Ryan Lopano Blog

Organization is so crucial when doing a project, especially at a large scale. Project management sites such as Trello, Monday, and ClickUp are designed to be a one stop shop to get a team of people on the same page. According to Purdue University, “As many organizations increasingly rely on data to achieve the best outcomes, effective project management has become more important than ever. The best project managers are data-driven themselves: using the power of data to make informed and efficient decisions on processes and approaches to different projects.” This shows the importance of these project management sites, especially since it being recommended by several universities and companies alike.

As someone who has minimal experience with project management sites, I wasn’t always on board with the idea. For one of my graphic design jobs, everything is requested and sent exclusively over email. For my job at the Recreation and Wellness Center at Quinnipiac University, all of my requests come through a Word document that I fill out and then put into organized folders. Both of these systems worked for me so I never saw a use for an actual project manager. After inputting everything for this project into Trello, the project management site I chosen to use, I can definitely see the benefit to it. One aspect of it that seems very useful is being able to use it for a multi-person team. Another professional management site, Slack, mentions how “strong communication keeps projects on track, but it’s hard to stay aligned when conversations live in a dozen different places. Project management software connects the work and the dialogue around it, making collaboration feel faster and more intuitive. Comments, tags, and shared files all live where the tasks do, so updates happen in context instead of in separate channels.” This definitely seems like a major benefit, especially when team size increases.

The biggest point of these sites has to be organization. When there are so many moving pieces to an organization, it is ridiculously important to have good communication. I know this first hand who works remotely for a hockey organization based out of Oklahoma City. Communication is very important and these project management tools make it very easy to work back and forth. The Project Management Institute talks about the importance of it, saying “for such organizations, the discipline has enabled them to improve their performance in managing projects and realize significant business benefits, a result often achieved by more discerningly selecting only those projects which specifically contribute to the organization’s enterprise strategy.” This really shows how important it is to stay organized as well as how easy it is to do so with these sites. They continue on saying, “in addition to now realizing projects that deliver expected outcomes, these organizations are also now completing projects faster, cheaper, better–and with less risk. Inspired by these results, many other non-project-oriented organizations are following their lead by establishing their own project management structures.” Overall, PMI demonstrates many benefits to a project management website. They have a great understanding of the topic as they are non-for-profit organization that specifically focuses on project management.