5 Project Management Tools Recommended By Startup Founders

The right project management tool can make a world of difference in how easily you can get through your work, whether you’re starting up a whole new company or you’re working on something much smaller. We asked five startup founders to tell us which project management tools really make their lives easier.

1. Jeff Kear, Planning Pod: “I use my own company’s tool — Planning Pod — to run my projects because it not only lets me track things like tasks,
   files/documents, checklists and communications but it also lets me manage other business details like my contacts, calendars, contracts, files/documents and time tracking. It pulls lots of tools together in one place so I don’t have to open a dozen different apps to manage my business.”
2. Hussein Yahfoufi, appsplit: “At appsplit, we are currently using Assembla as our main project management tool. There are several factors that drove us to choose Assembla. I would say these are our three most important in no particular order: First, it’s a great tool for managing agile projects. The ability to track milestones, tasks, backlogs, etc. is great and very easy to use and manage. Second, the wiki section of the tool is cool to track processes, guidelines and to be used as our knowledgebase. It’s also easy to store files and images. Third, Assembla also has an SVN hosting feature which was not something we found in many project management tools.”
3. Ian Lucas, VoiceBridge: “We have distributed people resources (Ottawa, Niagara Falls ON, London U.K., and Redhill U.K). The most important element, and key to early success has been communications. Everything involved close team communication, including software design, development, quality assurance / testing, documentation, establishing early adopters, website implementation, customer support and product distributors. Zoho’s online convenience, ease of getting started, intuitive interface and well thought-out project management tools and processes have been a major contributor to our success across several time zones. From small, short-duration projects, to long-duration complex projects with many dependencies, we have been very pleased with the results.”
4. Lindsay Watt, Placeling: “Our preferred project management tool is JIRA by Atlassian. It’s not technically a project management tool, but is rather an issue tracker, but it’s incredibly flexible and can be used for just about anything. It’s also $10 a year for us with the money donated to charity. For small tasks I use Wunderlist (a to-do list that syncs nicely across the web, iPhone and iPad). Anything that takes more than about two days goes in JIRA.”
5. Brennan Lake, Neosites: “Here at Neosites.com, we use Redmine, a web-based project manager to assign, monitor and complete tasks between 25 employees in 3 countries (US, Brazil and Argentina).”

That’s our five. If you’ve found a tool that works really well for you, let us know about it in the comments!

Image by Flickr user VFS Digital Design