Aluko Ahmad
3 min readAug 21, 2021

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TOP 5 PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS FOR SMEs IN 2021

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For small and medium enterprises, managing projects can be challenging and not encouraging. Unlike large businesses with dedicated project management departments or units, the SMEs mostly have their project management fused with other management activities with few individuals at the helm of affairs. According to Rory Burke, “ Project management can be defined as a way of developing structure in a complex project, where the independent variables of time, cost, resources, and human behavior come together.”

Finding the best project management applications that can help to maximize output while running other organizational activities simultaneously, is essential. Need not worry, we have done extensive research and have come up with the Top 5 project management applications for SMEs in 2021. They are;

Projectsly

Projectsly is a foremost project management application that enables you to plan every aspect of your project from start to finish to achieve organizational success. It is used to streamline online project management in organizations; enables you to monitor tasks, their current status, the laid down roadmaps, and automatically create reports for decision making. It has a user-friendly interface that enables you to monitor every connected team member’s activity and the duration of such activities from your desk. Projectsly functionalities include; issue management, project tracking, kamban board, timeline view, and a host of others.

Asana

Asana is a project management app that allows you to create tasks, project templates and assign those tasks seamlessly. It has a flexible and well-organized interface that enables the administrator or user to create tasks with titles, its description, organizational tags, custom fields, due dates, and a lot more tabs that allows you to input additional information. It is easy to use and can be linked to other apps such as Gmail and calendars.

Airtable

With airtable, you are rest assured of a multi-purpose spreadsheet-styled database for project management. There are dozens of templates available with sample formats, to enable you to choose the most suitable for your task. With airtable, you can import data directly from other sources, and most importantly, you can add multiple views of spreadsheets which enables you to work on multiple tasks simultaneously.

And.co

Just like every other project management application, And. co is not different but more fascinating to work on. With And.co you can create proposals, send invoices, initiate contracts, and receive payments. The interface has been well organized to enable you to assign tasks or completed projects to your client and includes the bills. It also has a built-in time tracking mechanism, which automatically takes care of your working hour and calculates the hourly rates in no time. Although it is not efficient for complex tasks, since you are running an SME, you are good to go.

Basecamp

With project management, you have a lot of activities and tasks such as emails, meeting schedules, deadlines and individual productivity to track and monitor. With Basecamp, you need not stress yourself, all you need to do is to automate or integrate this task into the base camp. That is, it allows you to automatically schedule questions and feedback to check your team’s activities and assess productivity. Questions like “what are you doing?”, “What did you accomplish in the last session?” can be scheduled on hourly, weekly or monthly basis and the answers generated would be automatically sent back via the same application on your team view interface. As an administrator or team lead, you can regulate who sees the messages and the feedback. The application is basically for monitoring and evaluation to increase productivity and efficiency.

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Conclusion

In every organization, irrespective of its size and service provided, your project management is as important to the success and efficiency of the organization as every other unit. You need the best applications available to carry out the day to day activities and communicate with your team. These applications have already been designed with user-friendly interfaces, all you need to do is find your way around it and get the organization up and running.

“Operations keeps the lights on, strategy provides a light at the end of the tunnel, but project management is the train engine that moves the organization forward.” ~ Joy Gumz

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Aluko Ahmad

Corporate communications || Technical writer || Content strategist, Writer and creator.