Chat platform for project management

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Chat platform with project management functionality is a must-have tool for company of any size today. It extremely enhances the collaboration and workflow. No matter what kind of business your company is in, it is important to have advanced tools for management and collaboration. Effective communication and tasks tracking allows meeting project deadlines and build smooth communication both with project stakeholders and within the team.

Properly selected chat platform for project management with built in or integrated task board helps to keep all collaboration within one application and increases the overall operational efficiency.

Why Virola is the best chat platform for project management?

Virola is a comprehensive collaboration software which includes not only powerful chat platform but also various project management functionality. Keeping all working processes in one tool is the most efficient and secure way of collaboration. In this case all internal information about projects will stay in one place. Virola is a self-hosted solution, thus all data will be protected on your corporate server. This is the most effective way to prevent data losses or data leakage.

Let's see what kind of features are available for project managers with Virola:

• Audio and video conferences can be started in any chat room with a couple of clicks. All members of the room can join the conference. For those who forgot about the meeting, a nudge can be sent as a reminder.
• Mobile apps allow staying available all the time. For project managers it is important to keep fingers on the pulse and have all latest information at their fingertips.
• With topic-based chats it is possible to create separate discussion groups and restrict access to them for other Virola users. This way project managers can keep an eye on different independent projects.
• Meetings scheduler allows creating meetings from messages sent in chat rooms or from scratch. They will remind chat room participants about a meeting, its date, time and duration.
• Task board displays all tasks created in the chat rooms. These tasks can be filtered and sorted to make the view more convenient.
• Files and conversations history storage is unlimited, all files are stored in chats and can be easily found with help of the global search feature.
• Screen sharing allows making presentations during meetings and remote control helps to troubleshoot issues.

How to adopt Virola for everyday project management tasks?

We started creating Virola Messenger as an all-in-one communication and project management tool for our team. We use it in our everyday activities and this helps us to constantly improve its functionality and usability. Here are our suggestions about using Virola features in project managers' workflow:

• Create tasks with a couple of clicks. Tasks can be created from scratch or from messages sent in chat. All created tasks will remain in chat history and will be also displayed on a Task board.
• Use Task board. It's a basic version of the scrum board for tasks tracking and managing. It allows tasks assigning, filtering and sorting. With Task board it is possible to monitor progress of tasks and employees, and manage tasks queue.
• Never neglect task status, type and priority. While creating a task it is possible to set its status, e.g. 'Backlog' or 'To Do', priority and specify its type. We use terms usual for Agile workflow, so they are most probably familiar to you. It is very convenient to filter tasks on Task board by priority to complete critical ones in the first place and leave tasks with lower priority for later.
• Schedule meetings. Meetings can be scheduled in chat rooms to be visible to the room participants only. All scheduled meetings are displayed in the Meetings calendar. All the chat room participants can adjust the meeting agenda to make sure that all essential topics will be covered.
• Use audio and video conferences to accelerate processes. In our experience, a couple of minutes of live talk can be more effective than an hour of messaging. Virola can be used as an alternative to Zoom to run video and audio conferences with group members. Any group member can join the meeting with a click, share screen and send files during it. It is also possible to send a nudge as a reminder to those group members who forgot to join.
• Organize your chat rooms. It is possible to pin the most important private and group chat rooms at the top and archive the ones which are not used any longer. Additionally, rooms with the recent messages are always stay close to the top. This way you will be never lost in dozens of different chat rooms and will have the most important ones at hand.
• Encourage your colleagues to use live avatars. They help to create a live presence atmosphere for remote and distributed teams by sending periodic camera shots which are displayed at the avatar placeholder. Such effect increases productivity and helps to get rid of work from home fatigue. Moreover, this way you can always see if your colleagues are available for an immediate talk.