What Does a Project Planner Do & How to Choose the Right One?

The right project planner for you can revolutionise your project management as a small business. Learn all about it right here

Using an effective project planner can help organise your weekly tasks and team projects. It’s like having a virtual project manager that keeps your work on track.

Many project planners use planners to streamline the work of businesses of all sizes. The trick to using a project planner effectively is finding one that best matches your business activities.

This guide will help you decipher the many tasks a project planner can help you with. We’ll also discuss how to choose the right one for you. Let’s dive in.

Here’s What We’ll Cover:

What Is a Project Planner and What Does It Do?

How Do You Choose the Right Project Planning System for You?

Key Takeaways

What Is a Project Planner and What Does It Do?

A project planner is an online application or system that houses your projects and tasks.

Common examples include Asana, ClickUp and Monday.com.

They use various features to help you keep track of your team tasks. Some project planners have special features that are particularly useful for certain industries.

Here is a round-up of what project planners generally do:

• Task management

At its core, project planners came from the traditional to-do list model of task management. Generally, the latest software will have different ways of managing your tasks and visualising them. You may have a Gantt planner or a project planner spreadsheet to help you see the overall progress of the project cycle. However, you best view your daily tasks, a project planner can help.

• Milestones

Setting project milestones in the app also keeps you on track. The task lists are more granular. The milestones and goalposts are overarching goals you want to achieve to push the project forward.

• Client collaboration software

Some project planning software will also have some collaboration tools. These enable collaborative work and sharing of files between you and your client.

• Team collaboration tools

It’s helpful to have a project management system that enables team collaboration too. File sharing and commenting helps keep everyone on the same page as you work towards completion together.

How Do You Choose the Right Project Planning System for You?

The perfect project planner doesn’t really exist. You need to know the ways in which you work best and how you can adequately translate this to an app. Here are some questions to consider as you review the various planners on the market:

1. Are you a solopreneur or do you have a team?

Using a project management system as a solo business owner is very different to collaborating with a team. With a team, you’ll be looking for the ability to assign tasks easily and track progress. You’ll want the subscription to be affordable for your business as you’ll be paying per user. You’ll also want the project cycle to be easily visible to all members and an easy onboarding process. If you’re working alone, you’ll view the system’s capabilities differently.

2. What is the best project management view for your line of work?

This is completely personal to each team or individual. If you thrive off of task lists, you may love a system like Todoist. If KanBan boards work well with your workflow, Trello is a prime choice. Figure out how you want to track your projects and this will help narrow the search.

3. What is your budget?

Project planners come at all ends of the spectrum. Some have a freemium model that will allow you to have a certain number of team members for free. Depending on how many staff members you have, you can get a package deal for everyone to use the system.

4. Do you need third party integration?

What bells and whistles would be useful to you? Do you want your project manager to sync to your email accounts? What about your accounting and CRM features? Find a task manager that will integrate with subscriptions you already use.

Key Takeaways

A project planner is key to increasing your productivity as a business and an individual. Our very own project planner is included with our accounting subscriptions. It includes helpful features like client collaboration portals, team project management and integration with the accounting software.

Click here to find out more about our project management tools.

For more guides like this one, check out our resource hub!

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