Avaza

Avaza is mostly utilized by our company for PM and tasks. By removing mundane, time-consuming tasks, it frees up a significant amount of our time each week. Our actions are closely tracked and evaluated by Avaza. The process aids in locating bottlenecks and other trouble spots. Avaza is vital to the smooth functioning of our Admin, BD, and TS departments.

Although the quoting mechanism is solid, it lacks the adaptability necessary for our purposes. We'd love it if large projects could be broken up into stages. It would be nice if screenshots of attached images could be shown in the chat window.

I have used a raft of alternative task & project management SaaS (software as a service) solutions. Additionally, I have trialled around 15-20 different task & project management SaaS solutions. With out a doubt, Avaza is the best solution I have ever used; it is intuitive, easy-to-use, very responsive in speed, has a great smartPhone app to compliment the web-based system, it integrates with Xero (for accounts), and has a raft of sophisticated features and views (Kanban-styled boards, Gantt Charts, task lists, priority views, status views, etc, etc etc!). The features we don't as yet use include Estimate and Invoicing creation, but we may well move to using these too.

A great SaaS solution and I think if I was to want to additional features added, then one would be chat integration (currently comments are available, but no chat). And the 2nd would be an enhanced file management facility, whereby you could upload to a File Repository/Folder, tag the image, assign it to a project, rename the virtual file name, and move it to another folder for housekeeping.

I love that it combines resources management and project management into one tool. Perfect for small design studios and agencies that need to know if their employees have the bandwidth to take on a new project (it also takes into account holiday/vacation time!). I use Avaza to create project estimates for clients, knowing that I can easily import from a spreadsheet and adjust timeline/dependencies once the project is confirmed. All on the free plan, too!

The UI could be a bit better-designed. There are some things, like the top toolbar design and the navigation menu for projects, that aren't really the best user experience. But then again, I'm a designer. My only complaint is that it's hard to bulk-edit tasks and it's not possible to do so with CSV import; you can't even select multiple tasks to delete, which can be an administrative time suck if you have a lot of tasks to edit/delete from a project.

Avaza has all the core functionality that lets any business successfully manage and deliver client projects. It is not just for development projects. It can be used in a wide array of industries because of this basic general core of features.

For starters, Avaza manages contacts and distinguishes them between clients (external contacts) and team members. It uses this to connect projects to its clients and the resources that will be working on these projects. The roles for the contacts are manage in the contacts section as well, allowing the admin to connect just the right resources and the features they need.

Adding projects is fairly simple, as well. Create a new project and allocate the client to it. That is it. Then add the necessary tasks for the project, allocating team members from the contact list. You can even group into sections that can represent milestones, features, epics, or any description that fits your project or organizational business needs. Project views can also be customized. You can view projects in a Kanban styled board, as a Gantt chart or even as a list.

Team members track time against the tasks until completion and the process is quite simple and straightforward. Avaza also provides team scheduling and provides forecasting capabilities across one or more projects. You can also manage timesheets, expenses and recurring expenses for all the projects in Avaza.

Avaza offers the capabilities of providing your clients with quotes or estimates for projects, as well as managing invoicing, recurring invoices, credit notes and payments. And you can track all the work via an extensive library of reports.

Avaza is not a feature rich product for large enterprises or large projects with large teams, as these must track defects, reworks, testing and a host of other tasks that often have dependencies upon others. This is something Avaza does not manage and trying to track this level of effort is not something that can be done. So, this is definitely for smaller organizations or teams with basic projects.