Project management software for small teams, minus the Gantt chart

Most project tools were built for a company with a person whose whole job is keeping the plan current. You don’t have that person. You have eight people who also do the work, and a plan that survives until the client’s first phone call.

So a Klusko project is a set of stages you name yourself (Survey, Planning, Technical design, On site) and the tasks that sit in them. Each task has one person on it, a due date and a priority. That’s enough structure for a loft conversion or a shop refit, and little enough that people actually keep it up to date, which, as far as we can tell, is the only test that matters in a small office where everyone is also answering the phone.

Board is where most people start: a column per stage, cards dragged along as the work moves. List groups the same tasks by stage, which is easier to read on a Monday with a coffee. Table puts every task in a row with its custom fields, so an architect can add a column for drawing revision and sort by it. Calendar lays the due dates across the month.

Then there’s Workload, the one we’d miss most. It shows a bar per person for what’s assigned to them, next to the team average. If Kwame has fourteen open tasks and everyone else has six, you’ll see it before he tells you (or before he doesn’t). Table and Workload come with the Team plan; the pricing page has what’s in each, and planning in Klusko shows every view.

We left it out, and there’s no timeline view or task dependencies either. Gantt charts are good at one thing: showing that task C can’t start until A and B are done, across months, with dozens of people. A small team probably doesn’t have that problem. You have maybe 30 tasks on a project and everyone can see the board.

What happens in practice is that someone spends a Friday afternoon drawing the chart, the client moves the start date, and nobody redraws it. In the business we ran before Klusko, ours was fiction within a fortnight.

If your work really does hang on long chains (a 200-task build programme with subcontractors in strict sequence), Klusko is the wrong tool and we’d rather say so now. We wrote more about choosing in our guide to project management software for small businesses.

Projects stall in the gap between where the plan lives and where people talk about it. In Klusko each project can have its own channel in the same app, and when someone mentions a task in a message it becomes a live link to that task. Anyone reading the thread can click through to the due date and the latest comment without asking.

Say the structural engineer emails Kwame a revised calc. He attaches the PDF to the task and posts in #wellington-st that it’s there. The file has one home and the conversation points at it. The chat page covers channels and threads in more detail.