You can’t build a house without a hammer. Well, maybe you can, but we definitely wouldn’t recommend it.
And following the same logic, you can’t run core business functions without the proper management tools. At least not without a lot of painful inefficiencies.
Management tools often come in the form of technology, and these days, technology is top of mind for a project manager. When asked what they see as the most important stepping stone to success in the future, 32% of managers said investing in the right technologies.
40% of those same leaders said that they plan to make the most considerable investments in technology in the next 3 to 5 years, and 44% expected to invest in the digitization of processes.
Depending on your department, your management tools might look different than the executive’s at the other end of the table. So, in this article, we’ll walk through some of the top management tools by business function, and how to get started with them today.
What are management tools?
Management tools are the systems, software, controls, and methods used by team leaders to accomplish their day-to-day tasks and achieve their business goals.
You can try using free management software, but often the features and services aren’t sufficient to meet all of your company’s needs. That’s why we recommend finding a paid plan that suits your needs for the best support.
monday.com supports businesses by providing the foundation to build the perfect management tools for them, across multiple project types and business departments.
Our Work Operating System (Work OS) provides business leaders a platform to build and integrate the tools you need for project planning, tracking project progress, assigning tasks, managing resources, reporting on costs, capturing sales leads, and tracking customer tickets.
monday.com is fully customizable, and allows all functions to work in one central place so that team members can share data, information, status updates, and other vital info with everyone who needs to know—whether that be teammates, other departments, clients, or vendors.
We’ll walk through how you can use monday.com’s templates and features to build some of the most common and effective tools for managing projects and work.
Top management tools by business function
A project management app is meant to make your life easier, not harder. But the right features for each tool will vary by department.
Across departments, tools share a few things in common—good management tools act as task management tools, make communication between teams and team members seamless, track progress, and bear some of the workload with features like automations and integrations.
Customer service
Customer service is all about communication with customers, and a customer service project management tool is anything that you can use to manage that process—including monitoring, tracking, and task management.
Communication could include anything from social media channels to chat boxes to traditional email. But for many companies, the most important customer service project management tool is the help desk or ticketing system. Customer service teams use this tool to collect and manage incoming customer complaints, service requests, and questions.
One popular example is Zendesk, an innovative help desk solution that helps you organize customer queries, regardless of whether the queries come in by email, chat, phone calls, or social media.
With this tool, you can manage customer service for multiple clients and track your service using different metrics.
Integrating Zendesk and monday.com allows you to automate several important actions, and sync customer service with different teams like IT and marketing.
With the integration, you can automate actions like adding internal notes for other team members, initiating automatic email sends, and duplicating tickets for other teams where needed.
Sales
A sales management tool is, of course, anything that your teams use to facilitate a sale.
This includes project management software that supports the creation of sales desks, and email software used to convince potential customers to make a deal with you, but the most integral sales project management tool is customer resource management (CRM) software.
Your CRM houses all relevant information about customers, prospects, and leads, including interactions from other teams within the organization, like marketing, customer service, and finance.
You can build a customized CRM with monday.com that suits all of your sales team’s needs, including lead and contact source, name and contact information, time zone, last contact, and potential deal size.
Automations like lead status updates, email drip campaigns, contract renewal reminders, and more, can all be customized to your business’s needs.
For a deeper dive into how to use monday.com as a CRM, check out this video:
Marketing
Marketing management tools allow marketing teams to ideate, create, and track marketing campaigns and assets for the purposes of lead generation and brand building.
Most often, marketing teams work with a tech stack that allows them to execute on several different fronts, like email campaigns, website development, landing page building, and analysis. That tech stack includes project management software.
Your project management tool, however, should house your strategy, calendar, and budget, and integrate all of the above so that all data and information are stored in one place.
Here’s an example of how marketing teams can use monday.com to plan and execute their marketing strategy:
Our template houses information like market research, a SWOT analysis, task management and status, team owners, and high-level progress.
You can also view your calendar as a Gantt chart or Kanban board, to manage upcoming deadlines and keep an eye on how work is progressing.
You can sync your marketing strategy tracker with your marketing calendar, which can house the launch date and status of every campaign and content asset needed to support your marketing strategy.
Finally, both your marketing strategy and your marketing calendar are supported by designated budgets allocated to different campaigns and content.
Marketing teams use monday.com’s marketing budget tracker to track status, estimates spend, and actual spend and to calculate how much is left in the marketing budget at all times.
Finance
From tracking expenses to managing inventory, finance management tools help your organization to keep its finances organized and strengthen accountability across teams.
These tools provide your company with convenient ways to manage budgets—like invoicing and payroll. The tools also help with making financial statements and reporting financial data to the management.
monday.com allows finance teams to import and export financial data with the use of our excel integration. Data can be reviewed manually before being uploaded to the monday.com platform so it can be used cross-functionally.
Human resources
Management tools in the human resources department can be used for everything from organizational change management and tracking and managing benefits to recruitment and onboarding.
When it comes to recruitment, greenhouse.io is a popular tool that allows companies to easily manage job posting and the influx of resumes.
Using monday.com, you can integrate with greenhouse.io through Zapier. Once your data from greenhouse.io—or any other recruitment tool—is in monday.com, teams can track the status of different open roles and where each candidate sits in the pipeline.
Once your recruitment team has found that perfect fit, you can use automations to move them over to onboarding, alerting other human resources members as well as the appropriate people from IT and other departments.
Here’s one example of an onboarding template used by one recruitment team to track and manage their employee welcome packages.
R&D and engineering
Research and Development (R&D) and engineering teams use management tools in order to track the products and features that need to be built and updated within a set timeframe. R&D teams use tools for test management, building a critical path, key feature building, and team collaboration.
One well-known example is Github, a provider of internet hosting for software development and version control using Git.
Engineering teams that use monday.com can easily integrate with Github to accomplish core task management responsibilities like Sprint planning, logging bugs to be fixed, and documenting features that need to be built.
Here’s an example of what Sprint planning as a part of Agile might look like with our Github integration:
With or without Github, engineering teams can use this Sprint planning template to track and manage sprints throughout the product life cycle.
Business-to-consumer operations
B2C operations teams manage everything needed to get a product to market, while their management tools include anything required to get products made and delivered to customers.
This wide umbrella typically includes core operations functions like production, supply orders, inventory, shipping, and logistics.
Many businesses use Shopify, a popular platform that collects orders and plans shipments from e-commerce stores. monday.com can integrate with Shopify to collect and manage orders within our platform.
Import orders from Shopify into monday.com using our supply orders template. You can track and manage orders by product type, quantity, price, and their status from production to shipping.
Choose the right management tools for you
Management tools are the foundation of work for most core business functions, no matter the business size.
monday.com is the Work OS that supports creative teams and business teams in building custom tools that perfectly match their needs. Plus it integrates with all the other tools you’re already using, so you can maintain seamless workflows without data silos.
Check out monday.com and build a custom management tool that suits all of your business management needs.
