What is Team Management Software and Why Your Team Needs One Right Now

Team management software (TMS) helps increase productivity and improve a team’s overall quality of work. A good TMS solution is able to do this as it helps managers, and leaders, to better communicate, collaborate and manage team members.

The difference between team management software and personal task management software

Personal task management software tends to work best for an individual, or a small team. And the team wouldn’t want to be any bigger than 5 people before the software becomes unwieldy. That is, before you would need to upgrade to something more robust.

This is because personal task management software solutions aren’t designed to be used for anything bigger than start-ups and freelancers.

Which is why team management software is more effective for most businesses. This particular type of software allows for greater levels of organization, communication and collaboration for small-to-medium sized businesses.

The better team management software programs—like Quire—allow managers to more efficiently break down projects into tasks and subtasks for transparency and productivity.

Productivity because it allows each team member to see what they are working on and how it relates to the project as a whole. Which is also how it helps with productivity.

The 8 ways team management software can contribute to your business’ success

If you’re looking to reduce risk, better manage your tasks and projects, improve communication and collaboration, and reduce overall cost-per-project, team management software can help.

No matter how complex the project is. And no matter what level of communication is necessary: whether with an in-house team, an external team or collaborating with both, a team management software solution can help you and your team stay connected.

1. Complex project management

Team management software (TMS) delves deeper into complex project planning and tracking than personal task management software is capable of.

Of course, a project doesn’t need to be complex for your business to benefit from a TMS solution. This software can be used to create task lists and sublists for small projects, to ensure a project is completed correctly the first time.

And this software makes it easier to track and measure the overall progress of each team member and the project as a whole.

Some of what can be tracked and measured includes the more complex nuances of a project. These nuances include team communication, deadlines, and budget.

2. Agile task management

One of the biggest benefits of team management software is improving efficiencies. To do this, it’s necessary to find what is slowing you down, and resolve that.

The simplest way of achieving this is through effective to-do lists and efficiently delegating tasks.

To-do lists

TMS solutions feature interactive tasks lists that allow you to add all upcoming tasks. They also come with the option of setting reminders for deadlines. This helps prioritize task and to-do lists. It also enables you to maintain a bird’s eye view of tasks being completed. who’s completing them. And how long it’s taking.

Delegating tasks

Making sure the right team members complete the appropriate tasks doesn’t need to be time consuming. A TMS solution lets you assign tasks quickly.

And it will notify the team member that a task has been assigned to them in real time. With in-built messaging, you can easily communicate with your team to let them know what’s going on.

Shared tasks

Creating shared tasks, or adding a team member to a task, improves collaboration. When a task is assigned to multiple people, it will show up in all their tasks lists. Comments can be seen in real time, making it easier to track what each person is doing.

As well as seeing what each person is responsible for. This helps with accountability and progress reports. And making sure no one’s doubling up on work.

Read more on top 12 Quire hacks that make your productivity great again.

3. Team communication and collaboration

Building on from complex project management and agile task management, team communication and collaboration help further improve a team’s productivity and efficiency.

A TMS solution with built-in instant messaging is necessary for streamlined communication. It enables you and your team to discuss a task without having to open, or rely on, another messaging platform.

File sharing

Being able to share files in your TMS solution enhances collaboration by making all data is quickly and easily accessible from one place.

This is far more effective and practical than sending emails back and forth, or relying on spreadsheets for storing data. It can all be done using team management software.

4. Shared calendars and projects

Most TMS solutions allow you to integrate or sync your tasks with a calendar. The advantage of this is it's easier to track your projects and plan ahead.

You can also send calendar invites to both team members and clients, making it easier to keep on top of—and not miss any—meetings.

You can also share a view of the project with a client so they too can see the breakdown of the project. The key advantage of this is transparency. Your clients know what’s being worked on, and the deadlines to assure them everything will be completed to the deadline.

5. Task reporting

If you just need something to create and check off tasks, you can do that with any basic app. But what most successful businesses want is to be able to report on what has been done, and how it has been done.

The best team management software solutions give you access to detailed reports and effective tools to achieve the surest control over your team’s work.

Teamwork summary

The advantage of a team management software is that it, in addition to an outline of your current tasks, also provides an outline of work completed.

The advantage of this is that you can create detailed reports about sales, accounting and marketing.

Task reports

Tasks reports are good for accounting. Figuring how much time is being spent by who and on which assignments allows you to see which clients your team is spending the most time on.

So, if you’re billing your clients hourly, this report will be a transparent way of showing the work completed and how long it took.

Gain more insight with detailed reporting

All reports should be data-driven. The data you’re able to acquire, the more useful insight you will possess. This is why it’s so important to have a TMS solution that allows you to collect a large amount of data. This includes:

• Time spent

• Completed tasks

• Related project data

• Past events

• Customer data

To get all this data, your team has to fill out all the information about their work as they go, accurately. The benefit of this is more data-driven decision making that can help to improve productivity and efficiencies.

6. Better understanding of your true resource capability

When you use team management software it provides you with clearer insight into your company’s overall resource capabilities.

As resource capability planning is a key factor in the success of a service or project. Using the TMS solution will help you to:

• Optimize team workflows through capacity reporting and resource forecasts.

• Look more closely at, and better analyze, why you go over budget. This will then help inform what you need to do differently next time.

• Maximize just how far your budget can go.

Overall, using the right TMS solution can help you to improve overall business productivity, better manage customer expectations, reduce costs, and exceed your customer service agreements.

Another advantage is it can also contribute an essential tool for planning further growth for your business.

7. Improve cost and budgeting control

As has been alluded to earlier, a TMS solution—like Quire—can help to improve how you spend on your projects. Indeed, by being able to monitor tasks, and in what time they’re completed, it will provide a better understanding of where the budget needs to be spent.

Also, team management software will ensure you can monitor how much you actually spent against how much you planned to spend.

The advantage here is you’re able to get a more accurate look at the overview of your current budget. And gain financial projections for the future in real time.

8. Reduce project failures and minimize project risk

The days of trying to keep tabs on everything with spreadsheets and email folders are gone. Now, there’s less chance of tasks going missing or being completely forgotten.

There’s also less risk that key parts of a project will be left undone. Or that no one will know who's responsible for which tasks. And deadlines. Deadlines are easier to track.

What this all amounts to is a significant reduction in both project risk and failure.

Have you tried out managing your work with Quire yet? Let us know in the comment section or share your stories with us in Twitter @quire_io