Email As Project Management Software

Being a wide-spread communication tool, email has been widely accepted by the business community. It was the first broad internet communication medium and has made an "e-revolution" in business communications. Moreover, email has become one of the most widely used management tools. Executives communicate goals to managers via email, and managers create assignments to team members via email. Team members collaborate on their tasks and report their progress to managers via email, as well.

However, using email as project management software can quickly bring a lot of frustration to managers and executives. Email overload has become one of the main evils for information workers and business people nowadays. Executives are trying to get a picture of the business state, and managers are trying to keep track of outgoing emails with tasks. Team members are trying to cope with the stream of incoming emails, and everyone is trying to get organized.

Let's examine the value and pitfalls of using email as project management software one-by-one.

• Project tasks often imply work on specifications, marketing copies, schemes, etc. Email allows you to transfer those files to peers, teammates, clients, partners and other interested parties. With a broadband internet connection, it takes only seconds to send several megabytes of data.
• Email allows you to contact several team members at the same time, keeping plenty of people in the loop.
• Email is a cost-effective solution that omits the expenses that other communication forms bring.
• Email allows you to work with distributed teams because there are no time or place barriers in using email. Employees can create and respond to emails virtually anytime and anywhere. It can free people from the office and make communications across time zones a simple process.
• Email can reduce time spent in meetings by educating participants on issues before the meeting. Additionally, it can eliminate the need for the meeting entirely.

However, email was not primarily aimed at project management process facilitation; therefore, it has some very important setbacks.

• The mere fact of receiving a message from an employee does not imply that it will be considered properly or at the time needed.
• Using email as project management software leads to the so-called loss of context: information in context is much easier and faster to understand than unsorted fragments. Communicating in context is faster and more efficient. So there is a need for a special tool that can show the whole process picture to every team member. The tool should allow team members to easily structure the information and share that structure.
• Email as a project management tool also engenders the lack of consistency. Email can duplicate information. This may be a problem when a team is collaboratively working on documents. Thus, a particular tracking system is essential.
• With email, an executive remains unaware of project updates, unless a manager takes an effort to communicate those updates. This knowledge gap can cause employees to go in the wrong direction, and it also forces executive to act without having up-to-date information.
• Things like writing reports and pulling the information create a lot of routine work that puts an obstacle in the way of creative thinking. So there is a need for special software to automatically send project updates to team members.
• While using email, it is hard for a manager to get a picture of where the business stands, if he or she simply relies on thousands of emails spread across hundreds of employees' mailboxes. This work of gathering relevant information can be easily performed by project management software.

If managers utilize project management software along with email, they face the problem of coordinating these separate tools. Managers have to gather information from emails, merge it into a bigger picture and manually update plans, while project management software can do it automatically, communicate the updated version to team members and report the progress to the top manager. So a manager gets an additional onus of transferring data from one tool to another. It results in productivity decreases at all levels in the organization.

Although it is an essential communication tool, email buries a lot of valuable information. You need a tool that would help to turn the email mess into organized projects, increase productivity and get control of the business. By using project management system integrated with email (i.e. Wrike), you get the opportunity to leverage the benefits of project management software and email.

Wrike shows you a clear picture of project plans, gives the context of tasks to team members and allows all of you to work on the project plan in real time. At the same time, Wrike lets you stay in your familiar environment - email. You can create tasks by simply adding wrike at wrike.com to the recipients of your emails, attach files and insert pictures to such emails. You also receive email notifications from Wrike if someone updates the plan. In short, Wrike is the right tool for project planning, keeping a team on the same page and driving projects to results and a company to a new level of competitiveness.