Benefits and Development Peculiarities of Project Management Tools for Remote Teams

The world has been changing tremendously in the last decades. Businesses and corporations not only grew but became global. No surprise that ICTs (Internet and Communication Technologies) became an indispensable part of modern business life because the work of huge teams located in different parts of the world should be organized and managed effectively. 

That’s why, project management tools for remote teams such as  Asana,  Jira, Slack, Trello, and others have firmly established themselves in the market of business apps, which was acknowledged the second in popularity on Apple Store by Statista as of Q3 2019. 

More than that, while working from home was considered to be the future of work before the worldwide lockdown for quarantine 2019-2020 due to the COVID pandemic, in the time of global stay-at-home it became the actual reality of the present-day already. Lots of employers and managers faced the problem of how to manage remote teams and not sacrifice efficiency.

How to manage your team remotely?

As we have noted above there are plenty of ready-made software solutions and apps, which facilitate coordination of the remote employees’ work:

• Asana
• Jira
• Slack
• Trello
• etc.

Various tools address specific tasks, as well as diverse teams, and have their own peculiarities for each business domain. While Jira is good for IT specialists and soft developers due to the function of time tacking and workflows management, Slack unifies communication facilitates group chats and file exchange. There are products, which offer certain additional features, like displaying statistics graphics and funnels to visualize productivity, natural language recognition for task setting, etc. Naturally, the team app pricing differs in accordance to the types, features used and team scope.

Nevertheless, the best tool to work for your business should take its peculiarities and specifics into consideration and our advice is to develop a custom tool not to pay for unnecessary features of the ready-made solutions, but first, let’s find out a bit more about them.

What are the types of task management soft?

There 2 major types to mention are:

• Personal to-do applications – the ones targeted to a single worker 
• Task managers for teams

While the first have rather limited functionality to create assignments and to-do lists, the second are aimed at collective usage. The tasks in the solutions for teams usually can be classified and filtered, integrations with multiple third-party services allowed, and communication tools implemented for comfortable and prompt cooperation within the team. 

So, as a rule, a team management software tool has multiple levels of tasks, subtasks, stages, and projects. Either they can be connected or independent, however, appointing roles and duties such software facilitates putting activities of a team in action and delivering the whole project on time.

What are the welfares of corporate team development services and task-management software usage?

The most important advantages a task manager may offer to a business owner or manager are comfort, flexibility, and smooth teamwork.

Comfort is manifested through simple and intuitive design, functionality, and user experience. A team task managing tool should offer an extended set of features, such as task and checklist creation, due date and priority indication as well as workflow customization with deadlines’ reminders. Boards, lists, and post-it note formats are usually applied for the purpose, besides the users can edit notes and lists, comment, attach documents, images, links, and other types of files. 

Flexibility lies in the possibility of synchronization across different platforms. Team development services and task management solutions should provide web and mobile versions to enhance employees’ productivity and not to limit the workers with the necessity to be attached to a single PC. 

In a perfect world, to reach the maximum flexibility, your task management apps should have the same functionality for all platforms — from the web to Android and iOS — and be easily synchronized, so your team members can reach their projects from any device and from anywhere. Besides, integrations matter, providing not only flexibility but also transparency to task management due to schedulers, automation, and reporting tools possible to associate with the main product. 

Teamwork – collaboration is realized through communication tools, either in-built or integrated messengers, and notifications as well through emails, SMS, or push. So, while the team members can focus on their tasks the management staff can monitor the progress of the project and each stage, detect risks, make well-weight decisions, and control costs. 

When questioning yourself how much is Microsoft teams app, Jira, Trello or Slack compared to how much my own team care app may cost, start with these key features evaluating and estimation of the features you have to pay for, but don’t need. To craft a custom product is much more cost-efficient in the long run. Find a more detailed plan of building a custom team application and cost estimation below. 

How to build software for project management and teamwork control?

The first and foremost task is to understand and define the workflow in your business, set goals, divide them into separate tasks and stages, and define the possible scenarios for each step. 

Having a clear picture of your workflow in mind you can proceed to crafting a list of features for your project management tool for remote teams. The most common features have already been mentioned above:

• Simple UI 
• Task and checklist creation option 
• The possibility to schedule tasks 
• Set deadlines and priorities 
• Opportunity to customize workflows, set reminders, assign tasks
• The possibility to track time
• Monitor the status of tasks and projects

Besides, the app should integrate well with email, so that the users can set up groups and send collaboration invites as well as share files. 

Cooperation is important, so it’s significant to let the teamwork and solve issues together. Reporting and visualization are vital to get an in-depth overview of the project progress and spot the dependencies and allow project managers to edit current dependencies or indicate new ones. 

There are also certain advanced tools you may want in your software, but being not obligatory, they can only be considered optionally. For instance, team development services may include budgeting and invoicing functionality integrated into the product. It can help you control time and money easier as well as track payments, outgoings, and generate invoices for your customers. The possibility to create and store portfolio may help you forecast future project running and roadmaps, distribute resources and monitor progress implementing real-time and high-level planning when it’s necessary. 

The list of potential functionality aspects can be endless, however, you should figure out only the ones, which are helpful and relevant to your business processes and workflows. A sound idea is to start with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It will let you test it, receive your staff feedback, and make the necessary adjustments and improvements. 

After you have decided upon the features you need in your product, you should decide on the development team to trust your product development and get a detailed yet clear task and list of requirements to them. The more precise description of the project you provide, the more accurate estimations on team app pricing and development time scope you will get. Our company is eager to discuss your product development with you. Just drop us a line.

Conclusion

Corporate task management software is a complex solution, which is aimed to effectively solve the tasks of staff and project management within the field your business operates in. That’s why it’s difficult to find a universal ready-made solution for the purpose. To get the most of the software product and knock out all the potential risks off your workflow, consider crafting a custom tool for your business. Having extensive experience Axisbits’ experts not only eager to consult you how to manage your team remotely and assist you in the process of development but can also prompt you optimization tricks for your software to save time and means for development without sacrificing the quality of your corporate solution.