The old fashioned way to manage projects was for a project manager to keep the schedule. The project manager would hold review meetings to update it (thereby wasting everyone’s time), or visit cubicles/make phone calls for updates.
The more modern way to manage projects is the Agile method. This typically involves a project manager holding short, daily, “scrum” (comes from a rugby term) meetings.
With a cloud tool to manage projects, everyone on the projects can update daily, making the job of project manager much easier. There’s also online discussions for better communication, collaboration, and file sharing.
With the possible exception of Insightly, you will have to pay for a cloud tool subscription.
Your tool choice should offer the ability to backup your data locally and also to export. This is important to protect yourself from the cloud service going offline (or going out of business). It’s also important if you have a legal requirement to retain your data on-site for a number of years.
You may be concerned about the security issues of giving your data over to a cloud service.
Here’s a quote from an article addressing this concern by Smartsheet (Read about Smartsheet here: Here’s an Easy Way to Manage Projects.)
As of this writing, nearly half of all enterprise project collaboration involves external users such as vendors, freelancers, and contractors, and this number is continually trending upwards. This external involvement complicates interaction and often forces users to make the common “security versus convenience” tradeoff decision when using solutions deployed behind the firewall.
So, in other words, when you’re not using a cloud service and you have to collaborate outside of the company, you or your co-workers will find a way to do it, and probably not securely. Turning security over to your cloud service provider is not a bad way to go, and the convenience and productivity gain is not to be argued with.
You can read the full article here: Will the Cloud Change Project Management?.
If you manage projects using a cloud service, you have to be online, which is not always guaranteed.
Smartsheet has a great option of exporting your data to an Excel spreadsheet when you know that you’re going to be traveling and offline. You can import the updated data when you’re back online. Some services, like Asana through its Android app, allow you to work offline and will automatically sync when back online.
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