Brightpod — The Tool For Project Management
Website: www.brightpod.com
Purpose: An effective management tool, Brightpod allows its users to create task lists for individual pods (projects), assign them to members, manage tasks, and even has an inbound messaging system that helps you stay updated and generates competitive team communication.
Pricing : After a 14 day free trial, the price ranges from $19 to $129.
A lot of hard work goes into the conceptualizing, programming, delegation, execution and follow up of any project or campaign. Until now, there were never really any technological help that could assist a team. But yes, only until now!
Yes, there are many project management tools out there, but to configure them to match your requirements can be quite a task. The answer is BRIGHTPOD by Synage Software, launched in April 2013, that helps you plan, collaborate and delegate all your digital marketing and creative projects on the browser.
Brightpod’s consumer friendly dashboard helps you effectively create PODS or projects using a custom workflow, sharing the same with your team, creating and managing tasks and also following up.
Sahil Parikh, Founder & CEO, Synage, believes that the key to a company’s creativity, speed and success lies in following a system that documents all tasks, check lists, communications and workflows that each of the team member or group can follow. “It is human nature to forget critical steps when implementing a project or a campaign. This leads to project delays, disgruntled clients and compromises your team. Unlike other general-purpose project management tool, we focus on marketing teams as our core audience”.
Getting all the information on an active project by simple click on these tabs — the user friendly BRIGHTPOD!
Features of Brightpod:
1. Creating Pods with Real Time Task Lists:
Brightpod allows its users to create individual pods or projects and have access to a birds eye view of each of these. It is easy to manage the performance and growth of individual pods, grouped with effective team work. A fairly creative display of task lists is available that can be executed as the Kanban Board (Kanban helps you manufacture products based on demand thus reducing inventory. In the social scheme of things, Kanban will simply help its users know what and when to work on a specific task).
2. Working in Teams
One of the highlighted features of Brightpod is that it allows its users to share real time progress on each pods with the relevant team members. They can send and receive instant messages and also are aware of eachothers developments. The feature Brightpod Send allows your team and clients to add tasks, task lists, messages and files to your projects via email.
3. Stay updated and avoid Inventories
The Recurring Tasks feature allows you to place tasks on repeat, avoiding the risk of skipping and important and usual scheme of work. For example, placing the task “submit report every Monday” under the tab. Brightpod allows you to manage and deploy resources as and when they are needed. This is important to improve efficiency and effectiveness of handling any project. A track list of blogs relevant to your industry can also be maintained effectively.
4. Workflows
Another impressive feature of Brightpod are the workflows that can be created to help similar projects perform without any glitches. Helps save time by planning faster therefore enhancing work-ability.
5. Editorial Calender
Editorial calender helps deploy and channel work that can be shared within the team. A simple drag and drop feature allows you and also your team members of individual pods, work collaboratively giving you the larger picture. The user can also plan their events on the same calender.
6. Reviewing Task
With the ability to manage the workflow through the ‘activity stream’ tab, the adminitrator of the pod gets to view the progress of individual team mates. Taskas within the lists of the team mates can be highlighted as ‘priority’ to let them know what is to be done when. Time tracking feature and the priority lists helps focus on what is important thus avoiding delays.
7. Archives
The archives in the tool are very sensibly put. A task or message that has been deleted is saved in the archived folder for 30 days. Thus, if your team mate deletes something that is important to you, but irrelevant for his/her use, you need not fret and simply gain access to the archives.
8. Time Tracking
Brightpod allows you to budget time for each project, track time for each task, add custom time entries, choose between billable and non-billable, filter time by team members and even export all your time to a spreadsheet. Therefore, it is assists in knowing exactly how much time is being spent over each project. It helps you track milestones, budgets and expenses and also staying aware of employee time and deliverables. Files upto 25 MB can be shared leaving enough space for anything to be done!
The UI — Life made simple
Using Brightpod is as simple as using an email and does not need much getting used to. Long email chains created while collaborating with team mates and clients can get tedious and time consuming to search logs. The Pods enable display of every conversation and Tasks on the same page, ensuring nothing that is important is missed.
The FOCUS TAB allows you to view the day’s activities and helps you critically analyse the same.
Everyone has their own Me page that helps them know about the tasks assigned to them. Only Administrators can view everyone else’s Me page by clicking the ‘Team’ tab and further clicking on any team member’s name. Here, you can explore everything this person has done in Brightpod. Moreover, you can move tasks to prioritize and even send a notification which will tell the person that their tasks have been prioritized by you.
“Brightpod offers marketers the tools they need for efficient communication, task delegation and file sharing right in their browsers. A big part of running a successful business is staying organized, whilst providing management and employees high level visibility of jobs, projects, tasks and agency/client communication. It’s difficult to grow your business without a system that creates a predictable result for your client projects. It will always be a bottleneck to ultimate growth,” quotes Sahil.
The players of the market
There are many general purpose project management tools. Brightpod innovated its approach by not making a software for everyone, but specifically for the marketer and his teams. A small list of comparison of the same is below.
When that’s said and done…
Brightpod is the all encompassing tool that maintains it’s quality and functionality towards its target audience. The only improvement that can be suggested would be for it to launch a mobile app which seems the order of the day. The viewing, listing, user interface, and even the communication benefits within the tool make it a ready to go tool finding itself in the number one criteria for an effective project management tool. “Competition is fierce in this space and growing fast it a challenge. I started to think about the days when I started this company and what excites me every day. Each time there was just one thing that kept echoing in my mind: We believe that business software should be simple, easy and fun to use.” says, Sahil Parikh.
