The deadline.
This word menacingly looms large on the horizon and stresses out every project manager, developer, designer, or digital marketer involved in the project management process.
Providing high-quality deliverables consistently and within a predefined time frame is a challenging task for both big and small companies. Juggling all the projects, tasks, and people, while eliminating roadblocks, preventing bottlenecks, and keeping the lines of communication open is an ambitious endeavor.
No wonder that even some of the most powerful companies have had their fair share of failed projects, some of which proved to be fatal on many levels.
For example, NASA’s ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded just 73 seconds after the launch killing all seven crew members suffered its demise due to human error – the communication between engineers who spotted the faulty O-rings and the management was poor, so the important message didn’t get through until it was too late.
So, effective team management is crucial for any project, but let’s see how you can build an app to help you with it.
There are numerous team and project management tools that you can use to plan your projects, coordinate your team, facilitate your workflow, allow collaboration, and, generally speaking, stay on top of things.
Basecamp is the first tool that comes to mind, as it’s one of the most popular and widely used team management platforms. Its main features include to-do lists, task management, group discussions, file sharing, reporting, document management, issue management, as well as email and push notifications. What’s obviously missing from this long list of cool features are time and cost tracking, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or task dependencies.
Trello is marketed as an organizational and collaboration tool, which allows you to keep track of how your project is progressing, who’s responsible for what task, and when the deadlines are, among many other things. Its kanban-like board design is great for managing your workflow in an easy way. However, it lacks additional views such as timeline, calendar, or Gantt chart. There’s also no chat or time-tracking options, while integrations also leave much to be desired.
Asana is an all-in-one organizational, collaboration, and tracking platform to help you overview your entire project management process. It boasts numerous useful features and integrations, but it still needs some improvement, particularly when it comes to reporting, communication, and notifications.
ActiveCollab is an effective project collaboration hub with features such as time and data tracking, team collaboration as well as task management solutions – its goal is to cover all the important project and team management bases. And while it’s pretty successful in this regard, there are a couple of drawbacks to be aware of, including no direct chat system, email integration, and to-do list option.
Jira is a tool that has to be mentioned as some of its users include the likes of LinkedIn and Spotify. The idea behind this project management platform is to enable teams to prioritize, sort, and track their tasks. It’s a great tool for agile teams that build applications and software. One of its downsides is complexity, which means that a team manager needs to have DevOps skills as well as understand agile practices.
As you can see from the example of the popular apps that we mentioned, they have some features that you might find redundant while lacking the ones that you need.
However, there are certain core features that are universally available in almost every team management app.
Here’s what you should include if you plan on building one yourself:
Collaboration on the project. Given that several people and even departments usually work on the same projects, it’s essential to enable the collaboration option so that they can share documents, discuss them, create and follow timelines, solve issues together, and organize their work accordingly. A nice touch would be adding a feature which would allow team members to upload different files, calendars, and contacts, as well as share these externally.
Task management. This is, obviously, a key feature of every good team management app, as it enables project managers to plan and schedule projects, assign tasks to team members, keep an eye on deadlines, and prevent bottlenecks.
Email integration. Make sure that your app has an email integration option so that your team can get in touch with their co-workers, send collaboration invites, and always be informed about the latest developments in a timely manner.
Intuitive UI. The success and effectiveness of your team management app depends on whether you’ve managed to make it user-friendly and intuitive. That way users will be able to easily create tasks and projects and monitor them without too much hassle.
APIs. These procedures allow your users to integrate other tools into your team management app and have a wide range of different options which will facilitate the process – for example, it would be great if Trello or Slack, for example, could be integrated with your app.
Budgeting. Although other tools can be used for budgeting, this functionality within your app would help your users control their budget more easily.
Time management and tracking. It’s extremely important to enable your employees to track how much time they use for every particular task.
Project evolution tracking. Everything including completion, time, and costs of your projects should be easily predicted and monitored. That way it will be possible to notice when things get out of hand and direct your employees in the right direction.
As building such an app is a complex endeavor, it’s important to divide it into steps.
Assess the scope of your project. First of all, define your company’s workflow, establish if there are some repetitive tasks that your team has to perform on a daily basis, and analyze all your business process. These insights will help you identify which of the features mentioned above have to be included in your app. Ask your employees what particular features they’d like to see in your upcoming app and see if that can be done. Besides, you’ll have to decide whether you want to build the web, Android, or iOS version of your app. It’s best to have all three, if possible.
Create a software development team. This is crucial for the success of your app. You need to hire well-versed developers capable of building the app you have in mind and make it glitch-free. Another important suggestion that will make the building of your app easier is using the Agile methodology. Make sure to opt for a Scrum team, because that’s the best option for software development. This means that your app development process will be split into sprints which are easily monitored so that you can track the projects’ deliverables. Scrum is a great process as it allows designers, developers, testers, and project owners to work closely and collaborate.
Have your SRS written by a professional technical writer. Put your software requirements specification in writing in order to get accurate pricing and time-frame estimates.
Opt for a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider for your web app. Using a PaaS platform has many benefits – it’s scalable, provides cloud infrastructure, operating system, runtime environment, among many other things, and all you have to take care about is coding and application data.
Pick an MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service). Again an MBaaS provider has you covered when it comes to cloud infrastructure, networking, and persistent storage. Also, it’s much easier to implement push notifications, user management, or security with an MBaaS. It’s also better when it comes to scalability and APIs. You can focus on front-end while leaving the backend to the provider.
By taking all these factors into consideration, you’ll be able to understand what featured you need to include in your team management app and find the best dev team to build it.
