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In 2022, we are noticing that more and more companies are hiring and delegating work to remote teams. It can be said that this shift in work practices has increased after COVID-19 forced everyone to work remotely, but stats suggest that it was around since before the pandemic. 

In terms of workplace failures, communication statistics show that 86% of employees and executives point to a lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause of workplace failures. It is believed that teams who communicate effectively may increase their productivity by as much as 25%.

The Market for Project Management Tools

In a 2018-2019 survey by Workfront, 63 percent of older workers and 78 percent of younger workers said that instant messaging is an effective means of communication between teams and business units. About 44 percent of respondents expressed the need for better digital project management tools to facilitate communication which would lead to greater productivity. This was the condition before the pandemic. After the outbreak of the pandemic, the need for remote communication between teams skyrocketed.

Advantages and Context for Distributed Teams

In America in 2020, Brookings reports that up to half of the employee workforce is working remotely. That is more than double compared to 2017-2018. Now in 2022, the distributed and remote model of employment is lucrative, especially for small business owners who lack the financial capacity to pay rent and utilities for an office space. It is far simpler and financially efficient to hire remote workers and use project management tools to run the ship.

Digital communication platforms often have built-in analytics, automation, and data management tools, allowing for greater productivity and efficiency across multiple teams.

Why You Need Project Management Tools

Remote work offers its own challenges. In a distributed team setting, the challenges could be the following:

  • Every team member uses different systems to manage their work, so all the tasks, files, and projects are scattered across different systems.
  • Team members tend to forget or be unaware of individual priorities and tasks. This results in a lot of time being wasted in back and forth communication.
  • Your process for team collaboration involves physical meetings, email chains, and manually updating sheets and tables.
  • Team members routinely miss deadlines.
  • Keeping track of communication and having a single place to have all work-related discussions.
  • Ability to work collaboratively on one task. 
  • Ability to see the overall work progress using a dashboard.

Don’t these sound familiar? 

Choosing the Best Project Management Tool for You

When choosing a tool, there are a few things to consider, such as:

  • User Interface: Is it clean and easy to use?
  • Usability: Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer support and updates?
  • Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools that you may be using? 
  • Value for Money: Is it free or paid? If it is paid, is it worth the money?
  • Features: Does it have the ones that you need?

When you are deciding on these, you should also look at the key features of the tool, such as:

  • Gantt chart and/or Kanban board – Does the project management tool have graphs and charts to support tasks?
  • In-app communication – Does the tool make it easy to collaborate and communicate with your team? 
  • Task lists – Does the tool make it clear what needs to be done by whom and by what deadline? 
  • Reporting and Documentation – Can you easily access data, visualize it and export it if needed?

6 Project Management Tools for Remote Teams

Now we’ll be looking at some prominent project management tools for remote teams in 2022. This list is not in any order of preference, each of the tools used has its own unique merits.

  1. ClickUp
  2. Monday.com
  3. Wrike
  4. Asana
  5. Basecamp
  6. Trello

ClickUp:

This application has been around for a relatively short time but has grown pretty rapidly. ClickUp offers impressive features such as tasks, docs, chat, goals, and also a Gantt chart visualizer. The unique feature of ClickUp is its intuitive built-in screen recorder, which makes team communication and sharing data super simple, regardless of your team’s physical location.

In the free version, you get unlimited tasks, and unlimited members, including all primary features. However, the freemium plan limits the use of maps, charts, and dashboards. The paid plans starts from $5 per user per month and you get access to unlimited file storage too. This project management tool for remote teams has a great interface for web apps and mobile apps, and also receives regular improvements and updates.

Monday.com:

It is an excellent application offering a host of tools for planning, tracking, and delivering remote work. It also offers numerous options for customization and templates to visualize information and tasks. It includes real-time progress monitoring and is a cloud-based project management tool.

For teams that involve the usage of multiple applications, such as advertising, marketing, and sales; Monday.com has all the solutions since it includes hundreds of 3rd party integrated apps, such as Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, DropBox, Typeform and Microsoft. 

monday.com offers a free plan to only two users. The paid version starts from $6 per user per month and comes with a 14-day free trial.

Wrike:

This is an Agile project management tool that does pretty much everything for remote teams. It has the best documenting abilities and a very user-friendly design. It also has a range of apps and integrations like Adobe creative cloud, GitHub, Jira, and many more.

Wrike is suitable for marketing, creative, project management, product development, business operations, and professional services. With its customized dashboard, fundamental building blocks, request forms, automation, live editing, and file management, you can easily organize your projects and execute them effectively.

You can use Wrike for free if you have a small team of 5 people who need a simple and basic solution. Meanwhile, the professional plan’s premium subscriptions start at $9.80 per user per month. It also offers comprehensive plans for entrepreneurs, marketers, and huge corporations

Asana:

Asana has been around for a long time and it is also an Agile project management tool. It allows you to get very creative with your projects while collaborating with your team by commenting, sharing, and setting up timelines, amongst other features.  Many additional project management apps, such as Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, are integrated with Asana.

Users can invite people to their digital workspace with Asana. It also notifies colleagues when tasks within the program are changed. Personal tasks are also displayed to other team members, and comments on assignments are allowed. Asana’s task management is well-organized and efficient. It provides consumers with a comprehensive overview of all tasks and the ability to prioritize them. 

Asana’s free edition is accessible for a team size up to 15. The premium plans start from $10.99 per user per month, and when billed monthly, it costs $13.49 per user per month.

Basecamp:

This is one of the best project management tools for remote teams, a great application if you’re in the creative design industry and your teams want to work asynchronously. This means that you don’t necessarily have to work in real-time which is a great support feature if you have people in different time zones that need to be communicated with or kept updated regularly.   

Basecamp offers a very simple user experience and is very easy to learn. However, it is not suitable for projects that require excessive planning and scheduling, since it does not offer a way to create dependencies or relationships between tasks and deadlines.

Basecamp has a very limited free version for not more than 20 users and 3 running projects. However, they offer a 30 day trial of the paid version, which is available for a flat $99 per month. In the paid version, you have access to unlimited projects, unlimited users, 500 GB of storage space, unlimited clients, project templates, priority support, and much more.

Trello:

Trello offers a very efficient board feature for teams to visualize tasks easily. Everything that team has to do, has done, and is planning to do, is visible at a glance. Besides the standard board view, they are also adding views like timeline, table, dashboard, and map. Trello also offers powerful no-code automation which allows you to connect to other services and automate specific actions, reducing the project management work that your team has to do physically.  

Trello comes with 4 plans: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise starting from $5 per user per month when billed annually. For personal usage and modest side projects, the free plan is ideal. It comes with an unlimited number of cards, lists, and file attachments of up to 10 MB each. Only ten boards per team are supported by this package, but that’s generally more than enough for personal use. You can also test one of Trello’s paid packages for free With a 14-day trial. 

Conclusion

By adopting digital and remote project management tools, businesses and employees are overcoming communication challenges and eliminating physical logistical issues. With the money and the time that is saved, services can be improved, skill sets can be added and portfolios can be diversified efficiently.

Our team at Genetech Solutions believes that the choice of the best-fitting project management tool depends on the scope and nature of the project.  For our client-facing projects, we prefer to use Basecamp and some of the teams use Trello to manage internal tasks. Our team is prone to work in shifts and working remotely, as per their convenience. We also collaborate between two campuses situated in different cities. Naturally, we have to use appropriate tools to communicate and collaborate.

We hope you enjoyed this article and it was helpful for you. Feel free to contact us if you have any queries.

I am a technical content writer at Genetech Solutions, one of Pakistan’s leading software houses. I have done a bachelor in Social Sciences, majoring in Political Science, from IBA. Thinking critically and reading is my passion. I like meeting new people and travelling to old historic places to experience life from different perspectives.