As founder and CEO of Adrenaline Special Events, which produces 5K races and other events, Aaron Del Mar often oversees dozens of projects at a time. To help monitor progress, he signed up his company for monday.com, an online project management platform that can track workflows and deadlines. “You can create calendars, and it sends reminders to hold people accountable for different tasks,” Del Mar says.
Eventually, though, the company abandoned the software and reverted to tracking their activities on Google Sheets, which they had developed manually. “The [monday.com] platform just became cumbersome,” Del Mar recalls. “It sent so many reminders that I was getting bombarded with updates, and some people weren’t getting on board. I got tired of fighting with them. It just wasn’t a good fit.”
In theory, meeting and event planners should take to project management software like fish to water, given the importance of tracking progress across a dizzying number of details and deadlines. But with a variety of project management tools available (e.g., Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Wrike, Monday, Microsoft Teams, etc.), it can be a struggle to choose a solution and stick with it.
While using project management software takes time—something planners never have enough of—not using these tools is a mistake, says Ethan Levitt, founder of Levitt Consulting, who helps companies implement Asana within their organizations: “If you have thoughtfully built out your environment with good templates and good connections between teams, then it’s infinitely easier and more efficient than Google Sheets,” Levitt says.
“While using project management software takes time—something planners never have enough of—not using these tools is a mistake.”
Invest in Training
Part of the challenge is that project management software requires everyone to use it consistently or the whole thing falls apart. “The learning curve and low adoption rate of some of these programs [are] enough to make them not valuable,” says Heather Mason, founder and CEO of Caspian Agency, an event planning and consulting firm. “If you cannot educate your entire team, or they’re not going to take the time to use it, then you might as well just default back to spreadsheets with timelines and milestones.”
To gain buy-in, managers need to make it clear that using the software is a priority, and create a culture of learning that supports universal adoption. Levitt recommends that companies delegate an “awareness builder,” someone with sufficient authority to get everyone on board. He also suggests empowering a few advocates to champion the platform and support their co-workers.
Read More: Building Healthy Habits: Resiliency Training for Events
“You’ll find there are one or two people who are really into it, so you need to get them into the conversation right away,” Levitt says. “They become the evangelists who spread it to the more reluctant people on their team.”
It’s also important to set aside time for training, and create how-to videos and other resources to help people learn the ropes, says Barbara Groff, project manager at Echo Consulting, a firm that helps companies design workflows for project management. “Early in the process, schedule time with individual users to do live show-and-tell for their hands-on experience and learning,” Groff says.
Customize and Repeat
Planners may avoid using project management software because it is not specifically designed for meeting planners. “A lot of these solutions are trying to be something for everybody,” Mason says. “The developers don’t understand events, so it’s a bit like going to a mechanic who’s never owned a car.”
The key is to invest time in defining your work processes and tailoring the software for your specific needs. “We’ve created templates that we can use every time, which makes it easy to replicate the same system across multiple programs,” says Morgan Connacher, CSEP, vice president of events and special projects at Brand Revolution, a production and events agency. “It takes time to go in and update the system—time that you’re not spending on other activities—so you have to be diligent in keeping everybody in the know that this is an important flow of communication.”
It’s also important to identify what’s frustrating people about the software and find ways to address it. For example, “notifications can be turned off or customized, including managing the types of email, desktop or specific board notifications,” says a spokesperson for monday.com. “The best work software solutions are those that don’t require long, drawn-out implementation processes.”
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Chuck Kapelke, a veteran communications professional, is a perpetually fascinated observer of human behavior; he holds a B.A. in anthropology from Harvard College.
This article appears in the July/August 2025 issue. You can subscribe to the magazine here.
