Workamajig: Worth the price, or project management software of yesteryear? A honest review.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Workamajig was used for four years in my organization before they recently moved to a different project management system. Workamajig was utilized by the entire marketing department, which consisted of interactive marketing, direct mail, trade shows, art department, and copy writing. The purpose of using Workamajig was to allow for our team to submit project requests, build project timelines out of those requests, assign tasks to different department members, and report on project results.
Pros
- Project Request submission. This is a feature that is difficult to find in other Project Management tools, and we have looked at several dozen while researching the latest products on the market. Project Requests allow a project manager to fill out what type of project is needed, then the Marketing Lead would receive an email with the Request data, and easily turn this request into a full-fledged Project.
- The customization is very good. Workamajig staff will work with your organization to determine exactly what features your team needs, and then customize the project experience catered to your organization. You can choose which data to display, what fields to fill in, how to organize each project, and so forth.
Cons
- It is not an intuitive system. It is Flash-based, so you won't be able to access and run it fully on some mobile devices. There is no drag and drop functionality, and some features are hidden deep behind several clicks. The learning curve is steep.
- The reporting feature leaves much to be desired. The data that the out-of-the-box reports contain is very limited, and does not offer solid cumulative metrics across multiple projects. Of course there are third-party add-ons that improve the reporting experience, but those incur an additional cost, and Workamajig is already on the high end of price points. Customizable reports are an option, but the system is convoluted, difficult to navigate, and very difficult to update.
- Managing project timelines is a harrowing experience. Workamajig offers many ways to view your timeline and upcoming task schedule, such as Gantt charts, but the process of updating the timelines when your scope inevitably changes is very tedious. Again, this is a Flash program, and it runs rather slow, and doesn't always do what you want. I've even resorted to using a separate scheduling application (SmartSheet) to avoid managing the timeline in Workamajig.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's tough to recommend after demoing several other new products on the market, such as WorkFront. However, as stated above, Workamajig is one of the only programs that comes pre-built with a Project Request feature that can be submitted by a PM, and the details emailed to potential Marketing Leads who can turn these requests into full-fledged projects, with attached assets, timelines, due dates, categorizations, assigned departments and task workers, etc. This tool would be good to use for a department that manages many projects at once across different programs, but it's difficult to recommend after having experienced poor reporting and Flash-restrictive scenarios.
