Projects are the buildings blocks for getting things done. When they’re small, they can be easily completed without much attention but when they get big, involving many people and large budgets, the complexity and risk of failure increases, especially when time and money is limited.

This past semester, graduate students in my “Managing People and Projects” course at George Washington University developed skills and used tools to manage these more challenging situations in a wide variety of museum-related projects, such as exhibitions, events, symposia, publications, school programs, and building construction. As a part of the course, students reviewed some of the latest application software (apps) for project management, including Shortcuts, Evernote, TeamGantt, OmniFocus, Trello, Asana, and Slack.

Unlike reviews prepared by CNET or published in a computer magazine, these reviews are written by emerging museum professionals for emerging museum professionals.  I might disagree with some of their conclusions, but often the difference was about cost or applicability at the start of one’s career.  If you’ve been thinking about increasing your productivity using apps, check out “A Beginner’s Guide to Productivity Apps for Emerging Museum Professionals.”

And if you want my recommendations on apps, I work in the Apple ecosystem and use Omnifocus (project management), Fantastical (calendar), Evernote (managing documents), Default Folder X (quick access to files), Shortcuts (to create recurring task lists), TextExpander (to prepare recurring text), PDF Expert (managing pdf documents), and Scrivener (writing).  Plus I regularly use a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 to quickly transform paper documents into digital versions, mostly managed in Evernote.