App Review: Teamwork

I have a mixed relationship with project managers. I am deep down an ITIL proponent. ITIL plans, builds, maintains and optimizes services in a continual stream. Projets have beginnings, ends, and milestones. Ask any helpdesk specialist: there is no ending to the downpour of IT tickets. I worry about scaling my service to thousands of customers. Project managers want their projects done and move on to the next thing.

That said, if I ever have to work on a project again, I would want it to happen on Teamwork.

Exploring the app

I was awestruck by Teamwork's project management dashb0ard. Look at this:

I fed the dashboard about 25 tasks based on two project templates (writing a blog post and creating an eBook) and invited Flavi Wand, my new best bot-dy to observe team management features. The dashboard tells the whole story.

Flavi the bot dog. Not to be confused with a hot dog.

The dashboard feeds off all the usual PMP goodies such as a risk register, automated PDF reports, notebooks and collective messages broadcast to every project member ("Fill your timesheets, fools!")

Tasks visualization appears in beautiful list views with a row of intuitive controls to update immediately (see images below). Gantt view looked pristine but the drag and drop felt chaotic.

Teamwork impressed me with its ability to reflect every facet of a project. The app provides a pop-up chat box which can be synced with a complimentary product, called "Spaces". Some elementary automation exists to easily allow project managers to auto-assign or auto-warn invites of changes.

Spaces leave behind the project management part to focus on knowledge sharing and communications. I built a nice little wiki for blog post templates within minutes. The chat function, while not on a Slack level, provides some "public" rooms to vent and share non-work-related banter.

Teamwork complements its fully-featured app with a premium mobile experience. I dread project management mobile apps that basically reproduce the "spreadsheet" model. Mobile real estate is both vertical and limited. Make it count. The welcome page centralizes your tasks while the project view retrieves all facets in a compact and no-flafla (flafla is French for "fancy BS") card display.

Teamwork thought of everything.

Recommended Use Cases

Every project manager worth its trade must try Teamwork out. I would find the dashboard especially useful in an enterprise setting with a project management office (PMO).

I have participated in my fair share of projects through the years (project managers call us "the security tax"), which gave me a sufficient understanding of the vocabulary. Project managers with no formal training could struggle with the large interface.

Limitations

My biggest issue with Teamwork is also its biggest strength: it does everything a project manager wants, to a point of feeling blindsided by the awesome app it could be. There is such an annoying focus on billable time, billable rates, time entry, time planning, calendars, time logging... I wish I could toggle this off if my work does not involve billing clients! Research and creativity happen serendipitously. Charles Darwin sat behind his desk 4 hours per day, which is what many would call his "billable time". He still wrote the most important book in science history. A Teamwork without the time flafla that focuses on objectives, services, or achievements, would fulfil its potential as a premium productivity app.

From a functional perspective, the board view appeared weird to me. I was expecting a kanban from my tasks, yet the board displayed "cards" as another layer of the project. Such a display appeared to me as an idiosyncrasy.

Out-of-the-box integrations focused on Hubspot and Quickbooks as well as the typical enterprise software from Microsoft and co with the rest being handled by Zapier. Overall Teamwork focuses this part on large customers and this commercial strategy may turn off users in small to medium businesses.

Pricing

A free tier exists, with a $10/user/month "deliver" plan for small teams, "grow" at $18 for a bigger portfolio view and Hubspot integration and of course enterprise. The tiering focuses on premium financial planning features (budgets, invoices, burndown reports), showing Teamwork's interest in larger enterprises.

Verdict

Teamwork delivers an encompassing project management app where contributors can do everything. Its premium mobile experience and project management dashboards stand out. Now if only Teamwork would break free from the project management's paradigm...