Task management is a way to ensure that you’re always working on high-priority tasks and being as efficient as possible. Easy it may sound, it’s challenging to track large-scale projects and even more difficult to apply to small-scale projects. If you’re working with a lot of team members, then you need to have task management software in place. This article will look at different aspects of task management and determine how to overcome problems with task management software like Monday.
What is Task Management?
Task management is a critical part of any successful project. Without proper task management, ensuring that all tasks are completed on time and that the project stays on track is challenging. A correct way to manage projects is to focus on completing priority tasks and creating a pipeline of upcoming tasks. Task management involves planning, organizing, and prioritizing tasks to achieve milestones. This includes creating a task list, assigning tasks to team members, and setting deadlines. It is also important to monitor progress and make changes to the plan as needed. Although it may sound easy to manage projects and lead teams, there are many challenges that you may encounter on your way. Let’s look at some of these task management challenges in detail.
Challenges in Task Management
Managing any project comes with a lot of challenges. You need to create and align several tasks in a systematic order. While you also need to take care of the task assignments, communicate with team members, and meet project deadlines. Let’s examine some of the common challenges in task management.
Lack of Team Collaboration: Without a proper management system, it’s hard for the team members to collaborate on the running and upcoming tasks.
Improper Information Sharing: Proper and accurate communication forms the basis of successful project completion. By doing so, team members can work together, and business stakeholders can stay up-to-date on ongoing projects.
Improper Task Organization: It’s hard to track the assigned tasks in excel sheets and keep a check on the completed tasks in case of delayed deadlines.
Team Conflicts: Successful project management requires a sync between leaders and performers. However, lack of direction, miscommunications, and misunderstandings may create conflicts among the team. It becomes a significant hurdle in the long run, and the focus shifts from work to other nonproductive thoughts.
Ambiguity in Task Distribution: A lack of a project management system creates ambiguity in task distribution. It may result in assigning tasks to members that do not match the skills required and lead to project failure.
Using Monday for Task Management
To overcome the task management challenges, you can opt for a platform like Monday. It’s a cloud-based work tool where teams can create workflows and structure the flow of projects. Monday.com is 100% code-free, so everybody involved in a project can easily make the changes, such as creating tasks, setting deadlines, setting priorities, and adding comments.
Monday.com Features
It’s time to explore some of Monday.com’s features that help you organize projects in a better way.
Visual Dashboards
Monday’s Kanban dashboards allow you and your team to visualize where things stand at any given moment. You can use a timeline, calendar, charts, and other views to track progress from the top to every last detail. Monday’s data tools allow you to prioritize tasks, share files and check the work status of your team members visually. This way, you can make better decisions about how to move forward with your projects. With its easy-to-use interface, you can quickly create custom dashboards and set budgets at a glance.
Automation
Monday.com offers enough code-free automation to save time on unnecessary meetings and get manual updates via email. Instead, you can create workflows for different teams and sync the due task dates with Google Calendar. You can also integrate Monday with popular third-party automation apps like Zapier to build custom triggers. Every time an event is triggered, it creates a new item automatically in your Monday dashboard. That means no manual task creation. Easy Peasy!
Integrations
Monday understands the pain that project managers go through for combining the segregated communication threads. To overcome this back-and-forth trauma, Monday offers seamless integrations with your favorite communication tools like Slack, Microsoft teams, Outlook, and many more to enhance workflow capabilities. For example, their Gmail integration allows you to transform emails into action items and keep the team updated about conversations.
Kanban and Gantt Workflow
Kanban is a visual method to streamline your team’s workflow. It helps you display data in an easy-to-understand column format and help you make decisions faster. Plus, it’s easy for team members to use and syncs changes in real time. Besides, Kanban dashboards are a great way to track iterations and backlogs so you can monitor the milestones. And with Gantt charts, you can turn spreadsheets into smart visual boards that help you track important dates, milestones, and dependencies. So you can be sure that everything gets done on time and to your high standards.
Monday.com Use Cases
Now that you’re aware of the features of Monday, let’s see how you can use Monday.com for handling projects.
Software Development
Managing Sprint cycles and following agile methodology is crucial to the software development industry. There are deadlines for ongoing tasks and streamlining upcoming tasks. To be effective, you must adjust and prioritize tasks in real-time. Monday helps you plan, prioritize, and manage sprints, create roadmaps and share the product vision with stakeholders. You can also automate task assignments and product design approvals and integrate them with tools like GitHub.
Marketing and Content Planning
Companies spend a lot of time creating marketing campaigns. The process usually involves approvals for ideas, creative collaterals, and frequent meetings with copywriters and designers to make changes. With Monday.com, you can monitor all your marketing campaigns in a single dashboard. Their visual boards help you make decisions faster and keep everyone in sync about campaign changes and schedules. Instead of writing emails for changes, you can directly write on files to avoid back-and-forth status updates. Not only this, you are free to connect Monday with your favorite apps like Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat, and more.
Human Resource and Operations
With Monday’s employee management system, HR teams can track recruiting pipeline and smoothen the onboarding process. Without a proper employee management system, HR would need an assistant to conduct daily meetings, schedule interviews, and track employees’ day-to-day performance. To add more, Monday provides readymade HR templates for tracking attendance, vacations, and maintaining employee info. You can even integrate platforms like Slack, LinkedIn, and Gmail to import employee data automatically.
Sales CRM Platform
Monday.com serves as a centralized system for communicating with your clients. You can use CRM software by integrating it with your email, creating email templates, and sending email replies from a single dashboard. Besides, you can automate repetitive sales tasks like calls and meetings, set reminders, and track sent emails for generating new leads.
Monday.com Pros and Cons
Like every other Saas tool available in the market, Monday.com also comes with many benefits and some drawbacks. Although the benefits outrank the drawbacks, addressing them is essential before you opt for any tool. Let’s look at the Pros of Monday.com first.
Pros
Monday.com has an easy-to-understand interface, is quite simple to use, and can be effortlessly scaled as your company grows without any issues.
One-click setting switches between different visualization views like Gantt, Kanban, calendar, and timeline.
Monday provides readymade templates for campaign planning, customer onboarding, contact management, task management, attendance tracking, and many more.
A reliable platform for organizing project information, collaborating with teams, adding and assigning tasks, and making projects accessible to everyone in the organization.
Built-in integrations with popular communication tools like Slack, Zoom, Shopify, Gmail, Google Calendar, Dropbox, and many more.
Cons
Their mobile app often does not sync with the web app in real time, so you need to refresh a few times to get the updated view.
Limited automation with email and email-tracking feature not available through Pulse.
Although many integrations are available, it lacks complete feature integration with Salesforce and other popular third-party platforms in its affordable plans.
Entry-level plans lack important features like private boards, automation, and many basic integrations. Some other task management software offers these features in their free version.
Monday.com Pricing Plans
Monday.com is available in five pricing plans that you can choose from: Individual Plan If you’re starting up your business and have only two members on the team, you can use Monday.com’s free version. Within the Individual plan, you can access up to 3 boards, 200+ templates, 20 column types, and complete docs. Basic Plan A basic plan is the best choice if you’re a group of a few members. It’s affordable and priced at just $8 per seat/month to manage team activity boards. The basic plan includes priority customer support, unlimited free viewers, and access to the Individual plan’s features. Standard Plan The standard plan is the most popular to collaborate with your team and increase overall productivity. This pricing plan gives you access to timeline and Gantt views, calendar views, setup process automation, and platform integrations. Pro Plan With Monday’s Pro plan, you can streamline the complex process and get access to all the Monday.com features. This plan is priced at $16 seat/month and allows you to create a dashboard that can combine up to 10 boards in it. Enterprise Plan Enterprise plans can help scale automation and integration processes. You can create a dashboard that combines up to 50 boards inside it.
Monday.com Alternatives
Although Monday.com tops the list of project management software, there is other similar Saas software that you can give a try. Here is a list of our top three Monday.com alternatives.
Clickup
ClickUp is another amazing project management software specially designed for remote working teams. It’s an easy-to-use platform that offers almost every feature available on Monday.com. ClickUp helps your team stay productive and organized and collaborate effortlessly on visual whiteboards. Team members can create sprints, chat, assign tasks, add comments, and docs, allocate resources, set deadlines, and get notifications for everything in a single place.
Wrike
Wrike is a solution for project managers who need help collecting and organizing project requirements, creating project plans, and visualizing schedules on a Gantt chart. With Wrike, it’s easy to make changes to project plans as work progresses, and all teams involved will get notifications about any changes.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an excellent option if you’re looking for an enterprise-ready cloud app that can help with work management and collaboration. With millions of users worldwide, Smartsheet is trusted by many businesses. Smartsheet’s app is similar to a spreadsheet, making it easy to use and familiar for many people. It’s suitable for tracking tasks, sales pipelines, scheduling tasks, and streamlining business processes. You can use Smartsheet for workflow automation, content collaboration, project management, activity logging, scheduling, real-time data tracking, and more.
Summary
We have tried to provide a brief overview of Monday.com and how it can help you streamline your business tasks effectively. We hope you found our article helpful and are ready to organize your projects easily on Monday.com. It’s easy to use, accessible, and trusted by hundreds of businesses worldwide. So what are you waiting for? Check Monday now. You may also explore the best way to manage your sales work with Monday sales CRM.
