Feature
The project management market is already dominated by vendors including Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Confluence, Wrike and Notion, among others. So does the market really need another contender?
Slack thinks so. The company recently started rolling out its Slack Lists feature to teams globally. The lightweight project management tool allows teams to manage projects, inbound requests, and top priorities within the Slack platform.
Slack Lists Rollout
First introduced at Salesforce’s Dreamforce event in 2023, Slack Lists is clearly not a fully-fledged project management tool. But the addition will likely make the platform even more attractive for the organizations and small teams in its customer base.
Lists also integrates with Workflow Builder, which leverages automation to integrate with the 2600 tools in the Slack App Directory.
“Year after year, business leaders are spending money on tools that promise to help them reach their goals, but those tools often do not deliver on that promise. In fact, even with all the solutions available today, only 34% of projects are completed on time and within budget,” the Slack team wrote in blog post. The blog also lists several problems that the company hopes to solve with Lists, including:
- Task-related conversations often occur outside of the project management tool.
- Various teams within the company use different apps, leading to silos and licensing challenges.
- Managing and sharing updates across multiple tools, platforms and systems results in hours of duplicative work.
The blog also points out that while the current project management tools get the job done for managers, the people performing the work don't effectively use them.
Lists, the company adds, instead of buying a new project management tool that keeps information, conversations, and teams separate and siloed, users can consolidate everything and everyone you need to manage work with Slack Lists.
Related Article: Why Salesforce Really Bought Slack
The Pros and Cons of Lightweight Project Management Tools
Despite the market conditions, there's room for another tool in the market, said Elizabeth Harrin, author of "Managing Multiple Projects" and a project management consultant.
“We already have hundreds if not more project management tools on the market and while they all do very similar things, they all have unique use cases and appeal to different market segments,” she said.
“A lot of tools seem to have been started by companies who couldn't find products that worked for them, so they built their own.”
She said Slack Lists reminds her of the basic Planner in Microsoft Teams. Users can view by grid or board, allocate people to tasks and keep all your messages in the same place.
“I think it's going to serve a purpose for some teams, but it's not going to revolutionize the project management tool marketplace,” she added.
For organizations that are already heavily reliant on Slack for daily work and team communication, Harrin believes Lists brings much-needed structure to those channels. "I think dedicated Slack users will find it easier to manage simple projects within the tool they already use, and it will be effective for that purpose," she said.
The challenge many project teams have is that stakeholders use different tools, so they often end up exporting data, duplicating information or taking screenshots because not everyone uses the same product.
Given Slack's maturity and high rates of adoption, Harrin hopes internal and external stakeholders will have access to Lists to support collaboration. A different, dedicated tool would be needed when more robust requirements are in order, whereas simple projects work well with basic Kanban boards and lists.
Once the project gets more involved, for example requiring you track budgets, timesheets, risks, scope changes, other meeting actions, benefits and KPIs or view task dependencies on a Gantt chart, the features of Slack Lists might act as a constraint, she concluded.
Related Article: Google Workspace Is Coming for Slack and Microsoft Teams
Tackling Long-Standing Project Management Challenges
“The integration of communication and task management into a single platform holds promising potential for solving longstanding project management challenges,” consultant Adam DeGraide told Reworked.
By integrating project management processes within Slack, where teams already spend most of their time, organizations can significantly reduce task overlap and improve overall efficiency. He noted the fragmentation caused when teams use multiple, different apps and the unnecessary licensing costs and silos they create.
Slack Teams can help teams avoid these problems by centralizing tasks, conversations and updates, he said. Everyone accesses the same platform for varied needs, leading to better cohesion and fewer licensing headaches.
Seamless project management is essential to an organization's success, said eLearning Industry founder Christopher Pappas.
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Pappas held his own company up as an example. It was struggling with fragmented communication and siloed information, the problems Slack Lists aims to solve.
His company's initial solution involved multiple apps, which lead to duplicated efforts and missed deadlines. “When Slack introduced Lists, it was a game-changer for us,” Pappas said. "By integrating project management into our existing workflow, we significantly reduced the time spent juggling different tools and improved collaboration across our dispersed team.”
However, while Slack Lists can streamline processes and enhance productivity, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution, he cautioned. It works best for teams already heavily invested in Slack. For those not yet on Slack, adopting Lists might not resolve underlying communication challenges.
“The real answer lies in evaluating your team’s specific needs and choosing tools that integrate smoothly with existing workflows," Pappas said. “The key is to prioritize tools that foster cohesion and minimize redundancy, whether it’s Slack Lists or another integrated solution.”