There are a whole range of important variables to keep in mind when making your decision, and it can quickly all get a bit overwhelming.
To help you out, we’ve decided to put this brief guide together – from checking where you’re currently at to assessing reliability and support, here’s where you should start.
Check where you’re at
First of all, you need to thoroughly assess your current project management requirements. Think about the systems that you’re using, what works (and what doesn’t quite work) and what you’d like more support with.
This will help to inform what kinds of functions you look for in your new solution, and will also allow for some reflection on what might be redundant. Make sure that you ask around your organisation when doing this, so that you get a number of different perspectives on the matter.
Predict your future requirements
Once you’ve put some time into assessing where you are currently, you can start to try to predict your future needs. Look at the upper margins of your growth predictions, to see how big things could get in the best-case scenario.
You want to make sure that the solution you go with has the scope to handle even more than those predictions – you need to operate with some kind of safety margin. In most cases, it’ll be a good idea to go with a service such as WorkSavi that will be able to handle your project management requirements on a number of different scales.
Don’t forget UX
While scalability and pure functionality are obviously important, it’s easy to get caught up in these things and forget about the importance of user experience, or UX. For these kinds of tools to be maximally effective, you need to make sure that the whole team is comfortable using them – otherwise, the data that the tool goes off will be incomplete. Make sure that the system is easy and even enjoyable to use, and that the least digitally literate people on your team will be able to use it.
Reviews & customer support
Lastly, once you’ve found a solution that’s scalable and that you reckon your employees will get along with, you need to make sure that the service is reliable enough for your requirements. A great way to gain more insight into this is to check some reviews from past users, to see what they have to say about the service.
Check for reviews that mention the kind of customer support you can expect to receive (especially as you’re getting to grips with things), the reliability of the platform, and any other key points that you deem to be important. If possible, try to get a trial before committing to long-term adoption.
These general pointers should make the process of choosing a new, scalable project management solution a lot easier. It’s critical that you involve the people who will actually be using the solution in the choosing process, to ensure that you operate from a holistic perspective in terms of your requirements.
