Agile
Agile is just a set of values and culture that an organization strives to follow - it is not an exact process. But, this culture can be hard to create if you aren't used to it. This is why software technologies have been developed to help Agile businesses keep their communications, resources, goals, and everything else organized. Using this software doesn't make you agile, but it sure does help. Some software is better at helping you than others, so when you are looking for technology to help you with these processes, make sure you take the time to look for and set up the software that is right for your team.
ClickUp
This week I will be reviewing the Project Management Software: ClickUp. This project management software claims to be the “One app to replace them all” and is free forever, so it will be useful to practice what it is like to start using this tool for the first time. I hope to answer questions like “What does ClickUp make extremely easy?” and “What did I not understand?”. I will work on ClickUp for 1 hour, including the time it takes to set up multiple accounts on one project. To review the product, first I will try to set up a simple flow for a generic software project from To Do, In Progress, Blocked, Peer Review, Product Review, and finally Accepted. Once the project is well organized, I will explore the other features that ClickUp advertises like Spaces, Spreadsheets, and Time & Goal Reporting. Let’s see what I can do in 1 hour with no prior experience! Time starts…. Now!
Setting Up and Getting Familiar
Time is up… What I really liked about this software was the design. It is definitely a fun, playful, upbeat theme that kind of makes you excited even though project management like this can be kind of boring. This is an excellent quality for the software to have and makes me want to learn the tool better. The setup process was extremely easy. All I had to do was enter my name, email, and my first workspace. Inviting other users was incredibly easy. When setting up my workspace, there were multiple templates I could select from. Hoping to save some time, I selected “Project Management.” Unfortunately, this template didn’t seem to fit what I had in mind so I decided to delete all of it and start from scratch. Then, I was surprised to see multiple on-boarding videos. The videos were short but very informative. This is a great example of how easy to use and friendly the user experience is. If you have any questions about how to do something, there is a great FAQ & video tutorials that probably answers your question. The first onboarding video explains that the dream of ClickUp is to unite all of the different work management softwares into one single place, including chats, reports, and boards.
The next video was about the organization of the software. ClickUp is organized around a Hierarchy from Workspaces to Tasks. Workspaces are the highest level items and encompass an entire business. Workspaces are broken up into Spaces, which are large categories within the business like Development, Marketing, Financial, etc. Spaces then have lists of tasks and maybe even folders of different lists. I thought of lists as the Features.
Tasks
The third video was specifically about Tasks and Views. This is where I think ClickUp seems to excel. Tasks are the fundamental items that need to be done to complete work. In order to complete tasks, you need to be able to assign them, estimate them, send them through the workflow, and interact with others to report progress, blockers, or look at documents. This is all possible through a pleasant user experience. You can assign one or multiple users. By the end of my hour I created a “Team” of people that I could assign all at once. However, the free version of this software only allows the creation of one team. Other things you can do with tasks are set dependencies, create subtasks, add documents, chat with others, estimate time, track the time worked on the task, and set a due date. A feature with tasks that I didn’t explore enough was Templates.
Views
Views are how you can visualize your tasks, work, employees, goals, etc. Views in ClickUp are incredibly flexible. I quickly was able to set up a Kanban style board view with the statuses that I wanted. Once all of the statuses were set up, I preferred this Board view to create a bunch of fake tasks for creating a fake website. I created a Website UI list for tasks to do on a UI, and then a Backend list for tasks to do on the backend. I set estimated times, due dates, set priority, and randomly dragged tasks to different statuses. Then came the fun part, exploring the views!
Views range from a simple todo list, to the board view, to more sophisticated views like Gantt charts, and they all interact with the same set of tasks. One useful view was the Workload view. Workload was a breakdown of each team member and the amount of work they had in the upcoming weeks. This workload is highly customizable to set how many tasks or hours an employee is capable of working each day and easily shows if someone is under or over worked. Tasks within each view are easily filtered and sorted by useful characteristics like who they are assigned to, when their due dates are, or what their priority is. I think if you are able to spend enough time learning this program and setting up your spaces, lists, and views the way you want them then you can easily make it do everything you need for schedule management.
Home Page & Dashboards
The last onboarding video and area that I explored was about the Home page. The home page shows everything that is related to you: what tasks are assigned to you, who mentioned you in a comment, what your tasks are for the day, etc. The thing I loved most about this was how easy it was to integrate my Google Calendar with my ClickUp calendar. Within seconds all the events on my google calendar were on my ClickUp calendar so that I could more easily manage my personal and work life.
Not included in the onboarding videos was Dashboards: this was like a homepage but customizable to what I wanted to see. You can create all kinds of widgets to keep track of pretty much anything you can dream up. You can have a widget for what tasks specific people are working on, time reporting, chats, etc. You can customize this to what you specifically are interested in and what goals or needs the business has.
Recommendation: Go for it!
In the end, my experience with this software was extremely positive. I felt like all the features were fairly straightforward to assume how they worked. One thing I haven’t mentioned was that I saw a great FAQ and help page which includes hour long “how-to” videos for how to master the software. I liked the design of the website which is very conducive to everyone on the team using the software - not just managers. The company also seems committed to providing awesome features and awesome software to people for free. There is a paywall for some features, but I don’t know enough yet to decide if it's worth it (or necessary) to pay for it. With the experience I had, I feel like I can do everything I need in the simple projects that I work on with the free version. I will use this for my next project!
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