Tools of the Trade
Many tools exist in the implementation / project management space. They all claim to boost productivity, collaboration, and to make work seamless. But which ones are actually worth your while? Read on to find out.
Running an implementation means that at least two parties will be working together for a common goal: a successful go-live. It’s important to choose tools that are intuitive, have fast adoption, and will automate stuff for you. Tools that meet these criteria will reduce friction during the implementation and this leads to happier customers.
Workflow Mapping
The top two choices for this are Miro and Lucidchart. They both get the job done, but Miro wins because it’s a little easier to use and more aesthetically pleasing. The only scenario in which you would go with Lucidchart is if you needed to export your work to Visio. Fewer and fewer organizations are paying for Visio licenses, so it’s unlikely that you will need to do this. If you are currently using Visio - stop it right now.
Project Ops
The two primary tools for project ops are Smartsheet and Teams. Smartsheet handles the project ops. Teams provides the collaboration platform.
You would be surprised at how many entities are still using MS Project. In today’s age MS Project is a dinosaur. The reason is because MS Project only handles the project plan which means you need other tools to manage other aspects of the implementation.
Salesforce and ServiceNow are other big IT tools that a lot of enterprises use, and these applications have “project management” modules. I feel the pain for any project manager that is forced to use either of these for project management, because they are cumbersome and counterintuitive for project work.
Smartsheet is the gold standard in project ops for implementations. It allows you to manage the project plan and all other aspects of the project in a single location. It integrates easily with many applications (Salesforce and ServiceNow are among them), and it has robust automation that makes it significantly easier to keep things on track.
Other tools that deserve honorable mention are Monday.com, Asana, and Workfront. These two can’t do everything that Smartsheet does, but they might fit your needs if you don’t like Smartsheet.
Communication
OneNote and Teams are best in class when it comes to communication. OneNote has the ability to sync notes across everyone’s desktop which eliminates some email and the need to create a plethora of Outlook folders. In addition, OneNote’s organizational structure simply makes sense.
Teams offers persistent chat capabilities for both internal and external parties. Just make sure your Teams admin has the external feature turned on to make external chats seamless.
Remember when Slack launched in 2014 and the world thought the death of email was imminent? Slack brought persistent chat mainstream, and it was so popular that it made $1 million in subscriptions within 3 days of its release. Needless to say, email is still around. There will be times when official communication needs sent out via email because it offers a permanent communication record and is known as the everlasting CYA.
AI
AI is popping up everywhere, but which tools will help you the most? I like these three the most: ChatGPT, Copilot, and Fireflies. ChatGPT needs no introduction and has the best LLM. Copilot is a Microsoft product and can provide summaries from Teams meetings. Fireflies has a ton of integrations, automation, and support for multiple languages. All three can decrease the time it takes to put together notes/documentation which is a lifeblood of implementations.