Item: Workamajig
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Workamajig (WMJ) is being used across our entire company, though each department utilizes it for slightly different purposes. On the whole, we use it all for time tracking, project management, budgets and financial reports, task management, group assignments, and scheduling. It helps multiple departments be able to access information from one source, though we also have multiple other tools that we utilize and the data is not always also cleanly shared into Workamajig but some of this may be less issue on WMJ and rather internal process issues.

Pros and Cons

The Platinum version has a particularly robust time tracking system, down to a 'timer' function that can be critical for an agency like mine where you want to be accountable for billing a client arruately
The ability to make projects available only to those who are permitted to assign their time to it has apparently been very helpful during our revenue reconciliation meetings where time incurred is reviewed against scope
The mobile app, while I still feel needs some work, is pretty handy for a quick calendar check if I'm in a client meeting and cannot utilize my browser to get information

The user-throttling is one of my biggest issues. I feel there needs to be a third level of permissions allowed, the first being "on project, can edit and assign", the second being "not on project, cannot see or interact with project" and the third being a "read-only" type of permission where someone should at least be able to SEE all projects currently open, even if not assign their time to it
The integration with Microsoft 365 seems problematic at best, and our IT company hasn't come up with any resolutions. Ever since switching from the Gmail/Google Suite platform to 365, many of us are getting 2-5 notifications per meeting and our Outlook calendars are not syncing correctly
For the web app, I'd really like to see a condensed "hamburger" type menu that simply lists items, rather than the more graphic user interface that can make it diffiicult to find what I want. For example- if I sign in I'd like to see a top level dropdown that simply says "Calendar" and then prompts me if further breakouts are need (All vs Creatives, etc). I feel it's not a very intuitive mobile experience right now, taking its layouts and architecture pretty directly from the web version

Return on Investment

Workamajig is the primary source for creating my scopes of work, which I do alongside the project management team, letting us hit tight turnarounds on work requests
That said, it can also be incredibly cumbersome to go chasing up being added to jobs, particularly as I cannot see at a high level view if the job has even been created yet or if it's a case of me simply not being added to the team
The budgeting information and reports is phenomenal, being able to quickly adjust the sort of column data you want to see to look at budgeted work vs incurred on a task-by-task basis gives a really good view of where projects stand

Alternatives Considered

JIRA Software and Slack

Personally WMJ is my least favorite project management program of those I've used in jobs past, but it was not my decision to use it and I believe our company has been utilizing it for many, many years. To be fair and put this in perspective, my interactions with WMJ probably only are utilizing about 25% of it's full features, and those are primarily for job assignment, time tracking, and setting scope of work. I do not have extensive experience with any of the rest of its many features as say, a project manager would. However for my uses, I often find the system cumbersome and while Platinum is a HUGE improvement on the GUI, there's still a lot of features I'd like to see, down to addressing various types of permissions to help facilitate the people who are doing the work that is being tracked in the system.

I think it's heavily geared toward the project management side of things which is great, but it can be cumbersome for the channels creating the work.

Other Software Used

Screaming Frog SEO Spider, VideoScribe, Adobe Photoshop

Likelihood to Recommend

I think this holds true to almost any CRM, but if you want to truly utilize it you sort of need to go all in. This can become tough with WMJ because it doesn't offer some critical options that many other CRMs do, like the ability to create and send emails, e-newsletters, to throttle and invite outside clients to look at projects, etc. As such we're pairing Workamajig with Hubspot (and slowly phasing out Mailchimp) and trying to keep the data clean and flowing between them all is pretty tough. I'm also not aware of any API bridge from Wordpress to Workamajig so while I can program and feed my leads from my site into the other spaces, Workamajig remains a manual entry for any insertions you want, even if simply as a CSV import.

But - if you're not worried about that and simply want to manage projects, budget time, and scope things, it's a robust system allowing you to do so.

Great project management software tool if you intend to just use it as that

Overall Satisfaction with Workamajig