If you are new to project management and are wondering about the various tools that you can leverage to make your day-to-day activities easy, then this post is for you.
Well, project management is a buzzword in businesses today. To make it simple let’s take any business as an example. The primary goal of any business is to sell a product or a service to make a profit. While the goal and objective of the business are set, there are definite processes and functional activities that must be followed to produce the product or service. Delivering this might require focusing on three main aspects: time, quality & budget. Here’s where Project Management comes to play.
Though the methods might differ across sectors and industries, the key aspect remains the same. So Project Management is nothing but delivering a project on schedule, within budget involving resources, skills, and adequate tools. However, projects are different from business functions. The former has a definite start and an end whereas the latter is a continuous repetitive function. There can be many projects, both short-term and long-term, involved in a business.
Now moving on to project management tools. A project management tool is a software that helps an individual or a team to organize and manage a project. The basic feature of any project management tool must include schedule creation, task tracking, and monitoring, resource management, team collaboration, document sharing, and reporting. Various project management tools are online and cloud-based. Some of these are free while some have various pricing bands. One such project management tool is ClickUp.
What is ClickUp?
ClickUp is one of the highly customizable project management tools available in the market and it goes with the tag line “One app to replace them all”. Now let’s see what ClickUp provides within its ecosystem.
- ClickUp can help you break down and list your task and track them efficiently.
- ClickUp lets you create relationships and task dependencies.
- ClickUp provides various task views that can help you better manage your project and track progress.
- ClickUp helps you to communicate and collaborate with your team effortlessly.
- ClickUp can help you to capture and share screen recordings.
- ClickUp integrates with various other apps that can help you leverage all other mediums within ClickUp’s ecosystem. You can easily import data from Trello, Jira, Monday, etc into ClickUp.
- ClickUp provides various views to help you organize, plan, schedule, prioritize and track activities, maximize productivity, and manage documents.
These are a few basic features and there are more advanced features that ClickUp provides.
To get started with Clickup
- Signing in with ClickUp is free. One good thing that I liked about ClickUp is that they don’t ask your credit card details to proceed further. ClickUp has various plans. The free forever plan is free and has a 100 MB storage capacity. The pricing starts at $5 per member per month with advanced features. You can sign up for ClickUp here. Though most of the features are similar throughout various pricing ranges there are differences in terms of the number of uses and a few advanced features that the free users cannot leverage.
- ClickUp has a well-built structure. Here’s the hierarchy; Workspace → Spaces → List and Folders → Tasks. Workspace in ClickUp is the highest and the parent level item in the hierarchy. Workspace can represent an organization, small business, or an enterprise or agency. Many spaces can be created under a workspace. Spaces can be various departments or functions within an organization or a business. Lists and folders are organized within Spaces and tasks are organized under the lists. The task is the leaf-level item in the hierarchy.
- Once you have entered into the ClickUp ecosystem, creating a task will be your first step. ClickUp has managed to accommodate various features with respect to tasks. Some of them are; assigning dependencies, schedule and time estimates, custom fields, linking content, attaching documents, etc.
- ClickUp better recommends importing and utilizing templates instead of creating everything from scratch which could save most of the time. ClickUp provides various pre-built templates from which you can choose the one that best suits you. So download the most suitable template and get started.
