7 Reasons to Use ONE Project Management Software

I've helped thousands of people decide which project management solution is right for them through videos like the one you see above. But when I receive messages like Our CEO doesn't believe in bringing us all into one software for tasks. He insists on only using Asana personally. But our devs will only use Jira. Our operations team is in ClickUp. Oh, and I'm exploring SmartSuite. So can you help me? Oh, these kinds of comments are so frustrating because it ultimately doesn't matter what the second part of the question is what they're looking to do in SmartSuite. Because no matter how great your setup is, if you are not working together with your team in one project management software for the full team, you're going to miss out on so many benefits of having a project management software. And clearly if you're watching this video, you might need a little convincing on that. So for the rest of this video, I'm going to go over to my trusty whiteboard and break down seven reasons why you may want to consider bringing everybody under one project management software, bringing them all under one roof. And we're going to start right now. All right, so over here on the wonderful whiteboard, reason number one why you might want to bring everybody into one project management software is the software cost. So no mystery here, every single software you use generally has a cost associated with it, whether it's the cost of checking it every day or more literally the cost that you are paying as a subscription to be part of it. Two software more expensive than one software. But you might be thinking, well, Layla, how does it cost more if we have one team here and one team there? It doesn't matter if they're in the same place, it's the same number of users, right? Wrong. The reason it's wrong is because when you have two software, I bet you there are people who need to have access to both, right? Your manager, your CEOs, your C suite, your departmental leads, your program leads, your anybody really who works cross departmentally, they're going to need access to both of those software. So all of a sudden, rather than having five people in one software and five people in another, you have two people that need to be in both software. So you end up having seven people in each software. So in that reality, rather than paying 10 seats in one software, you're paying for 14 seats across two software, which is more. Right. And let's not even taking into account how certain software these days are requiring you to have minimum seats and add on charges and this and that and the other. More softW software, more expensive. Assuming you have overlap, which almost every single team out there will. If only the CEO being in multiple tools, wiping this all away. We get to the second reason you want to bring everybody under one roof, and that is duplicate data entry, namely stopping it. If you're in a meeting with your whole team and you decide, yes, we want to create a new landing page, Amazing. But what happens if your design team creates a task for themselves in Todoist saying we need to create a new landing page. And then you, your development team creates a new task in Jira saying that they need to create a new landing page. And then your marketing team creates a task in their ClickUp account saying they need to live landing page. When you have multiple areas where you're tracking the same information, you don't know which one to trust. Is Jira the correct date? Is Asana the correct date? What about the CEO's area inside of SmartSuite? Is that the correct date? We don't know. And if any person is out of the office and we're trying to piece it together, everything becomes chaos. It's kind of like the project management equivalent of naming your files. You know, video final, video final, final, final, video final. Really this time, final. Like it's the same thing, except rather than just naming files, we're talking about our overall work organization. This kind of digital clutter not only is going to be very frustrating and probably going to lead to mistakes, it's also just cluttering up your digital footprint, making you store more and more information that's not exactly necessary, but which is something we definitely want to avoid. And we can, by just bringing everybody under one roof. Which brings me to number three. The third reason you want to avoid having people in separate tools is because of silos. Now, I've talked about this before. I'll talk about it again. This book, Scaling up by Verne Harnish. Great read. It introduces in one of the chapters the concept of organizational structure, specifically how your customer and stakeholders experience your business. Your customers might first experience marketing, but then they go into the sales department, Then they go into the fulfillment department. Then if they have an issue, they might go into the operations department, but your customer is navigating your organization horizontally. And so if the experience we're trying to optimize for is going this way in our business, if we build really rigid walls between our departments where teams can't work together on things, how is that experience going to go? What's the experience going to be like probably not very good. If we have sales very disjointed and disconnected from marketing, which is very disconnected from fulfillment, that customer experience is going to feel like all over the place. Like they're on an obstacle course and we want it to feel really smooth. A simple task like creating a new sales promotion needs to involve your billing department, your marketing department, your sales department, your fulfillment department. They all need to work together on pretty much every task in your business. So why would we build these giant walls that make it hard to get things done and make the customer experience more rocky just because we feel like using different project management software, right? Life becomes a lot easier. Becomes a lot easier to work together when you are physically working in the same place. Like it's not physically working more digitally working in the same place. Because it gives you one area to all collaborate on that same sales brochure you need to make. It gives you one area to all collaborate on that new offer you're creating. Everything is together, so you're actually able to work together. Because otherwise you're not really a team, you're just a group of individuals. So skip the silos, bring everybody under one roof and organize that roof in a way that allows people to actually collaborate rather than just work independently together. But Layla, even if we use all the same software, if we all use it differently in each team, we'll still have silos anyway, right? Good point. That is why it's important that you not only use the same project management software, but particularly if you're using a flexible software such as ClickUp or SmartSuite, something where you can really customize it. You want to make sure your team is using it in a consistent way. That's why we at ProcessDriven here have a user oriented course called how to ClickUp and how to SmartSuite respectively, where we show users how to use the software in a shared way, sharing conventions as to when to comment, when to create a task, when to do this. That way, not only do you have your team under one roof in one tool, getting all these benefits we're talking about here, but people are actually working together, which comes a lot more down to soft skills than actual features or brand names or software. The fourth reason to bring everybody under one roof is to streamline onboarding, offboarding and training. Basically all the back office magic that happens in your business. It will be easier if it's all in one tool. The fact is, every project management software has its own conventions. You need to establish these things like how do we tell people that we're offline things like how do we set deadlines and due dates. Each software needs you to behave a little bit differently and as an organization you're going to get better results if you teach that to your team. Fine. Right. That's kind of what our courses and stuff help you do. But if you are in four different software, that means you need to teach this four, four different ways to four different groups and maintain four different sets of SOPs for four separate sets of conventions. My friend, I am somebody who teaches people how to set up software and how to build processes for a living and even myself here we teach two different software right now and it is a full time job for multiple people to maintain the resources and training and processes that are required to make that possible. And I'm just going out on a limb and I'm assuming your full time job is not software and process trainer, right? So doing this for X just because is an extremely expensive and time consuming thing to do. And I just think your time might be better spent creating some automations and making one software super powerful and automated and streamlined and amazing versus trying to get all four software up to a usable baseline so people aren't running around like chickens with their head cut off. Moving on. The fifth reason you might want to bring everybody under one roof is analytics. This is kind of a trend in all software, but particularly in task and project management, where we're getting more and more reporting features that let us measure who's assigned what, who's over capacity, what's our predicted workload in the future, what holidays are coming up, who is the most online, who is the least online, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This reporting functionality really breaks down when you have people in different tools. You know, I might want to go make a report of who's ahead or who's behind or who's drowning in work. But if half of my team is tracking all of their work in a notebook, I'm never going to see that reflected. And so I'm not going to trust my numbers and the reporting becomes useless to me. Even though it's a really cool feature that I'm already paying for with my software, I can't take advantage of it if everyone's spread out all over the place and none of my data can be trusted. What a waste, right? Yeah. Because of this, you miss out on some really cool features that could make your life easier. But with issue number six, you might also be missing out on essential features that you need to have in order to operate smoothly. Namely Management features. As a manager, your job is generally to define a direction and coach people to achieve that end result or head in that direction. And that involves a lot of oversight in management or note taking system. You really don't have that visibility. You won't know until something is really wrong that it's really wrong. You were really kind of limited as a manager when you don't have access to your people. It's kind of like. This is kind of a ridiculous metaphor, but I'm watching this show, this TLC show, this old show called Sister Wives. It's about this polygamist person who has multiple wives and multiple children, whatever. In that show, the parent dude needs to visit all of these houses to parent his kids. And when he can't do that, all of a sudden the kids kind of run wild because he's not able to get in touch with them. To really parent these kids. That's a whole separate aside. But that's kind of what happens in your project management software when you have teams kind of all spread out doing their own things. We're not able to effectively manage because we're not able to really have exposure to what people are working on because we really just see the tool that we log into once a day. And unless you want a habit of checking every Single software every 15 minutes, you're going to be missing out on touch points and contacts and ideas if you're in multiple tools. But it's not just you who is missing out. In fact, the biggest issue I see with using multiple project management software is the lack of collision that you will have, the lack of digital collaboration. You will essentially have people working in their own little digital bubble all by themselves, just seeing their tasks and very focused. If we were all machines and AI, that would be fantastic. But we're not. We're human beings. And as we've seen with like these Silicon Valley companies building these giant campuses, so people collide and create new ideas and get inspired and so on and so forth. People do really well. They innovate, they create, they feel inspired and connected and they come up with new solutions to problems we didn't even know existed. When they are in community or at least getting exposure to new ideas. If we have everybody working in their own little bubble, in their own little project management software or in their own little task notebook, there is never going to be that kind of collision. Whereas if you're in the same project management software literally just happened this morning. In my own tool, you might be talking about a conversation as the development team talking about this new feature you're creating and someone from marketing sees that thread in their notifications as they're just clicking around in their day and they chime in on it. That is powerful. This kind of impromptu overlap can allow people to understand more about what other teams are doing. It makes it easier to keep everybody aligned on one vision. It again might come up with some new ideas. It might inspire a new new challenge that we can solve. All these kinds of things just have a lot of benefits for the whole organization. Greatly reduce the need for managers to over communicate and recommunicate status reports from other teams because the team themself is seeing this kind of cross collaboration by being in the same tool and essentially eavesdropping on what other people are working on. And that's a very, very positive thing, especially for remote or hybrid teams. Now I created this video because folks in the comments of videos like this have asked this question. This has been a challenge and I figured rather than trying to coach them through it in the comments, I just make this video so they can send it to their bosses to persuade them to hey, let's get under one roof. But I'm curious if there are any other challenges that you are facing with your team when it comes to process building, getting everybody working together on project management, or anything else. Let me know in the comments because your comment may just inspire the next video in the series. Let me know. Comment below. Speaking of process, have you watched our ultimate guide for how to systemize your business using process? You're going to want to watch that here next and until next time, enjoy the process.