Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello fellow efficiency seekers,

I`ve been researching online project management systems for virtual teams. I personally will be implementing one this week and would like to hear if anyone has experience with one of these tools below (or one they like better.)

Our key criteria is:

• Easy to use
• Low cost
• Can utilize templates for recurring projects
• Can associate team member email for updating them on their tasks
• Can generate simple views of each person`s overall tasks and projects
• Has a simple view that overviews a list of all current projects at once
• Has a report to view late tasks and current tasks at a glance

Ideally, but not essential, it will also:

• Interface into Microsoft Outlook (a stretch, I know)
• Provide hours allocated per resource
• Have a way to keep project overview and documentation with the project plan

We are looking at:

• Base Camp (www.basecamphq.com)
• Smart Sheets (www.smartsheet.com)
• TeamWork Live (www.teamworklive.com)
• SugarCRM (an open-source code project management tool that resides on my server. -- http://www.sugarcrm.com/)

We are not planning to use Microsoft Project as I`m familiar withthat program and find it too overwhelming for the types of projects we run.

We have 8 - 12 people who work on projects for me at any given time and the most important thing we want is to be able to map out every project with deliverables, deadlines and a way to automate the tracking of these deliverables being completed.

Once I test this out, I`m going to be incorporating my top 3 picks into my training program for entrepreneurs called Virtual Team Building Secrets So regardless of what I pick, your feedback will be very helpful for a lot of entrepreneurs out there.

Thanks for your input!

-------------------------

Melanie Benson Strick
Million Dollar Lifestyle Business Coach
& Virtual Team Building Expert
http://www.successconnections.com

Discover "101 Ways to Triple Your Income by Outsourcing Your High Payoff Activities" at http://www.successconnections.com/101ways.

This is on the higher end of the price spectrum, but we recently used quickbase to map a custom process online (multiple users, different locations, data capture at each step, e-mail notifications, custom forms, metrics/dashboards, etc.). 

I was impressed by the features, ease of use, flexibility, and number of templates that you can use to set up your workflow.

Hi Melanie,

have a look at this one : http://www.minuteman-systems.com/minutemanplusproductdetails .htm

 

 

-------------------------

Silvia
www.justaphonecallaway.com

Thanks everyone for your input.

In case someone else stumbles across this later and wants to know what I decided, I`ve selected BaseCamp. I also decided to use Sugar CRM for our customer tracking. I realized they truly handle different functions.

Thanks!

-------------------------

Melanie Benson Strick
Million Dollar Lifestyle Business Coach
& Virtual Team Building Expert
http://www.successconnections.com

Discover "101 Ways to Triple Your Income by Outsourcing Your High Payoff Activities" at http://www.successconnections.com/101ways.