Project management used to be rocket science dealt with only by the elite chosen ones of the project’s team. That was like, a decade ago, before the easy peasy desktop apps showed up and after the invasion of online project management apps. It is now possible even for a high school student to get things going.
Projecturf is one such online project management app that has a gamut of features like a Global Dashboard to see project activities, calendar events, tasks, timecards, tickets, code snippets, and bookmarks all in one place. Follow me after the fold for a review of Projecturf.
Overview
Projecturf is a sleek, easy to use and highly effective project web app for all your online project management needs. Be it big or small, hobby project or a high paid gig, Projecturf helps you to manage projects and teams efficiently, irrespective of the size of the projects from anywhere.
Overview
Signing up for Projecturf requires a credit card but they don’t charge you until the free trial period is over.
Pricing
All paid plans of Projecturf come with the entire set of features and plan prices are based on the number of projects you can handle from the account at a given time. There are absolutely no hidden charges to drive up the costs. All business plans of Projecturf come with unlimited storage space. That is something that most of their competitors don’t offer. Kudos Projecturf!
Pricing
Plans start with subscription charges of $9.99 to as big as $169 per month. All plans come with a 14 day free trial period and there no free accounts. If you cancel the account anytime within the trial period, your card won’t be charged.
Dashboard
After creating the account, Projecturf gives you a web address to login to your account. Instead, you can also link your company domain name from the Settings page of the app. We’re welcomed to the app with a dashboard with clean looks, great icons and a message to customize the account.
Dashboard
From the Settings page, you get to customize the colors, the template, add a custom URL and upload your own logo.
Customizing the Account
Creating a New Project
Creating a new project happens in just a few seconds as the details required are pretty limited. That does not mean that you don’t have options to fine tune the project details. After saving the project, use the Settings tab to see the impeccable project customization page.
Creating a New Project
From here you can add or edit the project budget, duration, progress, the group it belongs to, color labels, due date and more. You can also select which sections should appear in the dashboard and this can be decided on a project by project basis. If you are looking to add people to delegate some of the project work, you can select them from the address book. Instead of emailing invites to people everytime, this feature will come in handy if you work with the same group of people.
Project Settings
From this page you can export your entire project to an archive and store it locally. All project items, including uploaded files will be included in the export.
Creating a Task
Creating a New Task is as breezy as creating the project. Specify a due date, describe the task and assign it to a person or a group and the task will be created and everyone assigned to the project will be sent email notifications.
Creating a New Task
I was pleasantly surprised with the Task Dashboard and the graphical representation of tasks in progress. The graphs display both your progress and the progress of the project in general as well.
Task Dashboard
You can create sub tasks within the tasks you have just created and these can be delegated as well. While there are no separate Milestones option per se., you can use the tasks and subtasks combination to achieve the goals.
Gantt Chart
You can also see the tasks in the built in calender or on the Gantt Chart. The Gantt Chart representation looked really nice and is feature rich.
Timecard
With Projecturf you will not be needing a separate app to track time spent on the project and tasks. Add the hourly rate, the number of hours worked and the task associated to it and you got the billable hours appearing automatically. Alternatively, you can track the time when the work is progress by using the bundled timer.
Timecard
Document Sharing
You can upload documents from the desktop or from a URL. Just like in the case of tasks and projects, you have the option to choose who gets access to the documents.
Uploading a Document
Development & Bug Tracking
Development & Bug Tracking section helps you track support tickets and you can use this space to share code snippets too.
Development & Bug Tracking
Reports
With projects come the inevitable meetings to present the progress report. Projecturf lets you pull professional reports right from approvals to ticket responses. With each item, there is a note letting you know if the report will be graphical or just plain numbers. In the case of a graphical report, Projecturf states if it is a bar chart or a pie chart beforehand.
Reports
Final Thoughts
Projecturf is one of the very best project management apps I have come across in the recent past and has a boatload of features. Want whiteboards to draw your thoughts, a place to discuss and collaborate with your team, or share designs with them? You name a feature and they’ve probably got it.
People who are worried about getting their data locked in have the option of exporting them to a local backup. However, Projecturf isn’t specifying in what format the backup will be and if it will work with popular desktop project management apps when imported.
They do a great job in making life easy for project managers. So if you’re looking for an online project management app or planning to switch from one, I would highly recommend you give Projecturf a go!