Keeping track of your tasks is quite easy when you’re just a start-up business with just a few team members. However, as your business grows, it becomes harder to be on top of things. In this video, we tackle different task management systems that will help you and your team better manage your to-do lists with some extra features that will help you in your day-to-day operations. Watch and find out which works best for your business!
Finding the perfect solution for your team tasks can a challenge, we can help you decide between Asana, Teamwork, and Monday based on the specific needs of your team.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
G'day there. Pete Moriarty here today. I'm covering off some advantages and comparisons between some quite popular task management shared systems, shared task management systems. These are team task management systems for you and your team, and I'm going to be covering monday.com, asana, process.st, and teamwork shared tasks.
So, let's start with the basics. For starters using a shared task management system, is a great move for your business. If you're a solo operator and you're just using one task list or one to do list, you can probably get your work done. But as soon as you start adding staff members into the mix, things start to fall off the rails a little bit. And spreadsheets or a big whiteboard just ain't going to cut it in you actually managing tasks, and who's doing what inside the business. A task management system or a shared task management system means that you can see your own tasks, but you also have access to common or shared projects and shared tasks amongst your team. And some of the really popular solutions over the years have been tools like Basecamp. They were one of the real first popular ones years and years ago, and many have popped up all over the place.
I'm going to be covering some of my favorite, some of the most popular ones. But the point here is really don't stress too much about what system is right for you. The most important thing is that you actually use the system. The one you actually use is the one that works. So, when you're choosing different systems, don't stress too much about what has what features. You can always change in the future. Yeah, sure, it might be a pain to switch over your tasks, but it's not the end of the world to do that if you outgrow the system that you're using right now. So I'm going to start from the basics and I'm going to get up to the more sophisticated and advanced solutions. And as that process goes along, the price obviously changes for each one of these as well.
The first one that I love the best at this one is Asana. And honestly, we still use Asana inside our business, we've used it for years and years. We've tried many others, and I'm a big fan of simple is better, and I'm also a big fan of free. Asana is free for up to 15 people, which makes it really great. Now it's not just free for 15 people, it's free for teams of up to 15. So you can actually have one Asana set up with multiple teams and when you have multiple teams set up in Asana, you can effectively have more than 15 people using Asana still for free. That's pretty darn groovy. And so yes, we are still on the free account. We're still using Asana and loving it. Now you might be thinking people, how do I get access to the free account? Is there anything special that I need to do?
And there is. You actually have to be on G suite to make that happen, and you have to sign up to Asana using your G suite account. So there's a few hoops you have to jump through. If you need any help with that, you should get in touch with our team and we can help make that happen. The reason I love Asana is it's super simple to use. The interface is really nice and easy, and there aren't many button clicks to actually make things happen. A more sophisticated systems like teamwork.com or like process.st or Monday can sometimes require additional button clicks to achieve the same result, like marking off a task or looking into sub tasks or navigating through projects. And with Asana, I like that there's a really great set of simple keyboard shortcuts, but also the interface is very fluid, so it's very easy to use.
Their mobile app is also great, and one of the cool features of Asana is when you complete a task, you can actually have a unicorn fly across the screen, which that's pretty damn hard to beat. So my pick, if you're just getting started and you want something simple, as free as possible, for as long as possible, is to get started with Asana, because that's the easiest place to start.
The next one that I'll cover is called teamwork.com. And teamwork is great, because not only do you have a task management system and it's quite a sophisticated one, you also have a chat functionality and a ticketing help desk functionality in there as well. And they're building out other tools to expand their teamwork ecosystem. But the core apps are the tasks and now they've added the chat and also the ticketing feature as well.
Inside of Teamwork there are a few more button clicks to get things done, but you can run slightly more sophisticated projects. And so if you're a business in the construction industry and you want to have Gantt charts and timelines for your projects, if you want to also do things like maybe have time billing added to your projects and reporting on time billing with budgets, you can do all of that within Teamwork. And that's pretty cool. If we take a step back and talk about Asana, Asana only lets you do things like time billing through third party integrations. So you're going to have to use an external system if you want to do that inside of Asana, and if you want to add things like timelines and Gantt charts and more sophisticated timeline type scheduling inside of Asana, you've got to upgrade to the paid plan.
Whereas with Teamwork, you're on the paid plan for anywhere more than five users. And so if you've got more than five users in the business, you've got to jump up to a paid plan and you're effectively opened up to all of those features. So Teamwork, if you're a more sophisticated business, if you're doing more sophisticated projects and tasks, definitely worth the investment to bump up. But just keep in mind, as you keep adding add ons like chat and desk and other bits and pieces and features that they release, the pricing goes up to different pricing plans and you're paying on a per user basis. So as your business grows, the costs are obviously going to grow with that as well. So let's cover off some of the more sophisticated end and that would be monday.com or other tools like Podio or process.st.
These tools give you deep levels of customization inside your workflows. You can think about it like a super duper smart spreadsheet, in that you can not only have the visual aids of a … like ticking things off and having different colors and marking off your tasks and making it all pretty when that happens. But you can also add formulas, different types of data in the fields, and you can pretty much customize each one of those data fields to build it out to a business process system that matches your business. Now this is super duper powerful and allows you to do some pretty darn cool stuff to run the business and run all of your processes and workflows inside these systems. The downside is it costs a lot more. It is a significant investment per user, and you're typically locked into a per year contract.
I think that's with Monday, I'm not sure about process.st. But with these tools you also need someone to do the upkeep. You need someone to be the data analyst or engineer to actually build out these processes and systems.That's not always a bad thing. It just means that there's a bit of a resource cost in actually having someone maintain them and set them up and do the thinking around, okay, how is this process going to work and how am I going to build it out inside of Monday or process.st? But, once you do the work and you're happy to spend the money on the licenses, these apps are amazingly powerful and that will help you to grow and scale your business. So I hope that's been a useful comparison of the different apps. If you're just getting started, I would recommend you start with something simple.
That might be Asana, that might be Teamwork. Those applications are really great to use. If you've got nothing or if you're just using something like Google tasks right now or Apple tasks which just gives you your own tasks, then you want to expand yourself out to shared tasks. Get your team involved, and use one of these tools. It doesn't matter which one you use as long as you use something. But, use one of these tools to get your team on track with all their tasks and it really helps you to reduce the, is it done yet or hey can you please do this for me? Or if you're doing tasks on email, all that is just a complete mess, and these task management systems really help to bring it all into one nice tidy system for you. All right, if you've got any questions or you would like help implementing any of these systems, we support some of these systems in our business and we can help you get them implemented for your team and your staff.
Of course, we've got best practice tips, we've got training and we've got support staff on hand who can be that implementation person to make that happen, so you're not working it out yourself or spending hours and hours reading help guides, learning how to do these things. So if you're interested in that, get in touch with our team. Head along to itgenius.com, look for our service called Card Concierge, and we will help out with any needs that you have in task management. Or if you just want to do a business health checkup, if you'd like to be a bit of an IT audit, and have us check in with your systems and processes, see if there's any room for improvement and if we might be able to help, then our team will be very happy to help you out with that. Until the next one. Take care. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
