Project management software: what to look for

> Declaration of interest: BAI Business offers project and task management and publishes this article. It is signed by Héctor Redondo, CEO and founder of BAI Business. The criteria are my opinion; I do not compare brands or cite third-party data.

Today I want to talk about how to choose project management software in a small business, and why the important part is not in the list of features.

Project management software is useful to you if it answers three questions without meetings: what has to be done, who is doing it and by when. Choose according to how your team works, in the office or out on the road, and not according to how many features it advertises. Look at seven things, detailed below, and try it for two weeks on a real project before moving the whole business onto it.

The seven criteria

No.	Criterion	Question to ask	Why it matters
1	Who uses it and where	Does my team work out on the road? Can they see their tasks and receive alerts on their phone?	A tool that only opens from the office computer is the first one the field team stops using
2	What each task carries	Does it have an owner, date, priority, steps, comments and files or photos? Does it warn before it falls due?	A task with no owner or date is a wish, not a task
3	How I see it	Can I see it as a board of columns, a list of what is mine, a calendar and time bars?	The board answers "how is it going", the list "what is mine" and the bars "what is delaying delivery"
4	What repeats	Can I create the tasks that repeat by themselves, such as opening or the month's review?	What you repeat every week should not depend on someone remembering
5	How long it takes	Does it measure the time of each task and the billable hours per person and per customer?	You only need it if you charge by the hour or want to know what each job costs you
6	Link to your customers	Can I attach the task to its customer or to its sale, without copying data?	If the task and the customer live in two places, you copy them by hand
7	Conversation and permissions	Is there talk next to the task, in threads? Is each board private or shared with whom I choose?	A WhatsApp group does not let a new joiner read what came before, and not everyone should see everything

When you do not need any

If there are one to three of you and jobs last days, a shared list and a calendar are enough. My test is this: if nobody asks "how is this going?" more than once a day, you do not need a new tool, you need to write things down. Software gains value when there are several people, several jobs at once and someone who depends on what another finishes.

How to try it for two weeks

1. A real project, not a test one, with the tasks that really exist.
2. Three people at most, including the one who trusts it least.
3. A single source of truth: for the two weeks, nothing is sent by WhatsApp or noted anywhere else.
4. Two questions at the end: have you stopped asking "how is it going"? Does everyone open it without being asked?
5. Decide: if both answers are yes, widen it. If not, look at what failed: the tool or the habit.

Common mistakes

• Keeping the work in two places. It is worse than having no tool.
• Boards with fifteen columns. Start with "to do, in progress and done".
• Tasks with no owner or with the date "when possible".
• Putting everyone in on day one. Start with whoever has the problem.

Imagine a renovation company with three crews on site that hands out jobs by WhatsApp and every morning asks each foreman how theirs is going. It tries two weeks with a single site: each foreman sees their tasks with a date, measures their time and leaves the report signed at the customer's home. By the end of the second week it has stopped asking in the morning. (An invented example, not a real customer.)

What we have built at BAI

I use BAI's tasks and calendar. According to what we publish on our website, BAI's project management gives you a board per project or per customer, with the tasks in columns you drag. Each task carries an owner, date, priority, list of steps, comments and files or photos, and attaches to the customer or the sale in your customer diary. Each person sees everything of theirs from all the boards in one list and receives an alert before each date falls due; tasks that repeat create themselves; you measure the time of each task, with a stopwatch or by hand, and see each person's billable hours. Progress is seen as a board, table, calendar or time bars; the team talks in channels attached to the board or the task, with replies in threads; each board is private or shared with whom you choose; and on the phone, with the app for Android and iPhone, you see your tasks and receive the alerts. It is not your team's clocking in: entry and exit go separately, in working-time recording.

What to do now

Write on a piece of paper the three jobs you have open right now and, for each, who is doing it and by when. If it is hard to fill in, you already know why you are missing a tool. If you want to see how we do it, there is tasks and projects. If your customers' data will live in the tool, first see data security in the cloud. And for recording your team's working hours, which is another matter, working-time recording.

How we checked this

The seven criteria are my way of ordering what I have seen matters; they are neither a study nor a rule, and I have not compared third-party tools, which is why I name none. What I say about BAI comes from the published page of the solution and from what I use myself. I wrote it with the help of artificial intelligence from that page; I sign it myself.

Sources

• Description of BAI's solution: published page Tasks and projects.