You're managing a remote team. What are the best project management apps to keep everyone on track?

In my experience our team is scattered in different locations across the globe but instead of various tools we connect 2-3 days a week over a short call and discuss the process, prioritizing the tasks with deadlines and delegate them among the team and ensure that we complete our tasks and n time and meet the deadlines as required and accomplish the tasks and objectives.

Remote team management requires robust project management tools for communication, collaboration, and task management. Some popular tools include Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Basecamp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Notion, Jira, ClickUp, and Wrike. These tools help organize tasks, track progress, and collaborate in real-time, ensuring efficient project management and success. By leveraging these tools, remote teams can streamline communication, optimize collaboration, and stay organized, ultimately improving productivity and project success.

Every business thinks, yes thinks and works differently. When you are defining your needs and expectations the way your business thinks, or moves through a process before coming to a decision needs to be taken into account. Who is the decision maker? Is it collaborative or left to one voice? Should you consider the capabilities of each person on your team before choosing a platform or do you have the capacity to build in training hours to get them up to speed? Not everyone is on the same tech level so when factoring costs this should be thought about before making a final decision.

Defining your need is of essential,for you focus differently so you have to do that so that, when you are ready you don't need to stagger just looking what to do

Before you jump in to whatever the latest PM Apps is, consider what and how you want to use it and decide what features you need. Who needs access to it? What information to you need to capture and share? How do you prefer to work? What other tools, apps do you need it to integrate with - email, scheduling, accounts etc.? Will it grow with you? How easy is it to use and adapt to your own needs and those of your team?

One key feature is how the project management app handles task assignments and updates. Many apps will allow you to assign as many members to a task as you like. However, they often don't allow you to designate an owner or highlight who is responsible for the current work. Project management apps that can separate roles such as owner, assigned, watching, etc. can be very beneficial and cause much less confusion.

This is possibly the most important aspect with any app, knowing how to use it and ensuring that your team has access to the right training and help as they learn to adapt and work with it. Too often people will either stop using a tool because they don't fully understand how to use it, don't have time, because they're too busy just trying to do their day to day work or don't know how to make it work for them. There are often new features being introduced, so it's important to keep the team updated on how best to make use of new features or changes to the app. Used well, the best tools and apps will save time, not create more work in using them.

With project management, adaptability is key to optimizing what works and what doesn't work. Industry standard apps like JIRA, Smartsheet may not have what you and your team actually need after getting your processes in place. It's important to have a testing phase of apps in your roadmap to help allocate time to make decision to use one app or change to another.

Once everyone on your team has been trained, you will need to work on utilizing your time effectively in order to implement what the app is helping you organize. Technology is great, but its full potential is only realized when you have a team that knows how to manage themselves well. If I have a remote employee that has been trained to use the app but wastes their time on menial tasks or slacking off then the app will appear it isn't functioning. So along with training your staff on the app, including time management training is key to increase productivity and output.

Asana is currently my favourite, allowing you to organise each project by the team member working on it, status and subtasks for every task. You can easily view each member's page and what they're working on that week. The task list page is much simpler than other tools I've used, with an easy colour-coded checklist for the week.

Trello is the one best tool. Break your big project in different steps. Allot the steps with timelines to different people. Create different boards. Check the progress Keep the track. Simple and easy.

Click-Up has been a fantastic tool for us both in the office and when working remotely. It makes collaborating on tasks easy, and with options to create portal-like spaces for clients, it's a great way for everyone to have oversight on projects at once.