We made a project tracker to save you from email hell

By Derin Dutz, Ryan Anderson

We all know there are dozens of feature-packed project management solutions out there. But for all their power and complexity, these tools often neglect the things that really make a project run: collaboration, conversation, and discoverability. You can patch those holes with meetings and emails, but you’ll soon realize your tidy project has become scattered across inboxes, chat windows, and meeting rooms. So we built something to help: a new Live App called Project Tracker.

 



Project Tracker is a flexible app you can insert right into a Quip document with the @ key. It gives your team a way to run projects in the same place work and conversations happen. It’s a single source of truth that leads to more transparency, faster turnarounds, and better outcomes — all with fewer meetings and way less email.

It looks simple, but looks can be deceiving. Each row is a place for you to identify an aspect of any project, assign ownership (to one person, or several), communicate its status and deadline, and add any number of related Quip documents or spreadsheets. Each of these fields is fully customizable, and you can add more columns and rows as you please.

You can add comments to any of these items, just like you would anywhere else in Quip. Have a question about a due date? Want to give someone a nudge on the status of their deliverable? Just add a comment and use an @mention to grab someone's attention right there in Quip — instead of sending an email or message in a separate app.

Because the Project Tracker lives right inside a Quip doc, you can make that document your project headquarters. Add other Live Apps like Countdown, and make use of the document conversation. Discussions, updates, and questions that would normally be communicated via email — which you then have to search for and sift through — stay right there in the document. And instead of having a meeting to review progress and status, it's clear and transparent for anyone to see, at any time.

Project Tracker is great for team efforts, as well as personal projects. But it also functions as a high-level overview for leadership and executives. You can use it to communicate momentum and status on an entire organization's worth of initiatives, giving stakeholders insight at a glance.

You can start using Project Tracker right away with our Project Management template. To add a Project Tracker to any of your existing documents, just hit the @ key and start typing “Project Tracker.”

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