Understand the Roots: What Problem Did The Vendor Try to Solve?
Understanding what kind of solution you’re looking for starts with understanding where you are right now, and then finding the tools that sprang from similar roots. For example, if your team is comprised of PMP-certified managers used to driving complex software projects that span multiple work teams, then you’re probably looking for an application that has roots in enterprise-class desktop or self-hosted project management tools.
By contrast, if you’re looking to finally discard your spreadsheets and move to something more capable, you should consider the class of online PM tools that grew out of basic content management and shared spreadsheet visions.
Most online project management tools started out trying to build a better version to one or more desktop or server applications:
- Spreadsheet
- Task Management
- Time Tracking
- File/Document Management and Sharing
- Workflow Management
Taking a look at vendors who use spreadsheets as a root: Oh, Excel, how we love and loathe you. Probably the most extensively used application for project management today. Vendors such as Smartsheet count on the broad familiarity with spreadsheets, wrap them in powerful collaboration tools and useful templates, and deliver a useful project management experience with a minimal learning curve. The focus may not be on deep file and document sharing, time tracking, or on delivering a set of professional client-facing project portals (though often some bit of those features are included). But for smaller teams looking to to quickly and dramatically improve on their current ad-hoc use of Excel for project management, these kinds of solutions may be the ideal fit.
Alternatively, many vendors started with trying to solve for easy sharing and collaboration, taking advantage of modern content management features, and applying project management and file/document sharing capabilities to round out the experience. Basecamp is a good example of this – they solved for team collaboration around projects while eschewing some traditional project management functionality (such as Gantt charts).
A very popular root for online project management vendors to spring from is Microsoft Project. The goal often is to replicate the best, or at least most used, functionality of Project in an online environment and wrap it with modern Web-based collaboration and workflow functionality. The end goal is an application with a minimal learning curve or need to adjust work processes for current Project users, yet significantly boosted functionality. Liquidplanner is a useful example of this class of application.
There are dozens of variations in between, with dramatically varying levels of functionality and complexity. The trick is properly understanding where your current staff skills are, what kind of functionality you value the most, and how much tolerance for change and training time you have.
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