We have listed 5 tools that can help make your life as a project manager easier:
1. Miro
The first tool we recommend is Miro. This is a free collaboration tool (you can also use the payed version). The tool can help you collaboration visually through your company and projects. This tool is perfect to use when most of the people in your team is working from home! Miro can also be used to everything from planning and organizing meetings and workshops, to brainstorming, agile methods, strategy and planning, as well as visual mapping using different diagrams. We, the board at Young Crew Norway has started using this tool prior to and during Covid-19 as we could not meet in person anymore. We now use this tool to plan and execute tasks. Give it a try!
2. Planview Projectplace
Planview Projectplace can be used to plan and organize work in the team inside and outside of your organization. Projectplace offers a broad spectre of powerful work- and project execution tools which makes it possible for traditional and new project managers unfamiliar with project management as a field to plan projects and tasks, collaboration in team documents and tracking of the teams progress by integrating Kanban-panels, Gantt-diagrams and communication tools.
3. Lucidchart
Lucidchart is a very useful tool that can be used to easily draw up Gantt charts, flow charts and WBS (work breakdown structures). It is great visual tool that can help you draw up different processes in your project and it can give a good overview over governance structures, different deadlines and overview over workpackages in your project and how they are connected (dependencies, critical paths etc). This is the preferred tool amongst Anna’s coworkers in academia and is good for planning applications to grants and funding agencies and in many other projects.
4. Work Breakdown Structure
WBS is a simple tool you can use to make an overview over your project work and its tasks and workpackages. Start to define the scope of the project before you add different categories of the work and its workpackages and tasks. In the example below you will see that the small boxes (without fill) would be your tasks. This WBS is also divided into stages of the project but you can also categorize for example according to an event with the proposed categories: speakers, venue, marketing, registration, budget, and its subtasks. Tailor to your project as you see fit.
5. Gantt chart template
Here you will find a Gantt chart template, which is both free and easy to use. You can use the work packages from WBS as a starting point for the tasks you post in the Gantt chart.
But do you want to learn how to set up a Gantt chart? The simple is often the best: use excel. Excel can be used for a lot in project management. If you are in doubt about how to create a Gantt chart from beginning to end – watch this YouTube video, and after eight minutes you can create your own design and edit as you wish.
A tip: If you are stuck, it is often due to the start and end date of the work packages not being changed from general to number (time 6.15 in the video) and that you have entered the wrong date on some of the work packages. Double check this as you follow the guidelines.
If you don’t have a lot to create your own Gantt chart, we recommend using a free template as mentioned above.
We hope you learned something new that you can take with you into everyday life as a project manager in 2021!
styremedlem i Young Crew