If you were trying to define a practice that all successful businesses develop, a very safe bet is project management. In fact, companies that adopt project management practices save 28 times more money than companies that don’t. This is because project management overcomes some of the biggest project killers, like poor communication, scope creep, and missed deadlines.
What Is CROOW?
CROOW is a powerful project management platform built with the intention to take your project from initial client request through final approval. With features like task delegation and brand asset libraries, CROOW allows for collaboration within the tool so that project information and discussions can live in one place.
CROOW was born out of necessity in 2019 when the award winning digital marketing agency Sparxoo was looking for software to keep client projects organized and on time, and the available options kept coming up short. Since that time, CROOW has been honored as a Top 50 Innovator on Fire in its hometown of Tampa Bay, and a Top 10 Innovative Company of 2021 by Mirror Review.
Who Is CROOW For?
CROOW was developed with a number of audiences in mind—creative agencies, project managers, video teams, and freelance marketers can all benefit from CROOW’s creative collaboration and project management features.
What Challenges Does CROOW Help Solve?
CROOW can help solve a variety of common project management challenges.
Challenge: Workload Forecasting
When you’re in the weeds with executing on projects, it can be difficult to take a step back and see the big picture. Do you have enough client work scheduled for the future to be sustainable? Do you have enough team members to tackle the work requests coming in?
CROOW can help you answer all of these questions via the pipeline and workload reports. By assessing team members’ productivity, you’ll be able to see how much more work you can take on, and when it’s time to onboard new team members.
Challenge: Inconsistent Client Briefs
Each client operates differently, meaning you will frequently receive briefs in different formats, via different channels, sometimes with lots of details and sometimes without necessary information you need to be successful.
CROOW’s request functionality removes these inconsistencies. Request forms come in standard templates, but you can also customize the templates to ensure you get all of the information you need to start a project.
Challenge: Project Update Overload
We’ve all been in a meeting that could have been an email, and we’ve all received emails that could have been clearer. Project management inevitably requires regular progress reporting — but what if that didn’t have to mean meetings and emails flooding your schedule?
In CROOW, task statuses are managed by the individual responsible, and any project manager or stakeholder can check on progress. You can also manage your notifications so updates are sent directly to you, when you want them.
What’s On The CROOW Roadmap?
Since CROOW was launched in 2019, the platform has continued to evolve. In 2021, CROOW rolled out several new features, such as offering CROOW Teams free for all users
and developing a workload pipeline report for easier task management. And the product roadmap for the coming year includes some exciting updates, namely:
- Recurring tasks
- Additional reporting read-outs
Here’s A Breakdown Of CROOW Features
Project Organization: Workspaces & Projects
Project organization is easy in CROOW. You can create workspaces that contain projects to keep all assets organized and findable. CROOW supports both waterfall and agile project management, and permissions allow you to control who has access to what.
Project Briefing & Intake: Requests
CROOW requests help to standardize project intake. You can customize request forms, or use existing templates to quickly kick off a project.
Project Tasks: To-Dos
Task tracking and delegation is one of the most critical components to project management. With CROOW, it’s simple to create a new to-do, assign it to a team member, and associate it with as many projects or workspaces as you need. Then, your team will see their to-dos on their homepage, in either a calendar or list view.
Time Tracking
Time tracking needs to be flexible to suit different team members. Users can track time directly on to-dos, approvals, or requests, or by using time tables. Manually enter time, or use the built-in tracker.
Dashboard Views: Kanban & Gantt
CROOW’s Kanban board helps showcase workflows for agile teams visually, with callouts for things like blocked work so you can quickly and easily identify a fix. The Gantt view provides a better view on multi-phased projects, so contingencies are more easily spotted across phases and timelines.
For teams, a calendar view provides quick and easy access to a weekly overview, making it easier to stay ahead of task due dates.
Brand Library: Asset Management
End the vicious cycle of searching through emails and shared folders for the assets you need. CROOW allows you to create brand libraries where you can upload logos, fonts, and other assets so that your whole team has the right assets to work with.
Creative Review: Approvals
Comment directly on a project asset via CROOW’s approvals functionality. After an asset is uploaded, team members and clients can be invited to the approval process, and pin their comments directly to the area they reference.
Business Performance: Forecasting & Reporting
Access historical, current, and future workloads across your teams with CROOW’s forecasting and reporting tools. A team health scorecard gives a high-level overview of revenue, utilization, velocity, and sales pipeline, and role and department reporting offers a deeper look at data around your individual team members’ workloads.
Stock Image Library: CROOWStock
Stock photography feeling a little too “woman-eating-salad-smiling”? CROOW’s stock image library has rich, original photography with a focus on diversity and artistry. From Christmas cookies to coastal views, find a plethora of options within the project management tool.
CROOW Vs Monday.com
Just like monday.com’s Pro account, the CROOW Teams account offers private workspaces, multiple task views, unlimited guest sharing, customizable notifications, and advanced reporting. But unlike monday.com, CROOW also provides brand asset management, creative proofing, in-context feedback, and customizable project templates.
CROOW Integrations
CROOW is meant to be an all-in-one platform, so there aren’t any third-party integrations currently listed.
CROOW Pricing
CROOW’s standard Teams plan is completely free, and includes unlimited to-dos, users, collaboration, and much more. CROOW’s Plus plan is $19 a month, and adds unlimited file size for uploads, 50GB of upload storage, and additional reporting.
For CROOW Teams Plus, you pay $19 a month per user, and get 1TB of upload storage per 3 seats, a team management admin dashboard, and all access to customizable features.
CROOW Project Management Platform: Summary
CROOW is a project management platform built for use in any industry. It integrates every aspect of project management into one place, simplifying your team’s workflow and reducing tool onboarding time.
It’s free to sign up to use CROOW’s standard project management features and plan. Their developers directly process user feedback, meaning many of the planned updates on CROOW’s roadmap come directly from user suggestions.