Four Not-So-Obvious Signs You Need A Project Management Solution

There’s no hard and fast rule that dictates when a team needs to stop managing work with email, file sharing and spreadsheets and upgrade to an automated solution. While work volume and team size are often good cues, some small teams start with a system from day 1 and some surprisingly large enterprises still tempt fate by doing things the old-fashioned way. For teams that don’t have adopting a project management solution on their radar today, it pays to keep an eye out for these subtle signals that it’s time to start looking for a tool.

You’ve adopted remote or hybrid work

While seamless collaboration is never a given even if collaborators are sitting next to each other, the reality of geographic distance and asynchronous work adds an additional layer of complexity. Your team, whether it’s hybrid or fully remote, can’t afford not to have a tool in place to keep everyone on the same page and serve as a single, always-accessible source of truth for all work in progress.

More than two people need to review and approve a given asset

If the only person who ever needs to sign off on your work is your immediate supervisor, maybe you’re fine with sharing a cloud storage link or sending an email attachment. The reality for most creative production work, however, is that multiple stakeholders are usually involved in the review process, from clients to product managers to sales leaders to the in-house legal team. Once you have two or more people involved in your asset review and approval process, you can no longer rely on simple email sign-offs. To make sure everything is buttoned-up, you need a project management system with robust approvals and proofing functionality.

Everyone has a different approach to projects

If you ask five people in your organization how to create a client’s Black Friday marketing campaign and you get five different answers, it’s a safe bet that you lack a standard process for executing common project types. If everyone is doing things differently, you’re likely to end up with wildly different outcomes for the same project type, as each person’s process is unlikely to be equally efficient and comprehensive. Quality control inevitably suffers in the face of this variability, but a project management tool with standard templates for your most-executed project types could get your team back on track.

Your turnover is ticking up

There are plenty of reasons that companies experience high turnover, from a toxic culture to below-market compensation. Overwork (or underutilization), poor role clarity and the chaos caused by a lack of internal organization are a few of the drivers of turnover that a best-in-class project management solution can solve for. Employees who don’t feel maxed out due to unmanageable workloads and frustrated by lack of effective processes and transparency are much less likely to jump ship.

It might not always be obvious when it’s time to invest in a project management system, but if you keep your eyes open, you can identify those less-than-obvious indicators that implementing a solution to effectively manage your team’s work could be the answer to your current and future challenges.