A friend asked, so I sketched a rough list of the criteria I’d use today to choose a project management app for a company. I should say the list is incomplete, but I think it can be useful as a starting point for anyone choosing a task manager.
My experience isn’t universal. Over the years I’ve used a fair pile of tools for organizing teamwork: from simple task managers like Teamer and Trello to sophisticated builders like Planfix and Podio. Admittedly, my experience is limited in that I was always the boss, and I could break any resistance and discontent by force of authority rather than persuasion. I suspect that bringing in a task manager after working in chats and Google Sheets can meet much more resistance from a team. My employees hate Planfix too, but they have to put up with it.
One more consideration before the criteria. If there were a convenient tailor-made solution for my industry, I’d rather choose that. For instance, we process our online store’s orders in Brightpearl, because it’s a specialized e-commerce solution. If there are solutions like that for your field, look at them first. Now, my criteria.
Multitasking. The ability to build processes and manage projects in one place.
Flexibility. Task and process templates, or something similar. Very fine-grained access settings.
What do I do now? It should be easy for every employee to answer the question “What should I do today?” An example: an employee has several work boards in Trello. To understand what to do, they have to go through all of them and copy the tasks into their personal task manager. That’s why I gave up on Trello.
A human interface. Try it yourself and see what’s convenient and what isn’t. In Airtable, the extra rows you keep creating by accident are really annoying.
The system’s hard limits. Airtable limits how long it keeps the history of changes to cards and the comments on them. That’s shit, if you ask me. Three years ago we discussed an idea ⟶ now we’ve come back to it, and no dice, the conversation is gone. We might as well have discussed it on Telegram. Other examples: boards that aren’t linked to each other in Trello, and access set at the workspace level in Podio.
The product’s age. A new product can be shut down quickly if it doesn’t take off. I once built a training base on an Airtable lookalike, and it was shut down a year later.
A well-developed API for integrations. There’s an example of an integration on my Facebook.
The product is actively developed by its team. Brightpearl, for example, isn’t.
Price per user. The very last criterion, because a team’s productivity can vary by a factor of ten or more, and the environment for managing tasks has a big effect on that.