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A common way of managing a project is to use a project board. You could do this sort of thing quite easily in Google Sheets, but there are other tools that might work just as well, might give you more of a starting point, or might offer more functionality.
Collaborative whiteboards can be a really useful way for teams to work through ideas in an online setting. Let's take a look at some...
Zoom's whiteboard tool is probably the most flexible and easy to work with of the tools we've got available at York. If you've encountered other whiteboard tools like Miro you'll find Zoom Whiteboards very familiar. Template options include collaborative project management tools for mindmaps, kanban and more. Whiteboards can be saved, shared with specific people, and exported as a PDF, image, or spreadsheet. They even have their own URL (here's an example).
You don't need to be in a meeting to use Zoom Whiteboards — the option is on the top menu of the Zoom app (Zoom Workplace). However, there's the obvious benefit that they can easily be deployed within a Zoom meeting for collaborative working.
The canvas may be smaller, but Google Slides has many of the collaborative features you might be looking for in a whiteboard tool, coupled with the familiarity of Google Workspace's sharing options.
The Microsoft Whiteboard app (part of Microsoft 365) is a lot like Zoom Whiteboards but a bit harder to use for collaboration: they can be shared within the University, but the ability to share more widely is currently turned off at York.
Like the others mentioned on this page, Microsoft Whiteboard comes with a range of project management templates...
The Wiki's whiteboard tool features include the ability to create swimlanes, kanban, organisation charts, and product roadmap diagrams.
There's not currently an export option, so this is very much an option for users invested in using the wiki. It's not going to work as a standalone diagramming tool.
Here's some other project management tools you might want to explore:
MindGenius is a tool available to members of the University. There's two versions: a Windows desktop app and a browser-based online app.
The desktop app has tools for designing mindmaps and Gantt charts. For familiarity it uses an Office-style user interface with ribbons and side-panels, but despite this it's far from being the most intuitive tool you could use.
The online version is also quite fiddly but has more collaborative options available meaning you and your team can work together in various ways, including using templates such as projects, SWOT analysis, kanban boards, mindmaps, shared task lists and timeline tools.
Microsoft Planner is part of our Microsoft 365 online package. It's a card-based project board that looks and works a lot like Trello.
Unfortunately, with our setup it can only be used individually, not collaboratively, so it is limited in terms of organising a team project. But you might find it effective for an individual project.
Microsoft Project is a project management software program, and is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analysing workloads. It is not available as standard at the University but can be bought by departments as part of Microsoft Select.
Different departments and teams may have access to some other additional tools. Depending on who you are working with, you may have access to tools such as Jira (for issue tracking and sprint planning), Salesforce (for issue tracking), and Basecamp.
There are always the usual caveats with using external tools, as tools providers can be hacked, we don't have an agreement or contract with the tools providers, and the data can be stored outside of the EU, breaking GDPR. No sensitive or personal data should ever be entered into an external tool.
There are a number of commonly used project management tools beyond those licenced by the University, including Asana and Github. Here's a couple more that have proven especially popular, but if you do use them, do so with care, and remember not to include any sensitive information.
Trello has become a very popular tool for managing projects.
It lets you visually organise tasks, break them into sub-tasks, and attach relevant files and notes directly within task cards. You can also collaborate with others, assigning various tasks to different people.
For more guidance see Trello's own guide.
Padlet is often used to gather ideas and information from colleagues. It has the added benefit of being able to save people's posts as a spreadsheet file, meaning you can import them into Google Sheets should you want to do some further research, or processing of the comments.
Padlet has a number of really interesting templates, including storyboards, recipes, and family trees. It also has some project management templates including a project planner board to which you can collaboratively add and reorganise items. There's even a collaborative whiteboard tool called 'Sandbox'.
For more guidance see the Padlet Skills Guide.
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