- Good day, Peter Moriarty here,
today, I'm covering off some advantages and comparisons
between some quite popular task management shared systems.
Shared task management systems.
These are team task management systems for you and your team
and I'm gonna be covering
Monday.com, Asana, Process Street and Teamwork Shared Tasks.
(upbeat music)
So let's start with the basics,
for starters using a shared task management system
is a great move for your business.
If you're a solo operator
and you're just using one task list or one to-do list,
you can probably get your work done
but as soon as you start adding staff members into the mix,
things start to fall off the rails a little bit
and spreadsheets or a big white board
just ain't gonna cut it in you actually managing tasks
and who's doing what inside the business.
Now a task management system
or a shared task management system,
means that you can see your own tasks
but you also have access to common or shared projects
and shared tasks amongst your team.
And some of the really popular solutions over the years
have been tools like Basecamp,
they were one of the real first popular ones
years and years ago and many have popped up
all over the place.
Now, I'm gonna be covering some of my favorite,
some of the most popular ones
but the point here is really,
don't stress too much about what system is right for you.
The most important thing
is that you actually use the system.
The one you actually use is the one that works.
So when you're choosing different systems,
don't stress too much about what has what features,
you can always change in the future.
Yes sure it might be a pain to switch over your tasks
but it's not the end of the world to do that
if you outgrow the system that you're using right now.
So I'm gonna start from the basics
and I'm gonna get up to the more kind of sophisticated
and advanced solutions and as that process goes along,
the price obviously changes for each one of these as well.
Now the first one that I love the best,
this one is Asana and honestly
we still use Asana inside our business,
we've used it for years and years.
We've tried many others
and I'm a big fan of simple is better
and I'm also a big fan of free.
And Asana is free for up to 15 people,
which makes it really great.
Now it's not just free for 15 people,
it's free for teams of up to 15.
So you can actually have one Asana set-up
with multiple teams
and when you have multiple teams set-up in Asana,
you can effectively have more than 15 people using Asana,
still for free.
That's pretty darn groovy
and so yes we are still on the free account,
we're still using Asana and loving it.
Now you might be thinking,
"Pete, well how do I get access to the free account?
"Is there anything special that I need to do?"
And there is, you actually have to be on G Suite
to make that happen and you have to sign up to Asana
using your G Suite account.
So there's a few hoops you gotta jump through,
if you need any help with that,
you should get in touch with our team
and we can help make that happen.
Now the reason I love Asana
is it's super simple to use,
the interface is really nice and easy
and there aren't many button clicks
to actually make things happen.
More sophisticated systems like Teamwork.com
or like, you know Process Street or Monday
can sometimes require additional button clicks
to achieve the same result like marking off a task
or looking into sub-tasks or navigating through projects.
And with Asana, I like that there's a really great
set of simple keyboard shortcuts
but also, the interface is just very fluid
so it's very easy to use.
Their mobile app is also great
and one of the cool features of Asana
is when you complete a task
you can actually have a unicorn fly across the screen
which, that's pretty damn hard to beat.
So, you might pick it if you're just getting started
and you want something simple,
as free as possible for as long as possible,
is to get started with Asana
'cause that's the easiest place to start.
Now the next one that I'll cover is called Teamwork.com
and Teamwork is great
because not only do you have a task management system
and it's quite a sophisticated one,
you also have a chat functionality
and a ticketing help desk functionality in there as well.
And they're building out other tools
to expand their Teamwork ecosystem.
But the core apps are the tasks
and now they've added the chat
and also the projects feature,
sorry the ticketing feature as well.
Now inside of Teamwork, there are a few more button clicks
to get things done
but you can run slightly more sophisticated projects.
And so, if you're a business in the construction industry
and you wanna have Gantt charts
and timelines for your projects.
If you wanna also do things
like maybe have time billing added to your projects
and reporting on time billing with budgets,
you can do all of that within Teamwork
and that's pretty cool.
If we take a step back and talk about Asana,
Asana only let's you do things like time billing
through third party integrations.
So you're gonna have to use an external system
if you wanna do that inside of Asana.
And if you wanna add things like timelines and Gantt charts
and more sophisticated timeline type scheduling
inside of Asana, you've got to upgrade to the paid plan.
Whereas with Teamwork, you're on the paid plan
for anywhere more than five users
and so if you've got more than five users in the business,
you gotta jump up to a paid plan
and you're effectively opened up to all of those features.
So Teamwork if you're a more sophisticated business,
if you're doing more sophisticated projects and tasks,
definitely worth the investment to bump up.
But just keep in mind, as you keep adding add-ons,
like chat and the desk and other bits and pieces
and other features that they release,
the pricing does go up to different pricing plans
and you're paying on a per user basis.
So as your business grows the costs are obviously
gonna grow with that as well.
So let's cover off some of the more sophisticated end,
and that would be Monday.com or other tools
like Podio or Process Street.
Now these tools give you deep levels of customization
inside your workflows.
You can think of it like a super duper smart spreadsheet
in that you can not only have the visual aids
of ticking things off and having different colors
and marking off your tasks
and making it all pretty when that happens,
but you can also add formulas,
different types of data in their fields.
And you can pretty much customize
each one of those data fields
to build it out to a business process system
that matches your business.
Now this is super duper powerful
and it allows you to do some pretty darn cool stuff
to run the business
and run all of your processes and workflows
inside these systems.
The downside is, it costs a lot more,
it's a significant investment per user,
and you're typically locked in to a per year contract.
I think that's with Monday,
I'm not sure about Process Street.
But with these tools,
you also need someone to do the upkeep,
you need someone to be the data analyst or engineer,
to actually build out these processes and systems.
Now that's not always a bad thing,
it just means that there's a bit of a resource cost
in actually having someone maintain them and set them up
and do the thinking around,
okay, how is this process gonna work
and how am I gonna build it out
inside of Monday or Process Street?
But, once you do the work
and you're happy to spend the money on the licenses,
these apps are amazingly powerful
and they will help you to grow and scale your business.
So I hope that's been a useful comparison
of the different apps.
If you're just getting started,
I would recommend you start with something simple,
that might be Asana, that might be Teamwork,
those applications are really great to use
if you've got nothing,
or if you're just something like Google Tasks right now,
or Apple Tasks, which just kind of gives you your own tasks,
then you wanna expand yourself out to shared tasks,
get your team involved, and use one of these tools,
it doesn't matter which one you use,
as long as you use something.
But use one of these tools to get your team on track
with all their tasks,
and it really helps you to reduce the
is it done yet?
Or, hey can you please do this for me?
Or if you're doing tasks on email,
all that is just a complete mess
and these task management systems
will help to bring it all in to one nice,
tidy system for you.
All right, if you've got any questions,
or you would like help implementing any of these systems,
we support some of these systems in our business
and we can help you get them implemented for your team
and your staff.
Of course we've got best practice tips,
we've got training and we've got support staff on hand
who can be that implementation person to make that happen
so you're not working it out yourself
or spending hours and hours reading help guides,
learning how to do these things.
So if you're interested in that,
get in touch with our team,
head along to itgenius.com,
look for our service called Cloud Concierge,
and we will help out with any needs
that you have in task management
or if you just want to do a business health checkup.
If you'd like to do a bit of an I.T audit,
and have us check in with your systems and processes,
see if there's any room for improvement,
and if we might be able to help,
then our team will be very happy to help you out with that.
Until the next one, take care, cheers.
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