When you were a team of 4 it was easy to get everyone together, brainstorm and then head off to divide and conquer.
Now that your business is 10 times that size, collaboration is an entirely different animal, requiring tech assistance to manage projects and enable cross-enterprise communication.
So, what are the best free collaboration tools on the market? Here are 4 collaboration and project management tools you should check out and test before you commit major dollars to purchasing new tech:
Trello
Trello is a free project management tool that enables your team to organize its projects with ease. Projects and associated tasks are presented on boards or cards, providing a highly visual representation of a project's status, tasks and the team member responsible for the work. All of this information gets updated in real time. Trello is best suited for less complex projects, and is not ideal for an organization seeking a more robust suite of project management features like time tracking or reporting.
Asana
Asana is a workflow management tool that is highly flexible and customizable to your team's needs. Like Trello, Asana is a task management tool rather than a full blown piece of project management/workflow tech. The software is powerful, but there is a significant learning curve when it comes to tailoring it to work for you. Asana does not come with a proscribed way to do things; instead, its flexibility can be an asset in the long run but a headache in the short term. Make sure you assign an Asana project lead to build the concept and customize how your team uses it.
GanttProject
GanttProject offers similar workflow and task management features as Asana and Trello, though it's light on social media aspects like chat features. If you're looking for a pure task management tool with some, albeit limited, reporting features, GanttProject might be the best fit.
Slack
Slack offers a very strong social collaboration tool with some task management and workflow features. It offers ample notification options, chat features and the ability for team members to share documents. If you're looking for a way to encourage and increase information sharing, this program is highly customizable, easy to use and certainly makes communication easier. What's more, Slack can be integrated with other tools seamlessly if you want to bulk up on your task management or reporting capabilities.
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