The Devil in the Details: When You Need a More Detailed Project Management Tool

One of the fundamental pillars that holds up any organization is how you track your projects. Your to-do list. Every organization has the same basic needs expressed in many ways. We all need to save time, communicate clearly, and have reliable documentation. Finding that best tool to do all that will depend on a lot of factors. You will need to consider the size of your team, their technical fluency, and perhaps most importantly, their personalities.

Of the many choices of Project Management tools, consider two opposite ends of the “detail” spectrum. On one side, you have the embodiment of simplicity in a tool like Todoist. Tasks are easily created and assigned, have a simple due date, and you write them any way you want. On the other side there’s Atlassian’s Jira. Highly structured out of the box, near infinitely customizable, and many, many, buttons. Here are a couple of examples..

First we have “Cupcakes for Love”, a group of ten bakers with a few extra support staff that sell high quality cupcakes to fund affordable housing projects. They need to delegate acquiring supplies, baking shifts, and advertisement development. The support staff wears multiple hats, and the bakers need clear direction so they can spend their time working. A tool like Jira could hypothetically be used to set sprints for advertisement deadlines and revenue goals while assigning owners to tasks addressing marketing or Costco runs all under seven different projects… and ultimately wastes a lot of time. For this type of situation, we recommend a simpler tool like Todoist.

Now meet “Friendly Bankers”, a 200 member strong organization that helps recent immigrants set up bank accounts and manage their finances. Most of them are accountants or financial advisors, but they have an eight person tech team to manage internal software needs and data management. Every employee is remote and does almost everything on their computer. A tool like Todoist can assign individual tasks quickly and with reliable notifications. When the tech team needs to build out calendars to show clear timelines to the accounting team, or build out individual projects to give each team a level of independence, they can’t. Instead there’s a flood of vague tasks, and everyone has dozens of notifications with none of the organization that they sorely need. 

Ready to pick a PM tool for your organization? Two pieces of advice. First, don’t overthink it. As long as a PM tool hits your core needs, you can make it work. Second, think about what wouldn’t work for your organization. If too many visuals and choices will just bog you down, stay away from powerhouse tools like Jira. If your teams have a hierarchy, lots of team-specific work, and technical familiarity, Todoist just won’t cut it. Let your instincts rule out what you know won’t be conducive, and you’re halfway there. From there, you’ll be ready to make a quick and decisive choice within a much smaller pool. If the simpler route is right for you, start with our review of Todoist. If you need more structure, see our full Jira review and our guide to the Atlassian stack. If you’re somewhere in the middle, our project management review puts Monday.com, Asana, Trello alongside a few other options. Enjoy the search.