Project Management with Zoho

I’ve been trying out project management options, looking for a way to track everyone’s todo lists, meetings, time and clients in one place. I’ve eventually landed on Zoho Projects and purchased a paid account. I’m really happy with the options it provides and the interface it uses. Here’s a quick rundown…

The login and interface can be branded with your company logo. Every user can add a picture of themselves. You can customize each client you add. It’s not unusual for an online project manager, but it’s a great touch. Checking the “keep me signed in” box actually works, and returning from the same machine will not require a login every time. This, of course, makes it easy to have a tab open every time you launch a browser to keep track of projects.

Adding users is as easy as typing in email addresses. Zoho handles the rest. Adding clients is equally easy. It’s also a simple task to assign users to each project. It’s required that a user be assigned to a project before they are available within a project to have tasks assigned to them. It got a little repetitive as I set up all of my initial projects, but will be less so as I set up new projects.

The Dashboard view offers a quick rundown of milestones and tasks assigned to you. Like most project managers I tested, Zoho uses the concept of milestones and tasks to define each project. You define projects as major “categories” similar to a GTD workflow, then milestones become events that need to happen to complete the project, sub-projects, if you will. Each milestone can have a task-list assigned to it, detailing the tasks required to accomplish the milestone. Each milestone and task has an “owner” that serves as Project Manager, and each task can be assigned to individual users.

One of the solutions I considered was a simple Wiki. My biggest problem was that I kept delegating tasks without recording them and then forgetting who was doing what and what I needed to follow up on. Creative types can be hard to track (I’m only partially schizotypal and very dependable). Anyway, Zoho provides a forum with posting, editing and commenting options. It’s not a wiki, but allows for conversations that can accompany all of the client data, meeting info, task lists, etc.

Zoho provides Gantt charts, calendars and timers. It also has file sharing and storage, with the space determined by your payment plan. By the way, Zoho is 100% free for open source projects. You can put tasks on a timeline, along with meetings and major milestones, and then see them in different formats. There are export options, which with a little scripting can allow for task lists to be imported into programs like iGTD.

Zoho, and most of the project management solutions I tested, require that I figure out a planning method that deviates slightly from what I’m comfortable with in my personal GTD adaptation. It takes some forethought to make the most of the Project-Milestone-Tasklist-Task-User scheme, but that’s to be expected when you suddenly have a great system for delegation and multiple users.

There are more features that I didn’t touch here, mostly because I haven’t gotten to exploring every nook and cranny yet. But overall, I’m very impressed, and for most purposes, Zoho is very affordable. If you’re looking at project management solutions, be sure to add this to your list to check out. [link]