Teamwork Projects Review

We use Teamwork Projects for almost any type of project including web design, web development and web applications along with managing day-to-day ad hoc support and maintenance tasks.

We started using Teamwork when it was called TeamworkPM way back in 2009, so we’re pretty well qualified to provide a review of the platform!
 
These are the top features of Teamwork we use on a daily basis:

• Managing tasks - This is probably our number one use for Teamwork, every time we start a new project we use tasklist templates (saved lists of tasks) to populate the project with nearly 200 individual tasks that we need to complete as part of a web design project. This ensures that we don’t miss essential things during a web design project such as checking that Google Analytics is tracking correctly.
  • Board view - The paint is still drying on this latest addition, the board view of tasks has been an instant hit in the Enovate office, they allow us to set-up columns that our tasks can then transition through. This allows us to visually present to both colleagues and clients the latest status of a particular task.
• Messaging - Following quickly after managing tasks, the next most used feature of Teamwork Projects for us is the messaging facility. We encourage clients to use this in preference to email as it allows us to easily communicate with clients whilst allowing all team members to easily refer back to previous threads that they may not have been directly involved in.
• Milestones - Teamwork allows us to link task lists to milestones and each milestone has a due date, this helps to keep projects on track by linking a group of tasks (a task list) to a due date. Teamwork can also send out reminders when a milestone is approaching and due.

The team behind Teamwork Projects does not shy away from adding new features and functionality if there’s a genuine need for it and it provides a good improvement for users and I can personally vouch that their judgement in this regard is very good.

Over the years there’s been a whole host of functionality and features added, but at no point has the user-interface started to struggle to offer its bulging swiss army knife of functionality to users. Every change Teamwork have made has been done in such a way that has not left the more long-term users hunting around to find something they used to know where to find. That’s pretty impressive given how much the platform has evolved.

Tasks in Teamwork offer a rich array of functionality, which is often lacking in other platforms. This functionality is offered in such a way that it’s there if you need it but if you don’t you won’t feel like the user experience is any worse off because of it. Such as:

• Sub-tasks - Being able to group tasks under a main task is extremely useful and it’s a feature of Teamwork we use every single day.  It helps to keep the overview of tasks clear as you can choose to hide and show sub-tasks as needed.
• Recurring tasks - Being able to configure tasks to recur on a certain basis is really useful and we make use of this to carry out regular content management system updates and other repeating tasks.
• Task priority - As the number of tasks grows it’s quite useful to be able to assign a priority to tasks of high, medium or low without having to keep shuffling the order of tasks in a task list.
• Task due dates - Often a certain task needs to be completed by a certain date, adding a due date is a useful way to indicate this and overdue/late tasks are displayed in red to attract attention.
• Task comments - Being able to have a discussion right on a tasks with colleagues and/or clients is very useful.
• Task tags - Prior to the introduction of task boards we used tags to highlight the status of a task such as “in progress”, “on hold”, “in discussion”, etc.
• Task progress - Being able to indicate how far through a task you are is useful, we often update the progress of a task (as a percentage e.g. 60%) if we know it’s under particular scrutiny.
• Task reminders - Being able to configure an email notification to be sent at a certain future date and time often comes in useful.  For example setting a reminder on a Friday of something you need to do first thing on Monday.
• Task dependencies - This enables us to specify that one task needs to be done before another task can be completed.

Lastly, no long-term review would be complete if I didn’t cover the platform’s uptime.  Over the many years we’ve been using Teamwork I’m pleased to report that I can’t recall a major incidence of downtime that has greatly interrupted our work. Yes, there has been downtime but I’m sure Amazon Web Services has seen its fair share of downtime over the same period. But on the whole, and considering how much the platform has evolved, the uptime has been little short of excellent.

Teamwork is one of those tools that we have grown to rely on and I would go so far as to say is essential for us to conduct our projects in an organised and efficient manner. So in conclusion I would highly recommend Teamwork Projects for any business regardless of whether their projects are web design related or not.

For more information please visit Teamwork Projects.