Team management is quite a nightmare and it gets awfully problematic when your team members use the Internet to communicate. Quick communication, an eye on the what the plan or upcoming events are for the next few weeks prove a bit difficult. There are quite some services on the Web that help ease the task in the form of Yammer, Toggle, etc but there is always room for one more. PlannerHQ is another collaboration tool for team planning and event management coming from Toggle.
First things first, it’s easy to use, simple to get started with and readily integrates with your Toggl account. To start off, you are displayed a dashboard with calendar, an option to decide the number of weeks that should be displayed on the timeline. When you click on a particular date you will be displayed a box to create an event, set dates for the same and you are done, nothing requiring great managerial skills.
The events created can be dragged to the backlog box just beneath the timeline, this is to help you place events that aren’t yet confirmed or decided on. You can add team members by sending them invites via email, add clients or organizations you are working with at Planner to smoothen the process of sorting out issues with team planning.
The layout is pretty simple and I guess the people behind have resorted to paying attention to functionality. Secondly, I quite prefer such services as they are quick to work on and don’t take ages to load, given a member or two of your team might have Internet speed issues.
PlannerHQ is free to try and is available on $4 per month for each user. At first adding a cost to any service sounds a bit troubling, since most of us need to save whatever we can on payments. But then the winning point is affordability, you can really spam emails of every team member if you simply have to make a slight update to a particular event, worry about everyone being on the same page or making calls just to see if your designer is set to meet the logo designing deadline. All these things consume energy, quite a lot of revenue and more importantly time.
Toggl has managed to bring in an easy method here with PlannerHQ, my need being a team manager is to ensure productivity and that each member is on the same page, Planner ensures I achieve this with its service that is equally easy for everyone at a manageable price. However, I personally think this would meet quite a success with smaller teams, lets say a a dozen or less, who are looking forward for basic functions and not willing to spend too much on high end services. That’s just my opinion and we will try to explore this further in a followup interview with Toggl.
I just thought of asking our readers what similar tools are they using to manage teams, projects, etc and why? Maybe we can do a round up and see what service is more popular or also discover one we aren’t yet aware of.
