How do I pick a project management system?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you find yourself digging around to find details about a specific task that needs to be completed? 
2. Are you currently using email threads and messaging apps to manage your project collaboration? 
3. Do you have difficulty keeping track of deadlines, action items, and team responsibilities? 

If you answered "Yes" to any of the above, it's time you invested in a project management system. Lucky for you, we just happen to know two experts with the knowledge you need to navigate the ins-and-outs of the big 3: Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah share the role project management systems have played in their journey and guide you through the basics of selecting the perfect project management system for your business. From use cases to comparing features and integrations, you'll learn the pros and cons of each system so you can make the best possible choice.

Want to make your decision even easier? We've consolidated our knowledge into a free Project Management System Selector Tool to offer you a personalized recommendation in under 2 minutes. 

When you're ready to get your team up to speed quickly, don't forget to check out our team training courses for Monday.com, ClickUp, and Asana! A $79/user value is free to you with coupon code: AYAFREE

Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Thank you and see you next time!

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): Okay, so if you're using email threads, slack teams, anything like that, to talk about your projects and project management and tasks and what's going on, stop, now listen to this episode cause we've got some great insight for you.

0:00:36 - (Alane): And the quick end of the story is it's time for a real project management system.

0:00:41 - (Micah): Yes.

0:00:42 - (Micah): And even if you've already signed up for a real project management system like Asana ClickUp or Monday, keep listening because there's gonna be insight. And if you're still using those real time messaging and you're still using email alongside of those things, then have we got a story for you.

0:01:02 - (Alane): And we've been there. We were suffering there 15 once upon a time. Once upon a time, way back when, when Micah and I first started. No, but we, we painfully had to figure this out for ourselves.

0:01:15 - (Micah): Oh, it was terrible.

0:01:17 - (Alane): It was so hard. We used the very first version of base camp.

0:01:22 - (Micah): That's how long ago at the time was revolutionary.

0:01:25 - (Alane): It was. And we only used it for new client onboarding. It was a checklist of everything we needed to do.

0:01:33 - (Micah): Yep, that was game changing. And we thought, okay, we're onto something here. But the rest of our operations, email threads and Skype, because Slack didn't exist, obviously teams didn't exist. And a lot of email threads, forwarding.

0:01:50 - (Alane): Emails back and forth, I mean, it was a nightmare. It was chaos.

0:01:54 - (Micah): Yep.

0:01:54 - (Micah): Excel spreadsheets.

0:01:56 - (Alane): Oh, yes. And a lot of, like, we were in office. A lot of us were in the office at that point, like going to each other's desk, hey, where are we at on this? And they called me the goldfish at work because as soon as I would turn around, I would forget because I had 4000 other things stirring in my brain.

0:02:13 - (Micah): I forgot about that nickname.

0:02:15 - (Alane): Yeah, it was terrible. But I overcame that.

0:02:17 - (Micah): Yes. Great memory now.

0:02:20 - (Alane): So things started to evolve and we realized, especially with base camp two, it came out.

0:02:25 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:02:26 - (Micah): So we stayed with basecamp. We upgraded to basecamp two when they. That was a hard transition. They did that. Very strange. But that's a different.

0:02:33 - (Alane): We had to juggle both actually, for a period of time.

0:02:36 - (Micah): For a period of time. Yeah, we ran both because it just didn't upgrade.

0:02:40 - (Alane): Yeah. And they did. They missed some functionality. Anyway, so we were juggling both, but we started to say, hey, what if we just put our tasks what we need to get done. What if we just put our tasks in there?

0:02:52 - (Micah): Yep.

0:02:53 - (Alane): And if somebody needed me to do something, it went in as a task. That way I couldn't be a goldfish. I still had it in front of me and that became revolutionary.

0:03:02 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah.

0:03:03 - (Micah): We could definitely see the writing on the wall at this point. We could see there's something here. This is starting to work better. We have some standards in place. The functionality wasn't quite there. And then Asana came out. Very first version of Asana, super ugly interface. But at the time, it was light years ahead of what we could do with basecamp.

0:03:28 - (Alane): And change management was hard because it was so different and the UI wasn't that pretty. Basecamp was super cute UI and it was easy to navigate now, didn't have as many things that you could do in Asana, and I was even one of them that was like, not happy about it because we needed to. And that really showed, you know, I'm an owner in the company, I'm on board kind of with moving to Asana, but we need training in place for change management.

0:03:59 - (Micah): Yep. Yep.

0:04:01 - (Alane): Because if I'm struggling with this change, every other person on this team is going to be struggling as well.

0:04:08 - (Micah): Yep.

0:04:09 - (Micah): So we did make the change. We got into Asana. We struggled through the change management. We'll do change management on a different, different podcasts. But that was when, I think once we got the teams in there and once we got us in there and we could leverage this additional functionality where all of a sudden we had projects and we had tasks and then we could communicate within these tasks and it was in context and Asana had the inbox so that when we communicated, we could then see all of our communication related to the tasks related to the project all in one place.

0:04:51 - (Alane): Oh, yeah. And it was. We knew where to go to find an answer.

0:04:54 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:04:54 - (Alane): Or who was respons, where did it leave off and who was responsible for it. And our chat went down.

0:05:02 - (Micah): Our chat went down. Our internal email reduced by like 90%.

0:05:06 - (Alane): Yes, And that is such a dream.

0:05:06 - (Micah):  If not more.

0:05:09 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:05:09 - (Micah): Because then you start to think about all the time that we wasted going from like, oh, what was it? Where's that email? Well, we got to search for the email. Well, what was the subject line? What was it related to? What did we, you know, all of these things, just hours wasted trying to find the right email, the right email thread.

0:05:28 - (Alane): Or what if that employee was no longer there?

0:05:30 - (Micah): Then we're.

0:05:31 - (Alane): Yeah, then you're having to return on an email and dig through an inbox.

0:05:34 - (Micah): We did that many times.

0:05:35 - (Alane): Yes.

0:05:36 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah.

0:05:37 - (Micah): And if it's in real time messaging like Slack, or in our case, Skype, then trying to find a past conversation, again, a nightmare. But once things were, once we organized things in Asana per project, we had internal projects, we had client projects, we had our tasks, and we had the communication and even more than communication, that started true collaboration. Cause I don't know about you, Elaine, but I don't feel like an email thread is collaboration.

0:06:07 - (Micah): And I feel like real time messaging, like Slack and teams and all of that, that is still collaboration, but it's disruptive collaboration.

0:06:16 - (Alane): Oh, yeah.

0:06:17 - (Micah): The magic with Asana and now these days, ClickUp and Monday is that you can have uninterrupted collaboration, you can have asynchronous collaboration, which is just such a game changer for anybody who's still using Excel, spreadsheets, email, slack, teams, et cetera, to communicate about projects.

0:06:36 - (Alane): Yep. And one of the things that I love about project management system and when you're talking about asynchronous work is when during COVID we really started to grow because companies were forced to learn how to collaborate when you weren't sitting next to each other anymore. And this was a key piece, the problem was always there because of how much time was wasted with people going, hey, where are we at on this? Where are we at on this? And having those conversations, just companies didn't realize that those were happening until they were forced to put in a system in place that basically then put away with needing to have those. Because if you know where the status is of something and you can go into Asana ClickUp and Monday and see without having to ask somebody, you just saved your time and the person you interrupted time.

0:07:30 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So how do you know which system to use?

0:07:35 - (Alane): This one's a tough one.

0:07:37 - (Micah): Much tougher question.

0:07:38 - (Alane): Yeah. When, especially when, you know, now that we've done this hundreds of times across so many orgs, like, we can identify it pretty easily from a discussion, but when you are trying to figure out which one. Because we used to use Asana. We started this company using Asana, but we switched to ClickUp because it was a better fit for this organization.

0:07:57 - (Micah): Yep.

0:07:57 - (Micah): For our specific needs that we had. Absolutely.

0:08:01 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:08:01 - (Micah): And so one of the things that Asana is stellar at projects, project management, project portfolios, status updates, really the traditional worldview of, I have projects that I need to figure out how to track.

0:08:20 - (Alane): And I also love their inbox.

0:08:23 - (Micah): Yes, I will say.

0:08:24 - (Alane): Their inbox is the cleanest and easiest to understand. It's my favorite.

0:08:29 - (Micah): Yep.

0:08:30 - (Micah): For collaboration. Now, some of the downsides of Asana is over the years as they developed it, I would say ClickUp and Monday have done a really good job with avoiding this. But Asana does take management. It takes administrative work to manage the tasks, to manage the projects, to get stuff in there, to manage just everything that's in there. So if you have project managers and you're heavy in projects, especially client projects, Asana is a great choice.

0:08:59 - (Micah): We started with Asana, as Alane was just saying, for this business, and then shifted to ClickUp. And what we needed was less time managing and more transparency of what was going on inside the projects. ClickUp has a hierarchy.

0:09:15 - (Alane): I mean, this one is my favorite. Out of ClickUp is the hierarchy. And I call it the bubble up.

0:09:21 - (Micah): The bubble up. Okay.

0:09:22 - (Alane): Bubble up.

0:09:22 - (Micah): You can click up if you're listening.

0:09:24 - (Alane): Call it the bubble up.

0:09:25 - (Micah): The bubble up. Yes.

0:09:29 - (Alane): I mean, it's brilliant for capacity where your team, how much capacity they have, how many tasks they have on them, you could see it across your. It's phenomenal.

0:09:40 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:09:41 - (Micah): So the way that it works is like in Asana, in Monday you can have folders or you kind of have folders. In Asana, it's portfolios, but it looks like a folder. In Monday, you can organize boards or projects into folders, but you can't do anything with those folders on really kind of either level. In ClickUp you can have space, and that space can have multiple folders. And within those folders you can have multiple lists, which could be projects. And within those lists you can have tasks, and within those tasks you have subtasks and you can even nest sub tasks further than that.

0:10:15 - (Micah): But at each level, at the list level, you can have a set of views looking at all your tasks. So this would be like a Gantt view or a board view. And then at the folder level you could look at all the lists and set up your views. So you could have a Gantt chart at your folder level that would show you a gantt chart across all of your projects in that folder, which is right there. Mind blowing. But it can go even one step further, where at the space level you could put any of the views that you have access to, a timeline view, a gantt view.

0:10:46 - (Micah): So a really easy setup and example is you have a space in ClickUp called client projects. Every folder is your client or is a client, and then under the folder are your client projects. If you put a workload view at the space level client projects. As you were saying, Elaine, you can see the workload of your entire team, but in context to only client projects. Yeah, it's amazing.

0:11:13 - (Alane): I mean, it really is. And that's one of the reasons that I like ClickUp. And it also can feel more overwhelming than the other two.

0:11:23 - (Micah): It can. The interface is not as good. There's a lot more functionality.

0:11:27 - (Alane): A lot more functionality, which means just so many different directions. And this is where training is a big piece and building out the work. But we can talk about that another day.

0:11:37 - (Micah): Yeah, there's definitely a lot more to ClickUp. But just to kind of give another quick example of why we shifted to ClickUp is I wanted to answer questions like what are the overdue tasks across all the client projects? And I want to see it by assignee. That is so hard to do with the other platforms, but in ClickUp you could go to, we didn't even mention it, but there's one hierarchy level above spaces, which is called everything. And you can put views on the everything level. So I could literally do a list view on the everything level that grouped by assignee and filtered out only the tasks that were overdue. And in two or three clicks I've got a view of the entire organization and who has overdue tasks and by how much.

0:12:25 - (Micah): It's insane. Yeah, it's amazing. So that transparency has made such a big deal for us. Now, Monday. Monday is very interesting. Cause at first I did not understand why anybody would want to use Monday.

0:12:39 - (Alane): Yeah, you really fought that one. But we listened to what our clients.

0:12:43 - (Micah): Yeah, if you've listened to our previous episode that we recorded, we talked about building what people want to buy and one of the things that people want to buy, and so we added it to our services, was help with Monday. And as we got into Monday and as has Monday has developed more functionality and more features, there's actually a really strong use case for using money on Monday. And that's when you have a kind of a linear process that you want to track.

0:13:13 - (Micah): And so the other thing with Monday that I've seen with many, many clients is that you really can't screw it up. It's easy to screw ClickUp up. It's easy to screw Asana up with Monday. Like worst case, you make some extra boards you can't really like. Leadership can get in there, teams can get in there. You're going to use it the same way. Those limitations actually become features because you can actually start using Monday, set stuff up and get the benefit of collaboration inside of a project management tool like that really, really easily without having to hire experts how to do it now when you want to get a little.

0:13:53 - (Alane): Bit beyond that, right, that's where it gets complicated and has limitations. But getting your feet wet trying out a project management system, if you don't have one, it could be an easy one to get started with.

0:14:04 - (Micah): A lot of people love the interface. Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, Monday's kind of like a cross between a spreadsheet, a database and a project management system. So it's, you know, there's, there's, you can build some power, powerful stuff with it and there's some really cool things that you can do. A couple of things to watch out for in Monday is they've got a lot of dashboard limitations and recurring tasks are abysmal. Doesn't make sense.

0:14:28 - (Alane): And that one is, I mean, to me that's a reason why I wouldn't go with Monday because the recurring task is such a big deal for us.

0:14:38 - (Micah): For us, for us, yeah. There is a period of time where we're like, wow, look at what Monday can do now. Like should we look at that? And I got a little shiny object syndrome and I tried to replicate what we're doing now in Monday and as soon as I hit that recurring task, I'm like, nope, can't do it, can't do it.

0:14:58 - (Alane): One of the reasons that we like all three of these is that they also have APIs that are usable.

0:15:03 - (Micah): Great point.

0:15:04 - (Alane): And so when you're looking at a project management system, this is such an important thing because it's not the only software platform you're going to use. So if you want to build any other integrations or automations that include your project management system, the APIs are a key piece of this.

0:15:20 - (Micah): In fact, for many of our clients, the project management system sits at the hub of their integrations, the hub of their operations, the hub of their automations, because so many things can be triggered as things are happening in projects or a project is completed, whatever the trigger is needed, things can come into the systems really easy and things can go out of the systems really easy, which means you can actually build systems in your company and not have to do everything manual.

0:15:52 - (Alane): So that's why we like those three functionality within and out of it. Yeah, and we also build a project management selector tool. So if you're listening to this and you're like, man, all three sound like they could work. I'm not really sure which way to go, or I'm in one. I don't know if it's the best one. It's about twelve questions. We've taken all our knowledge on these three platforms and how we see companies run their businesses and have distilled it down to these twelve questions and it will tell you which one is likely the best fit for you and how you want to run your company.

0:16:28 - (Micah): Yeah, and we'll put the link in the description.

0:16:30 - (Alane): Yep.

0:16:30 - (Micah): So definitely check that out. Free tool. We got asked that question so many times.

0:16:36 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:16:36 - (Micah): Decided just to build the tool again, listening to clients huge, huge piece.

0:16:41 - (Alane): And then the next piece is training your team. And so another free resource that we've built are crash courses for these three platforms so you can learn how to use it, your team can learn how to use it. They're meant to be under 30 minutes so that you know how to get in and start doing the basics you need to know on using that platform.

0:17:01 - (Micah): Yeah, I can't understate or overstate. I can't overstate how important the training is. I would say nine times out of ten we start working with a client that has implemented Asana, ClickUp or Monday and their process is, hey, we're using.

0:17:21 - (Alane): Asana and that's it.

0:17:23 - (Micah): That's it. There's no training, there's no standardization. The wild, wild west. Absolutely. And these crash courses that we put together, they're five lessons each. It shows the absolute minimum that you need to know, but essentially everything that you need to know as an average user of a sonic ClickUp or Monday to get in and know how to collaborate, to know what to expect, to know where to look for things, to know what tasks look like, just to know the basics so that you're not flying blind and doing a whole bunch of random stuff or missing functionality. That is core and key to being able to successfully implement and use these systems.

0:18:06 - (Alane): Yeah. So we'll link to that. That's in our free community with Workday ninja and would love for you to check them out.

0:18:13 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:18:24 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business us.

0:18:29 - (Alane): Bye for now.