WorkZone is a project management software solution ideal for marketing, IT, and operations teams of more than ten users. With fifteen years of real-world improvements, WorkZone has paid particular attention to the balancing of functionality and usability. This is a cloud-based solution accessed through the web that facilitates document management, project collaboration, customizable reporting, resource tracking, task management, and time tracking. Auto-reporting through email keeps everyone updated on the status of a project. Depending on your role, you get the information you need. Senior managers receive cross-project summaries for a company-wide view of projects and their resources. Tactical managers can quickly see who should be doing what on each project. Individual project contributors receive personalized to-do lists that keep them up-to-date on their work. Workzone even links dependent tasks, such that the end-date of one results in the next task’s start date, and notifies the next user down when dependent task is done.

Here’s how Workzone stacks up along six critical dimensions:

• Usability. Most users find the system quite easy to use, and appreciate how easy it is to create new projects.
• Maintainability. As a cloud-based service, users never need to worry about maintenance.
• Performance. Users have noted that performance is reliable with no problems reported.
• Integration Ease. I couldn’t find any information about integrations with Workzone, which is a bit of a red flag.
• Functionality. Workzone’s best functionality comes through when a project includes tasks that need to happen in a given sequence.
• Support. Users have had only good things to say about Workzone support, which is easy to reach and timely in solving issues.

Pros

Here’s what users like most about Workzone:

• The task dependency feature that links tasks is especially great for projects that happen in a sequence of steps. Creative teams seem to especially like how it fits their process and workflow.
• For companies where people were using a combination of tools like spreadsheets and email to keep track of projects, adopting something like Workzone gives huge gains in productivity, efficiency, and sanity.

Cons

Here’s what users like least about Workzone:

• Workzone offers a demo of the system, but not a free trial, so you can’t really take it for a full test-drive before buying in.
• While the included reporting capabilities are good, getting customized reports out of the system is difficult, but the company says they’re working on it.
• Users don’t like the pricing plan, which includes an up-front licensing fee, then a monthly fee based on number users that requires a year-long contract that can’t be canceled.
• Tasks fall off to-do lists after 30 days, which is annoying. You have to manually add days to tasks to keep them on the list.

Workzone offers a solid entry in the project management software market, and seems to work especially well for creative teams. The only substantial complaint is that without a free trial, you can’t fully try before you buy.