Missed communications, crossed wires, lost documents, deadline pushbacks – the threats of a mismanaged project lurk around every corner of a long-term project and no team is safe at any stage during the project’s lifespan.
SaaS-focused businesses are particularly susceptible to the dangers of scope creep, given the nature of long-term client engagement and a subscription-based approach to sales. The need to both improve and iterate on a live product while supporting and maintaining existing services throws up a host of unique resource allocation challenges for project managers to consider.
So how can teams mitigate the dangers of a poorly-managed project? One of the best defenses available is by utilizing some of the top project management tools available. Let’s find out more.
Enhancing SaaS team efficiency with project management tools
When teams have to work across multiple different platforms, facilitate communication through ineffective channels, and manually manage increasingly large document stacks in complex projects, the end result will be missed deadlines and worse outcomes from the team.
Project management platforms support your team in working more efficiently across all aspects of a project and reduce the amount of administration required to keep it on track. They also support modern working methods, such as working with remote teams, and more dynamic project workflows.
For SaaS businesses specifically, project management helps to maintain accountability and visibility for long-term projects. SaaS businesses are most likely to have ongoing relationships with clients and third parties where extensive task lists and document trails build up, all while business plans change. Eventually, this can lead to issues further down the line – and that’s why using top project management tools is incredibly helpful.
Key factors to keep in mind
The needs of your business are always unique, with requirements often changing on a per-project basis,too. While some businesses might be exploring how to get a business phone number to support an upcoming project demand, others may be further along in the project status and need advanced features and custom dashboards to ensure accountability.
Take the time to review past performance, analyze the pain points experienced from individual tasks, and understand what features you need in a project management solution.
1. Team size and structure
As your team grows in size or the organizational structure changes to support a complex project brief, the chance for miscommunication and inefficiency rises. Ensure you have a robust method of time tracking, as well as accountability tools when working with a larger team.
Check whether platforms offer unlimited users or enterprise plans where required, and review the feature sets available for various pricing plans to ensure they provide exactly what your business needs.
2. Project complexity
It’s vital to keep tabs on the many moving parts within a challenging project. The original brief may change, causing the scope of work to increase, and team members may move to support the adjustment in workload. Some projects may include challenging customer support demands to further stretch the team. Robust file storage and cross-management features will be an important weapon in your arsenal to combat the growing complexity.
3. Ease of use and user adoption
Powerful and expansive features mean little to a business that can’t leverage them effectively. A third-party tool should assist workflows and simplify areas that are cumbersome or time-consuming to manage manually. Check your team is comfortable with the project management software you’re planning to invest in.
4. Collaboration and integration features
Given the prevalence of remote and cloud-based workflows, the need to have powerful collaboration tools within your software stack is paramount. Furthermore, if your team relies on other third-party tools to support the business, such as an IVR phone system to manage inbound calls and collect data, your project management tool should have integration features to unlock additional functionality.
5. Scalability and flexibility
Any effective project management software should be quickly and easily scaled to the needs of both individual projects and your wider business. Review the way that logins and licenses are handled and ensure you can support everyone in the company who requires the tool.
6. Cost and budget allocation
Review the costs of various tools and see how they fit into your wider company budgets. Many project management apps consist of several smaller tools that could allow you to remove other third-party software from your team’s software stack and reduce costs accordingly.
Top project management tools for SaaS teams
Here are some of the top project management tools to support your team in their next project, arranged for the specific use cases they offer. Many of the tools listed here offer additional features and functions – be sure to see what else is available before making your choice, and focus on what will help drive long-term customer success.
Task and workflow management tools
1. Monday
Monday is a robust tool that allows businesses to track and manage a host of important aspects of their projects. Monday makes extensive use of dashboard and reporting frameworks to provide more data about projects and put the team in control. It employs simple per-seat pricing plans, meaning that you can scale the tool to meet the needs of your team.
Monday offers a wide range of customizable templates, visual tracking, integration with 200+ third-party apps, and automation.
Pricing
Free basic plan available. Premium plan starting from €9 seat /month
2. Hive
Hive promotes project management as part of a hybrid working approach, meaning that the tool has been designed from the ground up to support hybrid structures. It also includes multiple viewports when reviewing project timelines, allowing everyone to understand and keep apprised of the progress of your project.
Hive provides flexible project hierarchies and allows for unlimited projects
and tasks to be managed.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $3/month.
3. Asana
Asana offers over 200 integrations with other popular apps, ensuring that it can fit into the vast majority of existing technology stacks in use today. It also provides a series of automation features, allowing your team to automate routine tasks and improve their efficiency.
Image sourced from Asana.com
Primary advantages
Asana has introduced Asana Intelligence, an AI that can assist by crafting smart goals and comprehensive status updates using real-time data, answer your questions, provide insights on projects, identify blockers, and formulate next steps.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from €10.99/ user/ month
4. Jira
Jira provides a range of pre-built templates to get your project running quickly, whilst offering deep customization as the work matures and your team understands the challenges.
Image sourced from atlassian.com
Primary advantages
Jira allows you to create timelines to help you track projects, scrum boards to assist you with your planning, and reports to gain insight into how to improve your team’s performance based on real-time, visual data.
Jira also offers features such as drag-and-drop automation that allows you to automate any task. Additionally, you can create sprints in Jira, which are fixed time periods where teams complete work from their product backlog in agile development.
This way you can effectively manage and execute your agile development process, ensuring timely delivery of project increments.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $8.15/user/month
5. Trello
Trello is an industry veteran, thanks to the post-it-note style ‘Boards’ feature that provided the digital equivalent of the tried-and-tested whiteboard in the office. It offers a breadth of information for team members at a glance, ensuring your team can focus on the key parts of the project and stay in the loop at all times.
Image sourced from trello.com
Primary advantages
As part of its platform, Trello employs the concept of cards; these represent tasks and ideas that can be moved around and onto different lists, as shown in the screenshot above, to help teams stay organized and on track.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $5/user/month.
Collaboration and communication tools
1. Miro
Miro brings a shared workspace concept forward into the project management software landscape. Combining visual concepts into a traditional project management feature set helps ensure the entire team can work cohesively and share the success.
Image sourced from miro.com
Primary advantages
Miro offers a platform that boasts enterprise-grade security. Moreover, users can easily communicate complex concepts using the visual canvas offered, which can be made accessible to the relevant teams.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plan pricing starts from $8/member/month
2.Vonage
Vonage offers unified communications solutions to ensure your team is kept as a single unit, integrating video and audio communication functionality into one efficient platform. For large-scale projects with regular external engagement – such as stakeholders – the ACD system helps to ensure inbound calls find the right department within your project team quickly.
Screenshot taken from vonage.com
Primary advantages
Vonage offers innovative solutions such as Vonage Fusion, which brings together their UCaaS and CCaaS solutions to provide powerful features, consistent performance, and integrations with popular CRMs and productivity tools.
Pricing: Free plan available. Contact sales for pricing details.
3. Quip
Quip has positioned itself as a supporting tool for Salesforce-driven businesses, integrating into the platform to a core level and enhancing the existing service. For businesses seeking to find insights into their sales data, Quip allows for collaborative documents to embed into Salesforce data.
Image sourced from quip.com
Primary advantages
Quip includes a chat feature that is built into every document and spreadsheet, along with team chat rooms and 1:1 messaging. This facilitates inter-team communication and helps all team members to stay on the same page.
Pricing: Starting from $10/user/month
4. Airtable
Airtable is an AI-powered platform that’s great for supporting SaaS businesses that develop apps. It integrates into other commonly used workflow tools – such as Google Drive – and relies on a low-code environment, so should be quick to adopt for the wider team.
Screenshot taken from airtable.com
Primary advantages
Airtable can be used for an array of purposes surrounding sales, products, human resources, operations, marketing, and finance. The solutions it offers include flexible roadmaps, the centralization of customer feedback, trend visualization, custom workflows, and automated reporting.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plan starting from $20/seat/month
Time tracking and resource management tools
1. Toggl Track
Toggl focuses on providing robust time-tracking functions to ensure that your project progresses effectively. Time tracking can help to ensure billed work is properly recorded and delivered to specification, and understanding how long work takes to complete can inform future timeline management decisions if too little is allocated to a deliverable.
Image sourced from toggl.com
Primary advantages
This tracking tool boasts over 100 integrations, including Asana and Salesforce, ensuring that users can integrate it easily with their existing tools.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans pricing starting from $9/user/month
2. Time Doctor
Time Doctor focuses on the analytics side, working to increase visibility on how employees are spending their working hours within the business. If you need an in-depth understanding of where your teams focus their efforts, Time Doctor should deliver.
Image sourced from timedoctor.com
Primary advantages
Time Doctor platform provides enterprise-level security, is GDPR and HIPAA-compliant, and provides real-time workforce analytics to improve performance.
Pricing: Starting from $5.9/user/month
Reporting and analytics tools
1. Wrike
Wrike’s ‘one-click reporting’ feature enables teams to quickly and effectively gather key information and explore project progress. Reporting functionality operates in real-time and can help drive projects to completion and boost SaaS sales.
Image sourced from wrike.com
Primary advantages
Wrike offers 360° visibility, true cross-functional collaboration, and powerful automation. This platform provides access to instant insights and real-time dashboards that support users in making data-led decisions and Agile leadership.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $9.80/user/ month
2. ClickUp
ClickUp’s witty tagline of ‘one app to replace them all’ is quite a bold claim, as well as a cheeky reference to a well-known film franchise, but it isn’t without precedent. There is a swathe of features available within the platform.
Screenshot sourced from ClickUp
Primary advantages
Amongst other features, ClickUp offers centralized, project-related communications in one place. This platform puts to the forefront the concept and inter-team communication by providing tools such as Whiteboards, with which team members can brainstorm, and collaborative Docs that can be used to draft plans together.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $7/user/month
Integration and automation tools
1. Zapier
Zapier is an automation-focused tool that leverages a host of proven automation functions to empower businesses to quickly build ‘zaps’ and reduce the amount of admin required day-to-day.
Screenshot taken from zapier.com
Primary advantages
This automation tool allows you to rapidly automate anything that you need. This means that time-laboring tasks such as manual data entry can be replaced with automated data entry and formatting at the click of a button. Zapier’s flexibility as a tool makes it applicable to countless areas, including customer support, lead management, and marketing.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans start from $19.99/month
2. Make
Make’s no-code workflow ensures that anyone can create the automated workflow they intend without knowledge of how the process works behind the scenes. This is a powerful tool in letting your entire team engage with the features on offer.
Image sourced from make.com
Primary advantages
Make’s intuitive drag-and-drop system means that users are able to easily select and place apps to automate existing workflows or build new complex processes without any headache.
Pricing: Free plan available. Premium plans starting from $9/month
Conclusion
There is a veritable ocean of tools and services to help businesses of all shapes and sizes to better manage their project portfolios, offering advanced automation functions, monitoring capabilities, and communications platforms to help your team work smarter and go further for key stakeholders.
Nearly every tool will offer a 30-day free trial or grace period for a refund if you’re unhappy. While it can be jarring for teams to switch between multiple software products in a short period, it’s worth considering trying the various tools on different projects before landing on the perfect one for your business. Patience is the key here – project management is a marathon, after all.
As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change. He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.
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