It doesn’t exist. I’ve been searching for it for years. I’ve signed up for the trials, I’ve read other project manager’s blogs, I’ve listened in at the conferences and asked the right questions but it continues to elude me: the ‘Perfect Project Management Tool’ is my Loch Ness Monster—I have a sneaking suspicion it’s out there, but despite the occasional bubble at the surface, I’m no closer to finding it.
If, at this point, you mention Basecamp, I’m going to have to step out of the room and take a few deep breaths. My frustrations with Basecamp are probably best kept for a different article. They had the ball and they dropped it. That said, it is hard to talk about project management tools without comparisons to the old guard from 37signals.
So, why is finding the “perfect” tool so difficult?
1. We’re all different. How do you create one tool that delivers for everyone when we all have different ways of managing our projects?
2. Projects rarely fit a standard mould. I often start a project using my go-to tool and then quickly discover that it’s not quite working for my project requirements.
In an ideal world, we would have enough flexibility to adapt our tools for different requirements and preferred workflows. This is where Podio steps out onto the court, offering the kind of flexibility and customization that I’ve been yearning for—a template-driven, modular workspace.
Tasty and tiered—like a wedding cake without the drama
I stumbled across Podio over a year ago in my ongoing hunt for the “one tool to rule them all.” Launched officially in 2011, Citrix quickly snapped it up a year later. Don’t be put off by the “big business” big brother here, though. Podio still feels like a startup product, but with a supportive enterprise backbone.
In essence, Podio is a team collaboration tool with two main parts. First, there is a workspace and activity wall—think Facebook group page. This captures all activity and communication. It’s not the most enticing activity wall I’ve come across, but it does the job and offers up basic tools like file and link sharing, plus a neat little poll tool for asking questions. Images you upload show as thumbnails, and I’d prefer they were larger to give the feed a little colour and definition, but I suspect the design focus is about keeping as much information in your viewport as possible.
Each workspace has a dashboard that shows your team members, activity wall, tasks, files and any other tiles that you wish to add or create.
Second, there are the apps. This is where the task management happens. Think: Trello or even Excel. When I demoed the app with my project team, we never really used the activity wall; we communicated and commented within the apps themselves.
Together, Podio’s workspace/activity wall and its apps create an effective tool you can use with your internal and external teams.
What does Podio look and feel like while you’re using it? It’s inoffensively nice and sensible. I don’t think it’s going to win any awards, but it’s likable. There is a good use of fonts, plenty of white space, and the whole thing feels well put together. It’s definitely lacking in sparkle though. Personally, I’d like to see more colour, more contrast between areas, and some larger imagery. I have high standards when it comes to the design of the tools I use, but I enjoy using Podio, so my gripes are minor.
To get a better understanding of Podio, it’s important for us to dive in deeper and explore the tiers within the app: Organization > Workspace > App > Item.
Organizations
Your first task in Podio is to create an organization. More often than not, this will be your company, but it could also be your local PTA, sports team, or running club. By creating an organization, you have a general workspace for all organization members. This is called the “Employee Network” and is a place to communicate with the entire organization. Use this space to share status updates, files, questions, links, hilarious GIFs and cat videos with all your co-workers. As an account holder, you can be a member of multiple organizations so if your client also happens to use Podio and invites you to one of their workspaces you’ll see that pop-up under a different organization within the interface.
Paid accounts have some reporting within the organization management so that you can see:
- A detailed breakdown of Podio usage in your organization
- Your statistics updates in real-time
- How you’re using your paid seats
I’m a fan of this kind of oversight. It should help you monitor the account tier you require and whether or not Podio is really working for you in your company.
Setting up a new organization is really straightforward. A name and the number of people in the organization are all you need to enter. You can also add a logo or avatar if you have one. Interestingly, Podio tries to source the correct logo from the web, but I found the feature to be pretty useless.
Workspaces
While the basic organization space is useful, workspaces are where your productivity really happens. There are no hard and fast rules about what a workspace should be or how you should use it. You might create a workspace for a client, and then have multiple projects exist within it, or you might make the workspace itself the project space. Equally, you might create a workspace for tracking business leads, proposals, or your company’s blogging schedule. I love how easy it is to create workspaces—just a name and privacy setting is enough to get going.
Once you create your workspace, you can invite members to it. Private workspaces are invite-only; open workspaces are available to all members of an organization. You can also invite external workspace members such as clients or suppliers to join them. With the paid plans there is no limit on external users, and they have no impact on your user allowance. If you’re using the free version, you can have up to five external members.
Podio’s strength is that you can make it work for everyone in an organization, not just its project managers. By tailoring workspaces, we can use Podio to manage our projects, account managers can use it to manage proposals and leads, HR can use it to manage staff, developers can use it to manage work tasks, and marketing can use it to manage social content distribution. Not many apps are quite so inclusive. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that with the mighty Citrix backing them up, Podio hasn’t made more headway in the market.
Once you create your workspace, you have access to a setup that is similar to the Employee Network, with an activity stream for sharing updates and content with other members. This dashboard with calendar and task widgets is already set up and you can enhance them anytime with reporting that’ll give you in-depth information about the workspace activity. For that to work, you’re going to need apps…
Much like when creating organizations, you only need to add a name and privacy settings to set up a workspace.
Apps
I’m not writing about software for your smartphone here. The term “apps” is perhaps a little misleading. The premise with Podio is that it works right out of the box with the basic tools in the workspace—certainly a match for Basecamp’s functionality right now—but, you can add extra components to build functionality. If you can’t find the components you need, you have the power to build your own. Think of it like a Lego® toy; you can put it together just like the picture on the front, but if you want something different, there are one or two other designs laid out in the instructions that you can assemble. Failing that, you can use the raw material available and build whatever you want. I should stress that this is far simpler than it sounds and I really enjoy building, editing, and customizing these apps to the point where they’re perfect for my requirements. Your OCD will thank you.
Apps can take many forms within Podio. Here, the ‘Deliverables’ app is in badge view format and each item is laid out as an individual card with summary information. This is a great view for contacts, proposals, or leads.
Within each app, you have fields that can include:
- Text
- Category
- Date
- Relationship
- Contact
- Number
- Link
- Image
- Money
- Progress
- Calculation
- Map
- Duration
You can create new or modify existing apps with ease using the app template builder. To be perfectly honest, this is simply a form builder.
For a full breakdown of what each of these can do, check out Podio’s guide.
Items
Apps help to organize items and give your work visibility. Items can be anything, and depend on the app template you use. So, for example, I want an app for managing development tasks and the fields in the app that form the template for the item might be:
- Text (title of the development task)
- Image (this could be a design, sketch, screenshot or asset)
- Category (front-end/back-end development)
- Date (due date)
- Contact (team member the task is assigned to)
- Link (URL of the webpage that requires development)
- Progress (% of task complete)
- Duration (time estimated)
- Duration (actual time used)
- Calculation (time remaining)
- Relationship (link the task to another item in another app such as a feature)
Once I’ve created or modified an app, I can start creating items within it. Close up, they look like completed forms. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but this data-driven approach provides a lot of options for sorting, filtering and referencing content within Podio. If I click on an item within an app, I can see all of the information relevant to that item. Essentially, it’s a form with different field types that you can customize however you want.
Creating an app is as easy as dragging and dropping fields within the template builder. It took me less than a minute to build a new app, and I can go back in and modify it any time, even after I’ve started to use it.
Once I’ve created an app, I can create an item. Here’s an example that uses the app I built for development tasks and you can see how the item uses the fields I specified.
You can view the items within each app in different formats and choose which works best for the type of content you’re referencing.
Card
This and the table view were most useful to me. It’ll also be familiar to Trello users out there. You can drag and drop cards between columns, and you can define which app fields create your columns. What I don’t like about the card view is that the colour categorization I’ve added to the app isn’t visible on the cards here, so the view is a little lifeless.
Badge
The badge view is useful as a high-level view or the status or a project or proposal. I found it didn’t work very well for granular task management because I couldn’t glean much information or see a wider context.
Calendar
If your app uses the time and date fields, you can use the calendar view to schedule your items. Here, I’ve set things up to show the due dates of my tasks.
Table
The table view is one of the more useful views. You can play with colour categorization here and apply powerful filtering. On the other hand, it suffers a lack of screen real estate. You can improve it by closing the sidebar.
Activity
I found this particular view to be superfluous as this information also shows up on the workspace activity wall.
I quickly found that some views worked best with certain types of content, so play around to find what works for you.
Podio’s app market saves time
Podio’s app market is quick to set up. I usually browse by category and explore the app packs designed to hold apps for typical use cases.
It’s really easy to create new apps, but if you want to save time, try out one of the hundreds of pre-made apps in Podio’s app market, all organized by functional category (eg. project management, marketing, sales & CRM). I found the pre-made apps good to start with. What I will say, though, is I noticed a lot of duplication. And sometimes it’s difficult to find official or higher quality apps. I edited the ones I added to my workspace so they fit my own objectives.
Here’s a neat thing: You can add ‘packs’ of apps to your workspace; these are a collection of apps designed to seamlessly work together. Here’s an example: the ‘Web App Development’ pack includes seven apps:
- Project Backlog
- Sprint planning
- Bugs
- Releases
- Features
- Areas
- Procedures
Say I don’t want procedures, but I do want an app for meetings. I remove the procedures app and switch it out with a meetings app instead. Now I have everything I need for my web development project, except for enough caffeine, time, and budget.
When you’re creating and modifying apps, you can even choose relevant icons.
Your dashboard with tiles
We’ve invited our team members, conversations are happening on the wall, we’ve established our workflow, and our apps are now configured just the way we want them, with a dash of absurd humour. Things are peachy, but we’re not done. Podio has one more trick up its sleeve: tiles.
I have customized my dashboard with some tiles that pull through key summary info such as when tasks are due, what their statuses are currently, and what is still outstanding.
Tiles are widgets you can add to the landing page of your workspace, your employee network, or your Podio dashboard. Podio offers a few standard tiles that let you pull in information and present it in different spaces like Tasks, Calendar, and Files. You can create more tiles using information pulled from your apps. For example, you can add a tile to a workspace that shows how many development features or critical bugs are outstanding. I’ve got a few projects on the go at the same time, so to get an easy status overview without diving into each workspace, I can create tiles from each and display them in one place on my Podio dashboard.
If you find you need more detailed reporting than what’s available within Podio, you can export items from any app as a CSV, which is handy.
Snazzy chat and video
Writing this article has reminded me just how much depth there is to Podio (and I’m starting to regret choosing such a behemoth to review!). Not only does it match the likes of Basecamp and Trello, but it’s also attempting to give Slack, Skype, and Google Hangouts a run for their money.
Podio lets you communicate with other account holders using instant messaging. There are one-to-one conversations or group chats. The developers are clearly investing their time into Podio’s chat functionality as they recently launched standalone Podio Chat clients for iOS and Android. If you’re after more face-time with your remote team, as a member of the Citrix family, you can access thoughtful GoToMeeting integration. You can set up meeting details and invite other parties through your meeting apps, then have GoToMeeting set up a corresponding virtual meeting room for you. Nifty!
I can access chat from any part of the app using this sidebar, or if I’m feeling really serious about my messaging, I can use this functionality in a full screen view. I didn’t really use full screen much on my projects, as I chatted with team members around a particular task or item, but I can see it being more useful for communication at an organizational rather than workspace level.
Sensible app integrations
Dropbox and Google Drive integrations for file sharing in workspaces seem pretty useful.
Podio nails integrations by focusing on quality over quantity. File-sharing and communication include:
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- OneDrive
- Microsoft Exchange
- Google Docs, Mail and Calendar
- Hightail (formerly YouSendIt)
- Box
- GoToMeeting
- ShareFile
- Office 365
- SugarSync
To be honest, because Podio performs the majority of the tasks I would usually assign to other apps such as Trello and Skype, I found that integrations weren’t as important as I would have expected. They complement rather than dominate the experience.
The good stuff
Podio has a lot going for it and here are the highlights:
- It’s flexible and customizable.
- The interface feels familiar (if you’ve got a Facebook account, the learning curve is small).
- There’s great support material including videos and how-to guides.
- It integrates with online file storage and calendars.
- It comes with widgets, reporting, and a custom personal workspace.
- Podio boasts its own iOS and Android apps.
- It offers chat and video.
- It allows you to document your task list.
- It integrates with other apps and platforms.
- It’s not constrained by business type or field: you can use it for project management, sales leads, marketing, and software development.
The bad stuff
Podio isn’t perfect, but to be honest, my gripes with it are pretty limited:
- The UI design lacks contrast so on low spec screens it’s difficult to distinguish content areas.
- The card view becomes difficult to navigate once you have a lot of content, necessitating a lot of scrolling. It’s easy to lose your bearings.
- It’s not a well-known platform, which means that, despite its big-business backing, it might be a hard sell to internal and external teams.
- You risk breaking your workflow down into granular details within the apps, at which point they can be difficult to maintain.
- This is completely subjective, but I found it lacks a little fun and joy, despite the playfulness of creating apps. Perhaps it’s the conservative colours or lack of fun animations touches, but I feel that a re-skin would lift it and make it more enticing.
- Podio automatically signs you up for their newsletter without asking you to opt-in. Bad Podio!
The Podio verdict
I still haven’t found it—the ‘Perfect Project Management Tool.’ However, considering just how many boxes Podio ticks (and ticks well), I’m not sure I ever will. Let’s be honest. As project managers, we strive for perfection and finding the perfect product that will fit all of our tastes, workflows, and projects is unlikely. That said, Podio is the closest that I’ve come to finding one tool that covers the majority of my day-to-day needs. You’re getting a lot of bang for your buck here and the feature set should be enough for you to bin some of your other paid apps, streamlining your day.
Where Podio suffers is in trying to do so many things. There is the old adage that you should do one thing well. I assure you that there are better task managers, better calendars, better chat programs, better kanban boards, and better file-sharers out there. Podio is very competent in all of these areas, but because the functionality is so multidisciplinary, none of the features feel sewn up. It is, by its very nature, a compromised app. However, I’ve found that when I sign-up for five or six apps that each do one thing very well, I end up with a cash flow that is not well.
To wrap it up, Podio is rather good and it’s difficult to find its major faults. Frequent updates keep it fresh, and the product appears to have momentum. Time will tell if their big business partner can reach out to the smaller groups and agencies, and turn the tide against the older, steadfast Basecamp, the agency world’s go-to PM tool.
We’d be interested to hear from you. Have you tried Podio? What do you think so far? Anything you’d like us to add?
