Outsourcify has been chosen by Teamwork.com as part of their start-up program and have been lucky to get to get their project management tool for free for one year. We have now been using it for 6 month and wanted to share our experience.
We tried quite a few project management tools since we started, using their free trial but also paying some of them for a few months before switching to another we though was more fit to our business. We tried Bandcamp, Asana, Wrike, Zoho Projects, they were all OK but not nearly good enough, missing key features we did find later in TeamWork. Our main issue is that we do a lot of medium sized projects in parallel, on which one to three developers work, so we need to have a way to visualize all these projects in a clear calendar like view, while also being able to add task lists into them and know exactly who is doing what at any moment and what is planned next.
TeamWork does match our expectations and we are happy to continue using it. I’ll try to explain briefly how we use it and what we like in it.
Do you need an online project management tool?
The answer is yes in most cases if you work in a business where you work on projects related with the internet, whether for yourself or for clients. In the case part of your team is remote it becomes obvious to have a cloud-based solution.
TeamWork Projects is a web based project management tool for freelancers and small teams that do client work. You can create your projects in it, each project can have milestones, task lists, and tasks, it’s possible to share files or comments on tasks, send messages back-and-forth between team members (and potentially clients). One feature we use a lot is the time tracking which allows to determine how much time our team spends on each task.
Features :
- Projects – each has milestones, task lists, and tasks, notes (wiki-like documents), time tracking, and file uploads. Users and company access are handled at the project level.
- Time Tracking – You can log time spent doing tasks, either by leaving the time tracker run or just by inputting the time spent.
- File Sharing – Files can be uploaded and shared within projects, for exemple wireframes can be uploaded to tasks.
- Task lists and Tasks – Tasks (todo items) are grouped into task lists. Lists can be tied to a milestone (usually a product milestone or release planned on a specific date).
- Notes and Messages – Projects have a message board so team members and clients can talk to each other, as well as a place to upload files and create text notes.
Organizing tasks
The tasks can be displayed as lists or as a Kanban board. This feature is very similar to what Trello offers, Kanban is a method of managing work by displaying tasks as on a board having columns with cards you can move from a column to another. Here each card is a task, and each column is a state of work (think: to do, ongoing, to test, done). It’s possible to create as many columns as needed and label them however you like. Once you create a board, you can switch back to a more-traditional list view of all the tasks. Additionally, while in the Board view, you can add attributes to cards that you would normally associate with any Teamwork Project task, such as start dates, due dates, assignees, and time logs. When you open the full view of a card, there is a timer button at the top to keep track of time spent on task.
The feature that made us move from other project management tools are the projects view. We often have up to 40 projects open and we need to have a general view of it all, the calendar and Gantt Chart are very useful for that.
Project management made simple?
Project management is never simple and the Teamwork.com interface can be a bit overwhelming at times, but it has solid features that we now could not work without to manage our projects, assign tasks to our designers and developers, visualize who is doing what in the team.
Beware their pricing was recently changed to a per user model, which can lead to high costs for larger teams.
