How to manage tasks from various project management tools?

Question

We work with a few clients, each with a number of projects, and each with their own project management tools (e.g. Jira, Asana, Trello, email, Google Sheets, etc.). We're getting to a point that we're probably missing some tasks, lost as what to do next, missing deadlines, etc.

One possible solution is to hire a person whose sole job is to just monitor all these tasks across various client project management tools and collate them into our own project management tool, then echo our updates in the clients' tools. This doesn't sound like an efficient plan (not to mention expensive).

Any recommendations on how we can efficiently manage our tasks internally? Any tools or techniques that we can implement?

Answer 1

Is it possible to have at least one representative from each project and come up with a standardized way of tracking that fits everyone's needs? That way you can understand their point of view on what benefits their tool brings and that can help you out creating a unified solution. It would help if you show them the cost that they are incurring my having everything on different platforms.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

I don't think you've identified the right problem and/or you're looking for an elegant technical solution to solve a problem that should be solved by normal project management capability. Who is managing each project? No matter how you're structured, no matter what development approach you're using, you should have named some type of lead for each project who is responsible for delivery. That person is responsible for tracking the work no matter if using a fancy tool or if the tasks are written on butcher paper taped on a wall. That person then negotiates with the other leads to facilitate the use of team members who might be matrixed to many projects. If you do not have a named lead, that's your problem. If you do have a named lead, then your problem is that person is not doing one of the most essential tasks of leading.

Answer 3

You do not mention your relationship with these clients, which is a key point to define what could be done.

If you're a consultant intended to deliver more value to your customers (usually through software delivery contracts), you may have an opportunity to partner with them and deliver beyond software - deliver best practices (specially for people still not using task tracking software).

If you're a partner and you have no influence whatsoever, then you may want to consider connecting these different tools into a task tracking software in your side through APIs, this way you'd have a consistent view from your end regardless of the madness on the other side.

Now, about do this manually: If someone starts doing this manually as you suggested, this should be just to validate the hypothesis that having the information in a single place will really deliver value for your company... not a long term solution. See this person as as band-aid. The longer you take to remove it, the more it'l hurt.