Asana
I am the self titled asana enforcer for our 8-person video production company. I don’t necessarily love it or think it’s the best project management software out there, but it is really good for what it’s meant. To me its biggest downside is it’s expensive. Something like $15/u/mo is the lower tier we’re on, and then it jumps to $25/u/mo I think to get all their tools. If your company can afford the higher tier I think it’s worth it, if you’re going to use it. Built in time estimate and tracking, group projects into portfolios to see aggregate progress, view workload per employee, it is some cool stuff.
For what we use it for, it is pretty good. If everyone uses it well, it does immediately answer who is doing what when? Especially for us with lots of clients to work with and handle timelines crossing over each other, it is extremely useful. I love planning out what a project will look like, what the full lift is of a client request and what staff we have available for that timeline and what outside resources we need to pull in. It is easy to add a freelancer to a single project and work with them there. I love the timeline view (video editor ) and just visualizing what a project should look like.
It is somewhat rigid in how it wants to be used, which can be good, but there is also enough flexibility to adapt to really specific things. One example is I’ve made a “poor man’s” workload project; you can add any task to more than one project so I just add what needs to be tracked to a staffing tracker project and can see who is and isn’t available when new requests come in.
And just about everything I’ve learned about asana is from Paul Minors. He is a consultant and has a fantastic YouTube channel, I’m sharing this one, but he has a lot of really helpful tutorials on asana and other tools. I highly recommend.