Task and Checklist Collaboration Tools Reviewed

Catherine Sanders Reach has an article this morning comparing collaboration tools Trello and Asana.

These tools can sometimes be helpful in keeping track of tasks, to-dos, deadlines, and such, which are core tasks of at least one of the legs of Legal Project Management. It speaks at least to the first leg in  this list:

• Manage tasks
• Manage people
• Manage time
• Manage clients
• Manage money¹ (see Note 1)

You might also consider Onit in this list; it does more (and is correspondingly a bit more complex) than Trello or Asana, but from a project management standpoint it’s part of the same family of tools.

For what it’s worth, I know the people behind both Trello and Onit and trust both organizations to do the right thing by their users, both in terms of being responsive and in terms of understanding and supporting the legal world’s need for privacy and confidentiality of data. The Asana privacy statement, described in Reach’s article, scares the heck out of me. I’m not sure I’d use Asana for any data for that reason, let alone suggest it for confidential or privileged work.

Also, I use Trello myself at times.

But….

I’ve wound up using a tool that works better for me. In effect, I’m a solo these days, though I do have some colleagues I collaborate with on various training projects. That said, when I was running a department at Microsoft, I used this tool to coordinate various collaborative projects.

Chances are you already have this tool on your computer. If you have Microsoft Office, you have OneNote.² (See Note 2)

Here are the various websites: Asana, OneNote, Onit, Trello (alphabetical order). Note that of these four, only Trello defaults to a secure (https) connection, demonstrating from the outset their commitment to and understanding of security. I wouldn’t expect the OneNote site to do that, since it’s a marketing-driven site that’s part of Microsoft.com; however, Asana and Onit, if you’re listening, it’s something you might consider.

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My footnoting tool apparently has chosen to take the morning off, so here are the footnotes.

1. “Manage money” means understanding and managing the economic aspects of a project – time/hours, budgeting, etc. – as well as overall department-budget or cost aspects of a project.

2. At some point I’ll do a OneNote-in-Legal-Project-Management series.