Review of 5pm (project management application)

Working in a team has its pros (spreading of tasks, sharing of ideas, etc…) and its cons (many personalities, goals and skills). When I was first hired as Humminbird604.com’s project manager, I didn’t think a team of 3 people would get that hard to manage… Boy, was I wrong.

Coming from my humanities background, I wasn’t much used to teamwork. We usually do our own thing and have it approved by other people who also do their own thing. So I had to adapt and find a solution to my most pressing problem: how to reduce the amount of emails flooding my inbox?

Raul gets a lot of emails, and I only end up seeing a tiny fraction of them. But even then, the constant back and forth between me, Jessica and Raul about posts, covers, meetings and other projects quickly became difficult to manage. I would have several email threads for one topic, multiplied by a dozen or so every week at least. So it’s in this context that I sought an online project management application to help streamline our communications.

Why I chose 5pm

After much research and considering of price against function, I finally set my sights on 5pm. I first started reading about it on forums reviewing more popular applications like BaseCamp. However, what convinced me to pitch 5pm to Raul was

1. The ability to choose a smaller account for a lower price. BaseCamp has one price for all accounts while 5pm has several different prices depending on the size of your team;
2. The simplicity of the interface. Since 5pm is a web-based account, it can’t accommodate very complicated functions; but since our work is rather simple (plan, write and follow up on posts and giveaways), we didn’t need much more than that;
3. The list of current clients. It includes McDonald’s, Best Western hotels, Autodesk, Olympus and Hyatt hotels.

Interface

Everyone in the team loves the 2-window interface. On the left side you have the list of projects and tasks; on the right side you can toggle between the Info, Activity and File tabs for all projects, single projects or even single tasks. There are easy color-coding features for visual cues as well. The interface is easy to learn and provides all the information you need in a single glance.

Timeline

We ended up finding the timeline aspect a little useless, but that might be because of the nature of our projects and tasks. We have to plan events in our calendar and there’s no way to do that in the 5pm timeline. I personally think it just isn’t meant to be a calendar, but it’s kind of annoying that we can’t sync our Google calendar with 5pm while we can use Google Docs. Maybe adding a calendar sub-function to the timeline would be a good idea, and allowing for integration with Google Calendar an even better one.

Messaging

The messaging function is definitely our favourite part. Instead of sending emails through every time we need to discuss a minor detail, we use the 5pm messaging to avoid flooding our email. You can still have the message copied in an email to your team members, but at least they’re also in the 5pm system. It’s great for things that don’t need instant attention. You can write notes about entire projects or single tasks. This is definitely one of the best features of 5pm.

Files

We used the file system a little at first but quickly dropped it because of limited space–we filed mostly pictures. But now that we’ve figured out how to work with Flickr as a team, we just don’t really need to use it anymore. It’s useful only if you don’t have access to another shared-space app like DropBox or if you absolutely need to have your files attached to tasks or projects. In any case, you need a more expensive account for it to be worth it.

Sorting

Another great thing about 5pm is that you can sort projects and tasks almost any way you like. You can hide the stuff you’re not working on and keep only what you’re attached to, or see everything (depending on your access level). Assigning tasks is easy, too. You can add tags to projects or tasks and sort them through that as well. There’s a way to hide all finished tasks without deleting them, leaving you with only what’s still open. You can sort by due date, alphabetical order… it’s pretty customizable.

Mobile

I haven’t had to use it much since I spend most of my time at home anyway. 5pm has both a mobile website (mostly for tablets) and a dedicated app (for iPhones). It mostly enables you to see tasks and follow up with messages, but there isn’t much else you can do with them. They’re great for keeping track on the go, but the full web application is necessary to access the more advanced functions.

A screen capture of someone else’s project, just as a showcase of 5pm

Overall

We would recommend 5pm for small teams like us who just need a space to put everything together instead of relying on emails and individual task lists. Our favourite features are the messaging and the sorting functions. It’s helped us a great deal for our communication tasks as well as to make sure that no one’s writing the same post twice! The learning curve is very low and the simple interface makes it really easy to understand. There are useful videos on the website to help you get started as well.

If you’ve used 5pm, how do you like it? Do you use another web-based project management app that you’d like to share with us?

RAUL’S NOTES ON 5PM:

The one thing that I’m very curious to explore is the Clients element. Right now, I can’t consider PR companies and/or restaurants, arts companies, non-profits and everybody who pitches me as a client (as they don’t pay for the posts, and I don’t do pay-for-play). But I wonder if at some point, with some large PR projects it would be useful. For example, we are doing A LOT of coverage for the Vancouver International Fringe Festival, and I media-sponsored the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Given the size of those projects, maybe I should consider using it.

This review was written by Anabelle with input from Jessica, my two wonderful interns, with a couple of comments from me (Raul) which are clearly indicated on the post. 5pm does not actually know we wrote a review. We were neither paid nor do we get any free perks (I pay for the paid version of 5pm). I just have fallen in love with this project management software and would encourage anyone who likes project management to consider it.

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Related posts:

1. Twice and Twice: The Tennessee Williams Project (guest review by @loisrp)
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3. Breaking down a project in smaller tasks
4. Keeping a project journal/logbook
5. Breakdown a project into smaller tasks [Productivity]