PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Challenges

For a client in the marketing domain, we have developed a solution that enables its employees and team members to effectively create, manage and track custom projects of any type and size. In today’s dynamic environment, the marketing agency needs to run different multi-channel marketing campaigns. Without having a proper project management solution – they faced multiple difficulties:

• Spending an entire day just to search for a piece of information in the long email threads
• Frequent delays in the delivery of marketing campaigns
• Manual task allocation often causes overlapping and miscommunication
• Marketing plans were hard to execute without team calendars (charts)
• Budget and resource allocation were quite difficult without a proper tool
• Hard to define the critical KPIs that impact the campaign’s success
• Monitoring and review of the campaign’s progress have been impossible

For these reasons – they needed a custom-tailored solution rather than using Trello/ Jira. Our solution enabled their employees to create, manage and track different campaigns (boards) within the platform. The project management features involve: splitting the project (board) into phases (lists), creating tasks (cards), scheduling tasks, defining milestones, assigning resources (team members) to tasks, adding comments, communicating (messaging), and many more. Aside from Our platform can serve as an efficient tool for daily assignments and ongoing tasks (job tracking, workflow management, employee engagement), as well as in agile environments (it provides a Kanban board).

The goal was to make a Project Management System (platform) with different modules, such as User/Employee module, Manager Module, Monitor/ Reporting module, etc.  

The Project Management System allows team members to organize their projects and team communication using the following artifacts:

Project details

The main features we developed within this project include the following:

Card / Task management: the user can update multiple items that can be added to a card and drill down the details:

• Labels – lets the user add one or more labels to the card, which work similarly to tags. Users can search for, select, or create a new label.
• Checklist – lets the user add a handy checklist with an option to copy one from another card. Or, the user can simply add the checklist and begin adding items to it. Then, as the items are checked off of the list, the progress bar, along with the percentage complete, is displayed.
• Attachment – lets the user select a file to include in the card. These options include a local file or one from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive. A link can also be attached to a card.
• Move – lets the user move the card to another board or to a different list, along with an option to choose its position within that list.
• Subscribe – lets users subscribe to a card so that users are notified of activity on it.
• Archive – lets the user move the card to the archive board or simply delete it.
• Share and More link – under the Action section lets the user print, export, email, or link to the card.

Board – Project management: the user/client can create a new Project (Board) and define its features: Board name, Board description, Add Board members (users), etc. The system will automatically generate Board Id and Board date-time. The user is able to define these Board features:

• Filter Cards option – allows users to see all similar cards based on keyword, label, person, or due date.
• Power-Ups are add-ons that can be included – such as a Calendar, card aging, and voting ability.
• Stickers are whimsical add-ons that can be dragged and dropped onto cards within a board.
• The link More in the Menu provides a set of options to view: Permission Settings, Labels, Archived items, and Email-to-board settings.
• Setup Board visibility: it can be a Public, Private, or Team board.

Team – Workgroup management:

• Create a Team: The User can create a Team for different purposes and projects. S/he can enter the name of the team and proceed with inviting members.
• Setup Team type/ Visibility: Team visibility is about whether the team can be indexed by search engines or visible to people outside of the team. Visibility can be set to Public or Private. 
• Invite members to a Team: the Members tab of the team page is where the user can add (or remove) team members. When adding members, users can define not only the department but also the entire company so that everyone can organize and collaborate in one centralized location. This makes it easier for colleagues to join boards and get to work without any friction.

Project results

In this project, we have implemented a custom project management solution that fulfills the marketing agency’s business requirements and improves employees’ efficiency. Particularly we have enabled the following:

• Creation and management of tasks, boards, and teams – are streamlined and very efficient.

• Task Automation (checking mail, tracking employees’ tasks, tracking leads on a daily basis, etc.)

• Content and Marketing monitoring/ tracking are enabled (ideas, leads, artifacts).

• Smooth Workflow management and custom Reports (Planned tasks, In progress, Completed).

• Efficient resource allocation – spending the right budgets on different marketing channels – social media, email/ web promotion, TV networks, etc.

• Definition and tracking of relevant KPIs that define the marketing campaign’s success.

• Creation of custom Reports (on a weekly and monthly basis) regarding tasks accomplishment, resource spending, and targets achieved.

By possessing these capabilities – the agency was able to improve the communication flow and streamline its work process. Our solution enforced collaboration among all stakeholders and established a single source of truth.