If you’ve been following me over the years, you’ll know that I’m a project management tool geek.
As an agile professional, part of my job has always been staying up-to-date on the best industry leading tools to get the job done while shipping products on time and on budget.
When it comes to building your online course, it’s important to choose what works best for you and your wallet, especially when you’re just getting started.
Ok, let’s get down to business.
Here are the top 3 online project management tools to create and launch your next online course, in order from most recommended:
Jira
I could end this post here since this is truly hands down the best tool I have used in both my corporate and personal projects. Built by developers for developers, this tool has evolved into one of the most flexible, user friendly and most cost effective tool (free for most uses) along with robust features like reporting that most tools charge heavily to gain access to.
Meistertask
One word to describe the way this app looks. Stunning. With a beautiful minimalistic style dashboard to highlight the key focus areas of your projects, this tool focuses more on task management than agile project management as there aren’t any sprints or other ways to time-box milestones in your project workflow. For kanban teams that leverage continuous flow, this is great, although if you’re looking for reporting, you’ll still find it lacking the traditional kanban metrics such as cycle time and work-in-progress limits and cumulative flow diagrams.
Trello
This was the very first online project management tool that caught my attention back in 2014. It’s come a long way since then, so it still makes my top 3 when it comes to cheap and flexible project management solutions. Lean, simple and basically a canvas to visualize your work, it was the easiest thing for me to track my progress for my online Amazon Kindle Book publishing business I was heavily involved in at the time, allowing me to systematize and automate some basic administrative tasks using zapier.com a 3rd party tool used to help connect different online apps so that you can save time using automation.
Perhaps the best advice I can give is to choose just one of these and don’t overcomplicate things. Unless you have a large team, which doesn’t apply to most digital entrepreneurs, especially in the early stages of your business, then you SHOULD NOT be paying a dime for an online project tool. So please trust me, ignore the marketing on this one from online project management tool companies and just pick a free tool and be mindful of your operating costs.
Remember that your online business should generate positive cash flow, so you’ll want to only spend money on the things that directly contribute to your bottom line (And if your a course creator, that’s things like a decent computer, microphone, editing software and video camera. That’s it.
