We currently use several cloud-based apps to manage our business such as :

Trello – for internal project management
Toggl – for managing clients’ time (for billing)
Float – for planning work for the team
Front – for managing support
Slack – for internal communications (pulls in support tickets from Front)
Freeagent – for accounting
Capsule – for CRM
Email – still gets used despite the others above usually being more appropriate places to communicate
*Dropbox – for storage
*Google Drive – for sharing documents

The whole thing has become bloated and clumsy. Staff are forgetting to hand-over, make notes etc and we think it is mainly because they don’t always know where to put stuff. Or indeed they *do* say something somewhere but then others forget to look, look in the wrong place, look in the right place but stuff was put in the wrong place or simply miss it.

*We are currently considering moving everything into Drive as they are both the same thing (but we had Dropbox before Drive existed and it will be a big job to transfer the entire contents of 12 years of work onto Drive).

So – can anyone suggest any alternatives that can reduce the amount of apps (ie, apps that do more of what we need under one roof, or apps from the same provider that integrate better).

Many thanks

The whole thing has become bloated and clumsy. Staff are forgetting to hand-over, make notes etc and we think it is mainly because they don’t always know where to put stuff. Or indeed they *do* say something somewhere but then others forget to look, look in the wrong place, look in the right place but stuff was put in the wrong place or simply miss it.[/I]

Too many options with a proper policy?

tbh We’ve started using Slack at work, winds me up ‘cos without actually looking at every channel you’ve no idea what the hell is going on. And yet another ‘channel’.

office365 with project, ODFB and sharepoint?

Too many options with a proper policy?

Definitely part of the problem. We are a small business and when we see a problem manifesting we find an app to ‘solve’ it, however, we have grown (8 in the team + freelancers) and now we have so many solutions that they have become part of the problem.

The thing is, the team ‘should’ know as we regularly brief them on the proper processes but it is just too confusing for anyone to remember properly.

If your serious, give Nick at https://www.synergist.co.uk/ a bell. He solves problems like yours for a living. And no I don’t work there, I ride with him.

JIRA for both internal comms and client tickets. Supported by slack should be sufficient. Oh and the “get off arse and talk” methodology is old hat, but effective

I expect a lot of systems on the market day they can do most of what you need but whether they do many of them well is another thing.

As suggested above, getting a consultant in to understand the issues and purpose solutions would be money well spent if they are any good at what they do. There may be some form of training & governance approach or an integration platform that would better deliver what you want.