You're delegating to your marketing team your development team and so on and so forth You're the visionary of the project. You're working directly with the client You have to be extremely creative because of this and also you have to be extremely resourceful So what does that mean? There's different personality types when it comes to project management One of the things that I've learned from dealing with many project managers in my consulting I will come into a company and I will help a company who is in between project managers And I will assess how they work what kind of clients they have and come up with the best path For them and their best workflow and so in doing so I have to assess what kind of project manager they need So what I've done is I've taken that and put that into different types of project managers For this first type the micromanager this does not mean the person you can't stand Everybody can't stand that micromanager sitting over their shoulder making sure everything's going on now This is done at a distance But it is the person who is extremely detail-oriented when we talk about those Characteristics on the previous slide. This is their standout characteristic. They are the detail oriented The other thing is they want those frequent updates. They want to know exactly what's going on on the project That doesn't necessarily mean that it's every five minutes But there are softwares that allow you to auto-send an email So that the project manager is not the one pinging them all the time But your staff is able to give you that update and we'll get into that in a minute the overachiever Good is never good enough Okay, so they're the they're the project manager that when they're looking over everything They're like, you know, I just don't know if the client's gonna like that Let's change this that are the other thing. So you have to work really hard when you're the overachiever to understand that sometimes you just got to Be okay 90% you can still ship The superhero they come in and save the day when everything's blowing up. They're gonna swing in. They're like, it's okay I got this The strategist they're always four steps ahead. They know exactly what the client wants They know exactly who's on their team and they know exactly how they're gonna navigate that path The macro manager the macro manager is the one where the team's Dictating how everything is going and they're just making sure we're all in the same boat cruising down the river The general it is my way or the highway. We're gonna do it Very task-oriented very specific in the order and the dates that things are going to be done and The mentor let's talk about it Let's just see how this is going to work But you'll find with mentors are most people pick up on that and they become the personal mentor as well So you end up with people's personal problems and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does happen So what does that mean? So we know that there's different types of workflows, but when we're talking about project management software We have to figure out what's going to work for our team The type of project manager you are and the workflow your company has or you as an individual has So with types of workflows, we have agile agile is one of those workflows where things come in They change you have to be extremely flexible It doesn't really ever you don't really have an end date You've got a retainer client a lot of SEO work is very agile in that Scrum scrum is highly updateable. You have a scrum meeting in the morning It is an actual method and there are people who go and study the method and become scrum masters and they run everything that way The the 10-second meetings in the morning are what you do yesterday What are you doing today? What where your roadblocks and how are we going to fix it and who you're going to have to meet with to do it? And it's 10 seconds and you're on to the next person very fast-paced But it is a project management style The waterfall this is your standard website development project you start here you end here We have a start date an end date and we're going to go from the start to design to development to launch to post lunch Kanban This is a project management philosophy And you all talk about Kanban boards and things like that as well But with Kanban one of the biggest things is it's highly visual. It's very ten foot overview It's for those macro managers that don't need to be in the nitty-gritty dirty task list details But they need to see just the board of what's going on and then something you see in I Tell you what something you see in Software development specifically is rad it stands for rapid applications development this is a fast cycle of prototyping without Production so you prototype you develop and then once you get to a point of this flow and cycle Then you end up in production. I have yet to work at a company who uses rad I just think it's cool, and I want people to know that it exists Okay, so now we're going to actually talk about software So we need to know what to look for when we're talking about Project management software. It is really hard to pick the software for your company I Literally spent for my company I spent a good 30 to 60 days before I finally landed on a final software that worked for us But the biggest thing is you've got to look at your personality type Because if it's not going to work for you as the main PM. It's not going to work for your staff either It's really easy to get everyone else on board when you have a handle on things because remember you're their guide The other thing is your workflow type if the software is built for agile and everything you do is waterfall It's not going to work. It's just going to be a bad fit pricing type if you're a team of a hundred employees and You're looking at a per-person pricing. There may be a flat rate priced project management software out there That's better for you, and that's going to be less money. I do not ever Say that it's good for you to rely on a hundred percent on pricing some things are worth the extra dollar for sure But it's definitely something to put in that spreadsheet when you're making comparisons Other thing is the ease of use remember. You're not the only one using the software So you've got to look at how easy is it going to be for me to onboard my staff? How easy is it for them to use on a daily basis and are they going to buy into this because if it's extremely Complicated the buy-in process is going to be ridiculously hard on your part What levels of support do they offer? Remember we're talking about mostly online systems. What happens if it goes down that can cripple what you're doing on a daily basis? Potentially so how does their support work? Can you call someone? Can you open up a chat window or do you email someone and hope that they're going to get back to you? What features do you specifically need? Do you need time tracking? Do you need the ability to see to send a report to someone higher up with what projects are open? What type of those features are you are you looking at needing? What integrations do they offer? Do they integrate with your time tracking software if you use something externally? Do they integrate with your billing software if you do time-based projects? And what are your client needs a lot of companies are built on Transparency these days and they want their clients in their project management software with limited capabilities so if you have the ability for your If you want your clients to be able to send you files directly into your project management software So they go straight to your developers then that is something that you're going to want to look at when you're looking at Your software option So these are the most used project management systems according to Oh Gosh There's a begin to the sea there's a software thing that takes all the users for everything and gives you the top like 10 So these are the top 10 the order where to go in go through them in is from the most used To the least used there's tons more than these these are just the most used that are out there I've used probably 90% of these myself at some point and or put a company into One of these as an option So the first one is Reich has anyone heard of Reich Has anyone used Reich now, okay Reich is It's a very very flexible system if you think of like how your computer is set up with folders and files That's how Reich is set up. So it's really easy to get people to understand what it is This is very much set up for the general Someone who's going to tell you exactly how to do things the way it's laid out is extremely structural You can use this in an agile or waterfall company I've used it in both It's a per user plan level pricing and it is not cheap This is probably the most expensive software I'm going to talk about today, but it's also the most used because it's that good The downside with Reich is that if you do not have five users, you're paying for users You're not using that is their minimum entry is paying for five users and like I said not cheap I do give it overall a three star. It's a lot of onboarding. So when It's easy to use day in and day out and it's really easy to get the buy-in from your staff the onboarding process is ridiculous But they walk you through it and they help you. So it's a lot of hand-holding from them There's a lot of videos and documentation but it works really good to be both a project management and a desk System so if you do have ongoing clients that can send and support requests and things like that This would function as both. So it's kind of killing two birds with one stone Their support's pretty good. They're not American based that I'm aware of But I still got pretty good support when I was working on onboarding one of the pretty large companies I was working with tons of features task lists can ban boards Gantt charts resource charts. So if you do have 20 or 30 staff members you can see exactly how many hours each one are assigned each day So you can make sure you're evening out the work and you're not overworking your staff Form requests for that desk side of things live file editing So if you upload a word doc or your client uploads a word doc, you can edit that file live Time and budget tracking. It does sync with harvest which I'll talk about in a minute Calendars you can actually have proofing. So when you send your client inside of rake, you can actually send your client that Design file and they can approve it. So you have written confirmation of the approval Which is something that not a lot of the systems do It syncs with email has mobile apps custom fields dashboard statuses workflows It's got it all which is why it's the most used And Again tons of integrations like I said the email sync with both Google and Microsoft products It actually syncs with Adobe for your design files for that approval process and straight into Slack notifications So it's definitely the top of the line. It also allows for unlimited free collaborators Those are your clients. So while you are stuck paying for those five licenses You do have the ability to add as many clients as you need to Potentially even Contractors as well if the collaborator level is enough for what you need it for So that's definitely something to keep in mind Has anybody heard of Podio? Do you does anybody use Podio? Nice. Okay. So if I say anything Call me out on it. Okay, cool So with Podio I and again, these are all Subjective and the way I see things so feel free to correct me later But personality would be the micromanager the way Podio is laid out Waterfall or can ban, but I would not say Podio would work for the agile client There's not recurring tasks and things like that at least not right now Again, we're at the per user plan pricing But I give it four stars on ease of use. It's easy to set up It's fairly easy to use on an ongoing basis But it does lack a few key features when you have recurring clients like the recurring tasks Support's okay. It's pretty good tons of features When you use extensions some are free and some are paid. So that's where you get into additional costs And then it also has some good integrations when it comes to Google Microsoft box dropbox Zapier, so whenever you see Zapier It's good and bad. I love Zapier but But this is a big but Zapier is not guaranteed to work 100% of the time I have used forms that I've zapped into Project management systems and I've gotten like 90% of the people requesting support And that's not good enough for me because I'm the overachiever So good enough isn't good enough So I like direct connect extensions better They do have can ban boards and list task views So when you're dealing with developers who need that visual view versus the task list, you've got both in there They have calendars for meetings customizable reports and templates so you can template your task list and reuse them over and over again It also allows for unlimited free collaborators when you need your clients to be involved in your work Teamwork anybody heard of teamwork anybody use teamwork nice teamwork was what we used and Until 30 days ago, and that's a whole nother story. They changed their pricing model So I'll get into that This is for the micromanager or the strategist. I could see a few overachievers using this as well And again, sometimes you're a mix of them all so that makes sense But the workflow is waterfall or can ban about six ish months ago They added can ban boards which has made my life so much easier because my husband loves can ban boards I hate them, but he loves them And so now he's like I can log into teamwork verse before getting him to look at a task list forget about it Per user plan levels. They used to be flat rate pricing and now they're per user and That became a problem. So that's why we moved, but There's always room for the people who are okay with per user pricing I give it a four-star Just because I had a hard time getting some team buy-in I had two team members who me getting them to use teamwork was kind of like come on I need your time in here. This is how I'm doing things But all in all it is a fairly easy system to use Their support was great. It was responsive. So when I'm looking at How good support is I want to know that they're responding pretty quickly when I say responsive I mean it was three hours, but I consider that for a large system to be pretty responsive Tons of features They've got the list view. They've got the calendars. They sync with Google pre-built project templates milestones a Gantt charts Subtasks dependencies so I can make certain tasks dependent and if I change the date on the milestone all the dates update So if a client's like I need to push the design off a week No problem gotcha covered. It also holds information like a CRM for your client so you don't necessarily need the CRM and Teamwork I still keep a CRM, but that's again because I'm an overachiever It has few integrations though, so it does have Google does sync with Microsoft 365 But the other integrations are more expensive you have to be on higher plans So you're looking at integrations you need Features you need and a per-user pricing, so you end up working your way up to the higher pricing pretty quickly And for me that's a con, but it does allow for unlimited free collaborators, but collaborators Can't add files if I remember correctly from when I was using it So having a client and wanting them to have the ease of being able to just drop a bunch of files in there I had to make them employees, which now I'm in the per-user pricing They have some work to do, but that's okay. They're a good project management software nonetheless Freedcamp has anybody heard of Freedcamp has anybody used Freedcamp? I have not integrated Freedcamp into anyone so much so that for me to add this into the To my presentation because it was in the top 10. I had to go set up a free account I'm actually pretty impressed to be honest I would say definitely this is for the strategist someone who's staying three steps ahead It's very dashboard based So that high-level dashboard, but three steps ahead of everybody else kind of person Waterfall or can man method for sure Per user plan pricing, but they have a free plan So check it out if it's just you so because they do have a free option So far with my test project Again, haven't used this in the wild. It's been four stars. I'm pretty pretty impressed I did email them telling them I was going to be doing this and they responded almost immediately and Answered any questions I had so that was that was pretty cool Lots of features in their paid plans. So again, they have the free one You're paying for features, but they've got task boards project boards very very very visual very dashboard based They have widgets So you can actually create the dashboards the way you need them to be And so you can actually have it where each individual team member is creating their own widgets And then they're able to fit their needs to manage their tasks on a daily basis while you're just kind of overseeing everything So I guess in that way I could I could also make the argument for the macro manager as well No external integrations. So this is still a baby project management software But they've got a pretty good start for where they fall in the top 10 And they do allow for unlimited free viewers So if you want your client to just keep track of what's going on viewers Base camp who's sort of base camp almost everybody. Yeah, who uses base camp? You use everything Okay, that makes sense That that makes total sense She was saying it was great for nonprofit clients, which is very very true Okay, so base camp just redid like everything like five years ago So before it was literally Tesla's and that was it it integrated with harvest and that was like the end of the day They have done a complete revamp. They have a lot more features and so now I would tell you the macro manager slash mentor because of the style Communication that they have inside of this Waterfall or remote scrum So if you're doing scrum remotely One of the cool things that this has if you're not using slack, which if you're not using slack Let me tell you this is going to be a quick slack plug you slack It is amazing for communication both with your clients without your clients. You can have public or private channels It's amazing. I use it every day Couldn't live without it, but they have a thing called campfire inside of base camp and that is a little chat system So your clients can chat with you similar to slack, but it's all within the project So when you archive that project at the end of the project cycle, it's all still right there So if you need to go back and see what Johnny said about the project or what Susie said about the project Because now they're saying they didn't say that Because that happens every day You have written proof inside your archived project The other thing that it has is check-ins and this is where the remote scrum part comes in It sends an email whenever you say to send the email that says Hey dev, what did you do today? What did you do yesterday? What roadblocks do you have and you create the questions and Then they answer in the email and submit and it goes right into the project So as a project manager from a high level, you can see exactly what everyone's doing You're good to go it does allow you to upload docs and files, so that's good All in one price You don't pay per person You don't pay per project. You don't pay per pre per feature and it's affordable So if price is an object This is definitely one to highly consider Three star ease of use here's why all of these things are very segmented your to-do list is Your to-do list is over here your schedule is here your message board is here your campfire chat is here Your automatic check-ins are here and your files are over here There's not a single view that I have found that I can see all of this in a stream That's my biggest complaint But otherwise it's amazing I used base camp at An organization where we had like 20 employees and it was great if you had a hundred. I'd say it was too much correct So so basically what Anna just said is you can you can departmentalize this as well So you can have a a task list that is specifically for One state or one department and another task list that only that other department can see and another task list another department can see Which allows you to kind of break it up a little bit and make it a little bit more easier But for the one person at the top, it's still a lot going on. So just remember that as your Their support is actually pretty good I've said that a lot of companies, but there's a reason that these are in the top 10 You'll see in a few minutes that I have some that aren't so good with support But they have the standard features the only thing Integration wise that is an external integration is harvest that is it I could not find documentation of any other external integrations, which is kind of sad I think you can do Google login, but that's Limited and of course, it's unlimited users because so it doesn't matter if it's a client user or An employee user. It's unlimited users because you're doing that all in one price Did you get the picture? Asana who's heard of Asana who uses Asana? Not anymore Okay, so Asana is a Task list system They've added a few more features since then, but when you think of what base camp used to be That's what Asana kind of still is This is for your mentor your overachiever Someone who can just do just check off a check checklist and and that's enough Waterfall they did add Kanban about 30 days ago. So that is their newest feature is having the Kanban boards No, you cannot Correct Yes, so to to repeat what was said is you you can't switch back and forth between Kanban and task list You do one or the other so at that point use Trello The the prices per user if you upgrade to their paid plans, but let me tell you their free plan Does almost everything. There's very little that you need to pay to upgrade for So when you're looking at it Strongly look can I get away with just the free plan? Of course if they saw this video, they probably would not like that, but that's okay These abuses five stars. It's a task list system. So you type in your task you type in the due date You assign it to a person done There's not really anything to complicate the matter when you're dealing with in a group of three or four people It's perfect Anything more than that you might want to start looking at do I need to look at who's assigned to what and when and where? Pretty good support dish if you hit them on social media I Haven't had an issue where I've needed support though So while I've hit them up once and they were pretty responsive. It's once where some of these other ones I've hit them up a lot The company that rates all of the software says they have pretty good support. I'm kind of trusting that I read through a bunch of reviews where people had a lot of issues when they were doing the paid plans and They handled everything very professionally. So Even though I haven't used it the internet so far says it's pretty good sport All the standard features are free They do integrate with harvest they have To-do lists candle calendars. They do have Gantt charts if you get an add-on. So there's a lot of add-ons for a sauna Some are paid some are free, but then you're going through another company that's hooking into your sauna API to pull that other stuff over So keep in mind with that now. You're looking at two baskets that you might be having to pay potentially Everything's a checklist. They do have Kanban boards with add-ons. So you can go through another company to pull your to-do list into a Kanban board Tags subtasks and harvest integration and it allows for unlimited users on the free plan and With the paid plan you're paying per user. So Little things to think about project manager comm. Okay, so here's the caveat with this one. Has anybody used this? Has anybody heard of it? Okay, so I actually haven't used it. So we're going off the internet with this one guys I did get a screenshot So that was fun. Looks like a Resource Gantt chart, which is nice. It's clean. I got to give them credit for that I'm definitely the micro manager everything in project manager comm is Very detail-oriented Lots of details you can track everything It's kind of overkill Definitely waterfall. I cannot see any other type of workflow working with project manager comm everything's per user Four star ease of use. I got a free 15-day trial plugged in a test project and Fairly easy to set up it walks you through like what do you do? How do you do it type of a thing? Fair support Their support was given like three stars online so Keep that in mind. I don't think they're a big organization But they have a lot of larger clients That keep them afloat It's pricey to manage multiple projects. Everything's per project pricing. I believe I was per user, but they have Per project as well like you're limited. So like you get X number of users and X number of projects So if you've got a lot of projects You're moving up that scale pretty quick and it's per user pricing as opposed to like bulk pricing So yeah, it doesn't agree with Zapier Google and Microsoft. So it covers, you know, the big three But even your clients are you're paying by the user So keep that in mind It's got to-do lists calendars Gantt charts and overview of your reports and it kind of ends there So not a whole lot of features Trello, who's heard of Trello? Who loves Trello? Okay Trello is One of the most used here when we're organizing work camps. I know my work camp we use Trello to organize everything Trello and air table. Anyway Definitely the mentor macro Manager for sure 100% can ban there's no way around it because that's a can ban board It's free Who doesn't love free? It's very visual You can pay per user for Trello gold or Trello business but invite someone to Trello and you get a free month of Trello gold and you get added features and Trello business is There's not that many added features to make it worth it unless there's something specific that you're looking for Totally five star ease of use. It doesn't get any easier than Trello But their support's not great, but like 90% of their clients are using it for free So that kind of comes with you get what you pay for Features are all based on extensions Chrome extensions to be exact So in my this is my work camp Orlando board See how this is extended across the board and I have my due dates well the due dates aren't affected But see how these are extended across the board. It says the actual title there. I know it's hard to read That's a chrome extension that does that otherwise it would just be a little blip of Color and so I'd have to know what that color means for that tag But there's a chrome extension that allows me to pick how this shows up, which is great Um Can I tell you afterwards because I can grab it off my computer There's chrome extensions that pull your calendar out so that you can actually put your stuff in Google Calendar So, you know when your due dates are from your calendar view and your meetings and things So when you if you Google Trello Chrome extensions, you'll have tons of options to make Trello Do what you need it to do but out of the box It's exactly what they say that is it is a camban board and There's like next to no integrations outside of Chrome Integrations and everything if you are doing the paid version is paid by the user But like I said 90% of people who use Trello are using the free version. Oh, yeah, you can use that beer for sure Yeah, oh, yeah, don't get me don't get me wrong with zappier and and Trello There are tons of things that that you can do I had one client who used it as a help desk and so, you know They just zapped in the thing and then it alerted something else when There's a lot of things magic things you can do It is kind of What you see is is what you get unless you go in find those Extensions or build the zappier apps, which you only get so many for free. So Yeah, yep Absolutely, absolutely who's heard of Monday Okay, they've been advertising like crazy on Facebook and they're getting Plenty of clients from it because now they're in the top 10 if you notice though with Monday This doesn't really look like a project management software to me Definitely the macro manager. This is more of a blocking tool knowing who's doing what when but not really on a micro level Definitely works for agile and the flow of user or of staff Everything's per user. It's extremely easy to use Their supports pretty good They have a timeline of oncoming being built features. So they're still getting started but they They have slack Google Asana Trello Microsoft So what you're doing with this is you're actually plugging it into your Trello and your Asana and And working as a secondary system But you are paying by the user and really this probably what me something your client would ever even need access to but Final one 10 of 10 Zoho projects. Has anybody heard of Zoho projects? Has anybody used Zoho projects? Okay, so Zoho projects is very different and This is what we switched to from teamwork And that's because I use other things of Zoho's I use their CRM because it's cheap and it's good But now it integrates so it makes my life easier Definitely the micro manager or the overachiever for sure And waterfall for the most part now they do have recurring tasks They're just not as good as like teamwork or some of the other systems, but they do exist and So you could get away with basic agile things like SEO If you have recurring SEO clients or maintenance clients you could still use this because that's what we use for it's flat rate bracing I'm not paying per user I can get you the number afterwards. I don't remember off the top of my head Four stars of ease of use. It's hard to get people used to it But their support is actually pretty good for a company not based in the US So I haven't had a major issue. They called me to get me set up. I Have not experienced that with any of these others teamwork didn't call me, but anyway It's feature rich, so I've got all my Gantt charts. I have all of that and I'm not on their highest level plan I'm on their second tier plan. So for me to have a ton of features on a second tier plan I'm feeling pretty good They have very few integrations though outside of Zoho So you've got your you know syncing with your Zoho books, Zoho subscriptions, Zoho CRM, but outside it's like Google But it allows for unlimited users So because I'm paying a flat rate based on features I have the ability to add as many users as I need so my clients are happy Time tracking, subtasks, task dependencies, Google sync, gamification So my devs can see who gets stuff done faster and earn points, which I think is totally awesome CRM integrations to Zoho CRM and a few select others file storage Recurring tasks, Gantt charts and Zoho books integration so I can pull all my time straight into Zoho books and send out the invoice Which makes it pretty seamless for me That is the top 10. All my slides are at my ce2.io Wp y'all PM So feel free to download those If you have any questions We only have like three minutes left because I talk a lot and I had a lot to get through in a short amount of time But I will be in the happiness bar afterwards So if you want to come and have a more in-depth discussion about what you do and where you think you might what you think you might need I'll be more than happy to have that. But do I have any questions right now? I've got time for like two. Yes It's in a notebook somewhere on paper Because I'm still a paper user. I know that sounds horrible. I'm a project manager and I love my paper I'm the bullet journal gal like I have my bullet journal and that's what I do But I did I went through what do I need so I put the features that I need and it was checked they have it No, they don't Made sure that I was fully aware of pricing. Am I willing to pay more for this or not? How how much do I need that item? I would recommend doing some sort of you know, list or spreadsheet Air table is great for that because you can have it You can break it down really well an air table and if anybody hasn't heard of air table and wants to see it in action You can come to the happiness bar afterwards as well, but you're not sure what it is. But yeah for sure question over here I do Yes, I do if you come see me in the happiness bar I can Hop it from my computer to your computer because we have max so it makes it easy Thank you guys for having me today you guys are awesome and hopefully I'll see some of you in the happiness bar