Featured Review: Collaborative, Web-Based Project Management  

I was in a pub the other day with a Project Manager friend of mine listening to him voicing his frustrations on how best to manage his project in a multi office, multi cultural and multi skill level environment. Having some painful memories of similar situations in my early project management days, I played out the agony aunt role and proceeded to listen to his long list of woes as he looked for the solution in another bottle of Beer Chang...

Missed deadlines due to lack of awareness of schedules and implications; how the communication gap, especially as he was dealing with young, inexperienced, multinational staff, was causing problems with requirements leakage, email tracking issues and unconnected dicussion threads. In addition, how documents were kept on local drives and how this made it hard for the team to track versions or find relevant project documentation; not to mention the client in all of this, who requested weekly status reports which simply added to the admin and email load.

He used a personal copy of MS Project but it was stored locally and only he 'managed' the overall plan. His company did not deem it necessary to pay for infrastructure or software to enable web based collaboration. His team were issued paper based schedules and used email to communicate status / ask questions and so on.

By the end of it all, well, I didn't fancy another beer that's for sure, but it did strike home with some common issues I'd faced personally before the advent of affordable, web based project management software. Back then it was available, but at a cost, more than most small businesses could afford or at least wanted to pay, and it was often put on the shoulders of the unfortunate PM to control all of these factors through traditional means, which, although possible, greatly reduced his/her ability to manage multiple projects due to the sheer admin of doing so.

These were all common issues which would have been a lot easier if all members of the team were part of a collaborative portal which you could refer to when managing the project.

If this sounds familiar to you too or if you currently face these kinds of issues then I'll make the same recommendation to you as I did to my friend who by that time was looking for solutions in yet another bottle of Elephant beer... Zoho Project is for you!

Everyone in business needs to work with others more efficiently and effectively. Whether e-mail, instant messaging, virtual workspaces or videoconferencing, technology dramatically shortens distances between people and frees up the flow of information, enabling employees to work together and respond to customers and each other more quickly.

Zoho Projects: Project Management Made Easy.

Plan, Track, Collaborate and Manage your Projects Online.

"Zoho Projects is incredibly powerful and because of it we no longer use emails for communication between projects members but rather use the user forums and messaging for constant communication all in one place."

- Raymond Gonzalez, Site Administrator, TradeWithPros.com

Tasks

Assign multiple members to a task, set start/end dates & send email notifications. Set interdependency between tasks to closely keep track of your project management schedule.
Milestones.

View Upcoming, Overdue & Completed Milestones and get to know each project's status, progress at any point of time. In other words, it is project management made easy.

Document Sharing

Share and manage project related files centrally to ensure efficient group collaboration. View, edit, share & save back documents directly from the browser without downloading.

Calendar

See all tasks, milestones & meetings in the easy-to-view project management calendar. Add, edit tasks and other items in the calendar view itself.

Forums

Let your project teams openly interact and collaborate. Unlike emails that are sent to individual mailboxes, all forum topics are archived centrally and hence allow easy retrieval.

Time Tracking and Gantt Charts

Enter billable & non-billable hours spent on each task which can then be used for client billing. Get at-a-glance status of your projects with the Gantt charts.

Indeed, CRM Asia Solutions use Zoho Project to manage all of our client CRM implementation and Website projects. All of our customers are given access to their project through our project portal where they can check status, time sheets, milestones, forums and access project documents.

Zoho Project can also be used in conjunction with Zoho CRM or any of the other Zoho products for providing managers with a more structured means to manage projects such as software development projects, construction, sales and marketing campaigns - anything. It's a great tool to further engage your customers as well, making use of the the shared documents or forums sections.

Suitable for any kind of 'project', for use by any manager, it makes life so much easier for business managers who need a platform on which their team members and clients can collaborate and share information.

Zoho Project is just one of a wide range of robust, very affordable web based business solutions that can help improve the efficiency of your teams and performance of your business.

For more information on Zoho Project and other business solutions from Zoho, please contact us here or via email on info@crmasiasolutions.com.

CRM Asia Solutions
info@crmasiasolutions.com
http://www.crmasiasolutions.com