Updated on by Hayley Brown
Understanding what your team is working on, whether a large or small organisation, is crucial for steering them towards achieving your business objectives. For instance, a marketing team needs to know who is working on advertising campaigns, when someone else is writing content, and analysing data. The team then understands the stage of a project, who is working on it, and the timeline.
Creating integrations, and automating processes between your project management applications, and other SaaS platforms can help unify a team even further.
What are Project Management applications?
Project management (PM) applications have the ability to help plan, organise and manage the resources of a team, or organisation. They are user-friendly, drag-and-drop interfaces where teams can see tasks, collaborate on projects, understand project scheduling and timelines, and check project statuses.
Project management platforms enable teams to work in an agile fashion and eases task management between office-based and remote teams. As a result, it encourages stability throughout their projects, so they can consistently, and seamlessly work together.
Popular Project Management Connectors
What are typical project management integrations?
Project management integrations are typically used to help organise tasks, assign them, track file storage, encourage team collaboration, and see project timelines. Building integrations between these applications, and others used by your team, can be simple workflows. As they are designed to respond to issues, tickets or comments. Alternatively, they may be somewhat complex integrations, designed to automate time-consuming processes, link attachments, or orchestrate sales leads.
Communication and Project Management Integration
Communication tools are vital for any team, but especially when managing remote teams, and trying to organise, and assign tasks. Therefore, creating seamless integrations between project management systems and communication tools can help.
A communication integration could be created to send messages to Slack when a new comment, issue or review request has occurred in GitHub. The messages are immediately sent to the appropriate channel and picked up or assigned to a team member to chase. This creates a solution for recurring tasks and automates a process that can take up time.
Example Integrations: Communication Platform – Project Management
- Post teams GitHub commits to Slack channel
- Send new GitHub to pull requests to the Slack channel
- When a new milestone in GitHub has been triggered send a Slack message
Collaboration and Project Management Integration
A useful integration with a project management platform is incorporating collaboration tools such as Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs. This type of integration allows team members to track projects, see project statuses, as well as share and store project files. This helps to encourage team collaboration, and file sharing, reducing file duplication, and real-time project management.
For instance, Trello is a web-based list-making application that helps keep track of everything. It is a popular project management platform which allows users to create new tasks and set up custom alerts. Integration with Google Drive allows access to files anywhere. Meaning a new card can be created when a Google Sheet or Doc is uploaded to a specific Drive folder.
Alternatively, a custom workflow could be built for a Google Drive folder. It can be created for a new Trello card and project, which keeps project files in one location.
Example Integrations: Collaboration tools – Project Management
- Save new Trello card attachments to Google Drive
- Move Trello cards when Google Drive files are updated
- Send a Gmail email when Google Drive files have been updated and moved the Trello card
CRM and Project Management Automation
Creating secure integrations between a CRM and a project management application can be beneficial to teams. As it will help manage accounts and fulfil orders.
For instance, using a project management solution like Asana. A web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. The integration between Asana and Salesforce could be implemented when a new account is added. This then triggers an outreach task in Asana. This is then automatically assigned to the relevant sales representative who can follow up with the lead.
Example Automation: CRM – Project Management
- Using Asana connect tasks and projects to specific Salesforce records, which can then be assigned to team members
- Create an Asana task when a Salesforce object has been updated/created
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CRM Integrations you should be using
Email and Project Management Automation
Staying on top of projects can be made easier if integrated with your emails. So, a useful integration with third-party applications is between a project management application and an email provider.
For example, an email can be triggered from your PM system when a task has been moved, updated, or completed. A new project management card could also be created from a new email received. As well as a card is created for receiving an email with attachments.
Example Automations: Email Platform – Project Management
- Create a new card in Kanbanize from email, link email attachment(s), and in a week’s time (delay) create a meeting in Microsoft teams for a project progress review
- Send an email when the Kanbanize card is updated or closed
Calendar and Project Management Integration
Keeping track of project timelines, budget tracking and deadlines can be a challenge. Building a customised workflow can help alleviate any missed deadlines/issues, or overrunning project timelines. If you are using JIRA, an issue-tracking application that has features that support every stage of your software development process. It can be integrated with another project management application, and a calendar platform to automate the reporting of issues.
For example, when a new issue arises in JIRA a new Trello card can be created, and assigned. Then the project or issue deadline can be added to Google Calendar as an event. Therefore project or issue due dates are not missed.
Example Integrations: Calendar – Project Management
- Create a new Trello card from the JIRA issue, add it to Google Calendar as an event, and email the project assignment to team members
- Generate JIRA issues from new inbound emails
How is this used/beneficial for an organisation?
Using project management applications and integrations have numerous team benefits. For instance, planning and scheduling are improved, collaboration is increased, and task delegation is effective. As well as access to files is easier, remote working is effective and engaged, onboarding new team members is more efficient, productivity is enhanced, and budgets can be visually managed.
Ultimately creating a streamlined and efficient working team with automated processes, and useful integrations enabling the flow of data between applications.
