So you’ve been using Teamwork on a Free Forever plan and you’ve already started to see the benefits of using a project management tool to manage your work.
You’re hitting your deadlines more reliably. You and your small team all know what to prioritize at any given moment. Everyone can see at a glance what the others are working on. You’ve even created some boards so you can visually represent your tasks as they progress on their journey.
Overall, things are flowing more smoothly. You’re saving time, developing processes that help you become more organized and efficient, and starting to build out your own best practices. Woo!
The Free Forever plan is great for teams who are just getting started, but as you start to build on your successes and get serious about taking your team’s performance to the next level, you need more: more file space, more features, and more integrations. But how do you know when it’s time to take that next step? Here are a few indicators that you’re ready to take your team to the next level — and keep your momentum going.
1. You’re ready to do more with your projects
The Free Forever plan gives you enough file space, projects, and just enough users to get started, but as you start building out your workflows, you’ll likely find its limitations, well…limiting.
It’s hard to represent all of your complex processes when you’re trying to squeeze them into just two active projects — and with only 5 users to get everything done. Upgrading your Teamwork plan means you can get more of the good stuff. Here’s what that can look like.
The Teamwork Deliver plan gives you:
100GB file space (vs 100MB on Free Forever)
300 active projects (vs 2 on Free Forever)
Up to 50 users (vs a maximum of 5 on Free Forever)
More functionality in Board View
20 Project Templates (exclusive to the Deliver plan and higher)
Limited Workload functionality (exclusive to the Deliver plan and higher)
Instant file editing (exclusive to the Deliver plan and higher)
Some great integrations (exclusive to the Deliver plan and higher):
Google Drive
Box.com
OneDrive Personal
Dropbox
Slack
Microsoft Office
We did the math — that’s 10x the users and 298 more projects than the Free Forever plan! (Plus your Bs of file space go from an M to a G!)
Need even more power? Teamwork Grow gives you all of the features and integrations above, with even more space and functionality — as well as some top-tier additional features.
The Teamwork Grow plan gives you:
250GB file space
600 projects
Up to 100 users
50 Project Templates
Project Portfolio (exclusive to the Grow plan and higher)
Full Workload functionality (exclusive to the Grow plan and higher)
Increased security (two-factor authentication and a custom domain with SSL) (exclusive to the Grow plan and higher)
All the integrations mentioned above, plus exclusive integrations:
HubSpot
OneDrive Business
SharePoint
Microsoft Connectors
Microsoft Project
So whether you’re looking to grow your numbers, optimize your processes, or better manage your team’s resources, there’s a Teamwork plan to support you.
2. You’ve established your process — now it’s time to scale
You’ve found a way of working that works for you. Now what? Project Templates can help you to iterate on your wins and save time in the process. With the Project Templates feature, you can create templates from scratch or turn your existing projects into templates so you can replicate your best successes again and again.
Not only do Project Templates help you to ensure consistency and best practices across your entire organization, but they’re also huge time-savers, letting you reclaim hours in manual admin setups while still ensuring that you never miss a step (and without sacrificing detail).
Not only do Project Templates help you to ensure consistency and best practices across your entire organization, but they’re also huge time-savers, letting you reclaim hours in manual admin setups while still ensuring that you never miss a step (and without sacrificing detail).
The Deliver plan gives you 20 Project Templates, while the Grow plan gives you 50. Learn more about Project Templates in this post and discover 6 ways that they’re a game-changer for every team here.
3. You want to connect your files…
Switching between tools and trawling through folders to find what you’re looking for is a major time-waster. And when you do find the file, how can you be sure you’re working from the most up-to-date version — and that there’s not a more recent copy hiding on someone’s hard drive?
You need a centralized place to work from that serves as your single source of truth. With the Deliver and Grow plans, you can connect your file storage solution to Teamwork and attach files directly to tasks in Teamwork effortlessly.
Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.com…integrating your favorite file storage solution with Teamwork not only helps you to centralize your important project information and stay focused, but it also helps you to save space on your Teamwork site.
Need some more advanced integrations for your workflow? Teamwork Grow offers integrations with HubSpot, SharePoint, Microsoft Project and more.
4. …and keep working on them seamlessly
With the Deliver and Grow plans, you can keep your work moving from directly within Teamwork.
Once you’ve added your files, you can use the Document Editor — another feature exclusive to the Deliver plan and up — to keep progress flowing and work with context. The Document Editor allows you to download, open, edit, and save changes to files stored within Teamwork without having to upload them again manually. It works with the applications that you already have on your computer, such as Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, LibreOffice, and Adobe Photoshop, as well as certain other image file types. Not only that, but while you’re editing, the document will be locked so that no one else can edit it at the same time and accidentally overwrite your changes — meaning that you can be sure you’re always working from the most recent master doc.
Older versions are saved along the way, meaning that you have a full history, more accountability, and the option to quickly and easily revert if you need to go back to an older version.
5. You’re ready to automate your workflows
On Free Forever, while you still have access to the Board View feature, you’re limited to just three columns per board. That’s fine if you’re only dealing with To Do, Doing, and Done, but what about when you want to chart out more complex processes?
On the Deliver and Grow plans, you can add as many columns as you need to create boards that work the way you need.
Another great benefit of having full access to the Board View feature is that it gives you the ability to automate your workflow with Triggers. You can add triggers to automate the admin (like adding tags, assigning or reassigning owners, and more), making your process not only more time-efficient but also more consistent and organized.
And if you want to create an even more customized and automated experience, you can dig into our API and set up webhooks that help you to be more efficient, productive, and data-driven. If that sounds like your kinda thing, you can learn more about using webhooks here.
6. You want people to cut you some Slack
Naturally, we’re big fans of our 100% free team chat platform, Teamwork Chat. (Have you seen the improvements we’ve been making lately? 😍) But hey, we understand: if you use Slack, you want options, too.
When you upgrade to a Teamwork Deliver or Grow plan, you can use our Slack integration to keep your conversations productive and manage work directly from your team chat software. Turn messages in Slack into tasks in Teamwork, get real-time notifications on your progress, add comments, and more, all from one place.
7. It’s time to get serious about managing your resources
Whether you’re adding more projects, more team members, or both, one thing is critical: you’ll need to manage your resources properly if you want to succeed. Poor resource management leads to burnt out team members, frustrated stakeholders, and projects going over deadline and over budget.
That’s where the Workload feature in Teamwork comes in. Workload lets you see where and how your team’s time is allocated, gives you an overview of each person’s available capacity, and enables you to reassign tasks to quickly balance work across your team.
Not only does this help to keep your team working at a sustainable pace throughout, but it also means that when the unexpected happens — team members become unavailable, priorities shift, life throws a curveball at you — you can jump in to make quicker decisions without throwing your project into disarray. (And we all know that delays in one project are likely to cause knock-on effects in other projects, too.)
We wanted to share the love with this great feature, so while the full functionality is only available on Grow and Scale plans, users on a Deliver plan will have access to Limited Workload.
Learn more about how Workload can help you to manage your team’s work more effectively.
8. You need to oversee multiple projects at a glance
Project visibility probably wasn’t a problem when you only had 2 active projects, but as you ramp up your productivity (and start adding those 598 new projects), you’re going to need a way to quickly manage, organize and report on them all. With Portfolio, you can get immediate insights and take action on multiple projects from one central place.
Portfolio allows you to see where everything stands, drill down for more information, spot potential blockers before they happen, and get real-time updates that you can report back to stakeholders, clients, or leadership.
And just like with Board View, you can also add triggers to automate your processes and improve your efficiency.
Portfolio is essential for anyone who needs to manage a large volume of projects, such as project managers, client-facing teams, and professional services businesses. Portfolio is exclusive to our Grow plan and higher. Learn more about Portfolio and how it can help your team in this post.
Ready to level up?
If you’re ready to unlock the features you need to take your team’s performance to the next level, you can upgrade your plan at any time from the subscription area of your site. Want to learn more about which plan is right for your team? Looking for more information about best practices and use cases? Get in touch with us — we’d love to chat.