Over the years, I’ve worked to manage projects for teams, and used a variety of tracking methods as different needs came up. I believe in selecting and customizing the tracking method to what the team is already used to, but also looking at their willingness to train and learn a new tool.
Excel spreadsheets
For small projects, Excel spreadsheets can help with tracking dates, statuses, text to be edited and inserted into the project, names of team members, and more. It’s a widely available tool and I’m happy to help my teams create and manage these trackers.
monday.com
monday.com is an alternative to Excel if the company already has access to the tool. Since some users may be unfamiliar with the tool, some initial guidance may be needed to show the users how to interact with the tables and dashboards. I wouldn’t say that it’s an absolute must-use as far as tools go, but the built-in formatting and color options are nice.
Airtable
I enjoy using Airtable for its variety of available view types, including list, form, calendar, and gantt views. Depending on the needs of the team and project, it can be a visual way to display tasks and timelines. It has a lot of capabilities with the use of automations and its interface designer. I’m very comfortable with designing custom views and screens in Airtable, but also am happy to train my team members on using the new views and tool.
Jira & Confluence
Jira is great for tracking tasks and dependencies, as well as identifying where tasks belong in the hierarchy and grouping tasks into groups called epics. Users can also identify task dependencies in Jira.
Confluence serves as a “wiki” for storing information about a project, which can include meeting notes, project updates, decision matrices, and more. Confluence can be customized to be as complex or simple as needed. This tool can replace a set of file folders and Word documents, or any other system that a team was using. I enjoy building tables and linking information across Confluence pages using their macros, as well as helping to serve as page and permissions admin.
Microsoft Project & Planner
I have previous experience with Microsoft Planner and Project. Planner is more limited in scope, and used for tracking tasks in a simpler project. On top of basic tasks tracking, Project has additional capabilities to track dependencies.
Learnings
Over the years using various software solutions to handle project task tracking and information management, which solution you use really depends on the needs and capabilities of the team, how everyone interacts with the tracker, and how much work needs to be spent on setting up the tracker and managing it on an ongoing basis.