As a Project Manager in a software developing company, you have a lot of things to do. You have to create tasks, assign them properly, do testing, keep track of what everyone is doing, make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to, catch up with priorities and just make everything run smoothly, on time and with the quality required; and all this must be done for each of the projects, sometimes they can be a lot. Doing all this is not easy at all, so, the most important thing is being organized. For this, at Swapps we have several tools that help us on being organized and keeping track about almost everything that is being done.
JIRA by Attlassian, is one of the most important tools we use at Swapps. JIRA helps the team on being very organized in each of their projects. In JIRA you can create boards, which are very useful for controlling tasks. With them, you can have a whole view of how the project is going. You have things in “To Do”, things being done, in testing and already completely done. This way you, as a project manager, don’t just put the tasks and assign them but keep track of them easily, guaranteeing they are actually done and testing that they are made with the quality required.
Toggl is another tool we use at Swapps.Toggl, helps the team keep track of the time spent in each activity. By using this tool, is easier to predict the team’s speed, see how much time was spent in each project in any period of time, and in a special feature of Toggl, you can see what everyone is working on in real time. In Toggl, you can also have reports and filter them according to the project, team member, client or task you want to know more detailed information about. Is also a good way to report work done to your clients, as you charge them according to hours worked. Toggl has a lot of advantages, but is true sometimes seeing the clock going by makes you nervous and makes you think you are not going to finish in the right time, nevertheless, it motivates you to do things quicker without forgetting quality.
Another tool used at Swapps is Slack. Slack is an application which helps you keep track of all the team’s conversations and messaging. Have you ever had a problem in a group because someone assures he had said something he never really said? or someone in the team who misunderstood something and made everything go wrong in the team? well, communication problems are everywhere, from your family relationships to obviously, your work team. For this, Slack let’s you keep track on everything said from each team member in each project. Slack also lets you make channels, which are group conversations about, for example, an specific project. You can also synchronize Slack with JIRA and see in these channels each update on the tasks of the project. So basically, you have a whole record on what’s happening on your project, which is vital to go to the root cause of found problems and then, make sure they don’t happen again, ensuring a continuous improvement at your company.
To share documents we basically use Google Drive at the moment. You might think that in a software development company not much documents are made, and it’s true, but all the company has a lot of documentation going on, and also, as Swapps works with the Agile methodology, is important having documents like, for example, the inception deck done at the beginning of each project, user stories, etc.
For some of these tools you have to pay, but at the end they are completely worth it, it actually becomes an investment as it makes your company differentiate and be more organized bringing better results and more satisfied customers, which finally, represents more money for your company!