Vartika Kashyap November 5th, 2019

Want to Make Every New Project a Success In 2020? Try These 20+ Tools

The success of every project is ensured by a collective effort of teams. But, it is not only the zeal that fixes everything. Right tools that bring teams together and make the working easier become all the more important.

We are heading into 2020, remote teams are a common phenomenon. Businesses need to stay equipped with the right tools to deliver the maximum output in less time. Here is a list of 20 tools that can ensure the success of all your projects.

I have categorized these tools as per the purpose they serve primarily. You can choose as per what suits best for your requirements.

Tools For Project Management And Collaboration

Teams need to interact and discuss ideas and issues many times during a project course. Calling meetings for every little update involves a lot of wastage of time. Here is a list of software solutions that facilitate seamless collaboration and management of projects.

ProofHub

ProofHub is a cloud-based project management and collaboration tool which seems to do it all for project teams. It becomes a central location to find all your project related information in one place. Teams can plan, schedule, discuss, view tasks and their progress status,  find files and documents all in one place. The inbuilt Proofing tool of ProofHub makes it all the more versatile for project management. ProofHub is great for keeping everyone on the same page regarding duties and responsibilities. It ensures seamless collaboration without the need to call meetings and use email threads now and then to share information.

Teamwork

Teamwork comes second on this list. It is yet another tool that manages almost all aspects related to your projects. It gives teams an easy glance over all the aspects of the projects. Teams can plan, schedule, share files, assign tasks using Teamwork. It provides a panoramic view of where all your projects stand, spot roadblocks and take essential steps to keep the work moving.

Scoro

Scoro is another efficient tool for project management and collaboration. It takes care of planning your projects, assigning tasks and subtasks, keeping track of billable and non-billable hours, status reports and helps you view workload of every resource. 

Clarizen

Clarizen is a cloud-based project management software that helps to simplify work management and achieve the goals of an organization. Clarizen provides a complete view of all the resources, schedules, and tasks with real-time insights. It has an intuitive interface and one-click access to your resources to manage all their tasks on their task lists.

zipBoard

zipBoard is a popular bug tracking and website annotation tool. It is used to review and collaborate on websites. The tool also comes with a central task manager that helps in tracking issues and sharing it with the team members easily. The user just needs to enter their website URL or upload mock designs in order to get started. zipBoard can easily integrate with JIRA and Slack.

Tools For Team Communication

Great team communication is very important to ensure project success. Here is a list of a few tools that can streamline your team communication.

Chanty

Chanty is an amazing tool for team communication which keeps project teams in sync via text, voice or video. Chanty comes with an import feature such that you can import all your message history or other team data from a third party messenger to Chanty. It also offers unlimited message history. Apart from this, you can use @mentions to reach your teammates on the go as this sends a push notification to their mobile.

Rocket.chat

Rocket.chat is an open-source, team chat software solution. This chat platform allows discussions, sharing files, and ideas with real-time or asynchronous team chat. This being an open-source tool, a team can customize, extend or add new functionality as per their requirements.

Twist

Twist is a team communication platform where team conversations stay organized and on topic. Teams can refer back to any conversation easily with Twist at any time. Twist offers one topic per thread so that your teams can keep an easy track of parallel conversations and stay up to date on what’s happening.

Convo

Convo is a team communication tool that lets team members share their ideas, thoughts, images, weblinks, documents, etc. by a post. It offers the feature of powerful comments and annotations. Some of the other features of convo include image-based polls, geotag posts, powerful search, activity log or news feed, etc. 

Tools For Time Tracking

Time tracking allows you to keep track of the time spent on individual tasks as well as on the project as a whole. This helps you in calculating the accuracy of your work estimates as well as the effectiveness of employees. Here are some useful time tracking tools for project management.

Timely

Timely is a time tracking tool that gives a detailed record of the time spent on different aspects of projects. It helps to balance the workload by giving a complete account of the work hours of every employee. Timely creates an automatic timesheet for you by tracking your work across different sources using artificial intelligence. Its reporting features help you in getting work done within the budget constraints.

Everhour

Everhour is a time tracking tool that is suitable for all kinds of teams. Teams can keep track of their project budgets, schedule threshold alerts and forward resource planning. Managers can view who is overworked and who can handle more work. Building reports and sending professional invoices is yet another feature of Everhour.

WebWork Tracker

WebWork Tracker is a powerful time tracking software for effortless project and employee productivity management. It simplifies work hour monitoring, automates timesheet creation, and delivers precise insights to optimize project efficiency.

With WebWork Tracker, you can generate invoices with ease, monitor real-time progress, and customize reports to suit your needs. Stay on top of your projects, boost productivity, and streamline your time tracking processes effortlessly.

ClickTime

ClickTime is a time tracking software that answers many questions about your business. It helps teams estimate their project costs, review past performance or simply monitor who has not completed their timesheets.

Toggl

Toggl is a cloud-based software that specializes in time tracking. It not only tracks your working time rather it keeps a record of your idle time as well. It helps you see all your employee time reports at one location.

Tools For Customer Relation Management 

A customer relationship management system helps manage customer data. Here is a list of some good CRM tools.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM system that easily integrates with your system. It helps you create attractive contact and company profiles. It is linked to multiple places where most sales processes occur such as phone calls, emails, websites, social media, etc. It organizes all the details from your customer’s communication with you. HubSpot is one of the best integrated CRM platforms in the market.

Zoho

Zoho CRM is a web-based CRM solution designed to help businesses to attract, retain and satisfy customers. This can be linked to your customer’s Twitter and Facebook pages. You can then categorize them as leads or contacts and send them invitations. Integrations with Google apps like tasks, calendars, contacts, docs, emails, etc is yet another feature of this system.

Really Simple Systems

Really Simple Systems is a cloud-based CRM system that’s specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. It includes all the features you’re likely to need to get organized and manage your sales but without the price tag of some of its competitors. Whilst you can subscribe to the stand-alone sales CRM, it also offers an all-in-one solution for sales, marketing, and customer service.

Nimble

Nimble is a CRM solution that helps in building customer engagement, data organization, and sales insights. This tool’s contact management system uses data record and imports contact information from almost all platforms like Google+, Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.

SalesforceIQ

SalesforceIQ helps businesses build stronger customer relationships. Its relationship Intelligence technology spots meaningful actions, unifies your customer’s story, and enables productive outcomes. You can set up SalesforceIQ quickly and easily by linking it to your Gmail or Exchange account.

ConvergeHub

ConvergeHub is a simple to use all-in-one cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that lets you take charge of business growth and manage your Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Billing from one platform. It lets users store contact lists, design campaigns, automate business process and manage sales activities or leads. In ConvergeHub, Leads can be entered manually or can be integrated using Office365, Landing pages, Dialers Google Apps, Linkedin or any other 1500+ apps. It stores a 360-degree communication log summarizing any form of interaction between the lead at any given point using channels viz. Email, Phone, SMS, Fax or eSignature process. ConvergeHub dashboard offers a quick view to show business performance and where it requires improvement. With its unique ability to provide click to call, SMS, email, fax, eSignature, meeting, and invoices, it offers Small and Medium businesses a convenient and cost-effective platform to get more work done in less time.”

Tools to train your teams

Training software makes it easier for managers to create, store, and send training material to all teams in an organization.

TalentLMS

TalentLMS is the award-winning and user-loving training software that will become your training hub. Administrators can create courses in a snap, automate lots of recurring tasks, and track training milestones. The system is so intuitive that when you invite employees or "learners" into the platform, they instinctively take the training. It’s that easy! Use TalentLMS if you don’t have a standardized training process yet, and see how simple it is to establish one. Better training, after all, makes better teams.

Tools For Organizing Projects

Organizing tasks, resources, timelines, etc. is highly important to manage your projects in an optimum manner. Here is a list of some tools that can help you organize your projects. 

Evernote

Evernote is a cloud-based tool that allows you to take notes on your computer or smartphone. Apart from grouping notes into notebooks, other organizational features include tagging notes for sorting, cross-linking notes, saving attachments to notes and inserting checklists and tables are also available. It is a way to organize your project related information and ideas.

Dropbox

With Dropbox, you can store reports, sales decks or new collateral. You can switch between personal and professional files with only a few clicks in Dropbox. Users can review documents, add their comments and then comment back and forth if there are any questions.

Zapier

Zapier is an organizational tool that helps you automate your work without any need to learn to code. It does your nitty-gritty digital tasks like adding new clients in a spreadsheet automatically. You can send an automated personal message as soon as someone reaches out and thus grab opportunities with Zapier.

Invoicebus

Invoicebus is a free online invoice app to help in your financial document management. Invoicebus is an easy to use application for creating, sending and tracking invoices for your projects. It makes the invoicing process very simple.

Conclusion

With the rapid-paced business advancements, the needs of software solutions for businesses has become essential. It is important to understand your business demands and make the most of the available tools for easy work management. 

We hope that the above-mentioned tools make your life easier. We would like to know if you have any more suggestions to add to this list.

Featured image by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Vartika Kashyap

Vartika is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub, a project management software. She has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2016, 2017, and 2018. She is also a contributor at Business.com, The Next Web, YourStory, and Huffington, among others. Her articles mainly revolve around productivity and leadership.

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