Key takeaways:
- Why should you avoid traditional databases for project management? They are difficult to use, prone to human error, and can silo project information, complicating collaboration among team members.
- What are the benefits of project management tools like Wrike? They provide an intuitive interface, automate task tracking, and make project history easily accessible, enhancing project visibility.
- How do project management tools support the entire team? They translate raw data into readable formats, making project information accessible while maintaining confidentiality with tiered access levels.
- What features does Wrike offer over traditional databases? Seamless integrations, real-time updates, customizable reports, and risk management alerts streamline project oversight for increased efficiency.
- How can Wrike optimize your project management experience? Wrike’s user-friendly platform centralizes project data, eliminates silos, and offers tools tailored for team collaboration and productivity.
A project management database centralizes the key metrics of your project, like your task statuses, the percentage of budget and resources you’re utilizing, and how your tasks are distributed across your team. When you have all this information in one place, it’s easier to make planning decisions, predict outcomes, and track progress on your project.
When you imagine a project management database, you might think of Microsoft Access or a database built on spreadsheet software like Excel. But let’s be honest — these tools have quite a steep learning curve. Even more challenging, you could spend days collecting your project information in a traditional database, but unless you also have the skills and time to interpret and maintain that data, you won’t achieve your goals of time-saving, visibility, or accuracy in your project planning.
In this post, I’ll explain why I recommend project managers explore new options to centralize and analyze their project data.
Using work management tools like Wrike, you can do everything you would do in a traditional database. But when you ditch the spreadsheets and switch to our user-friendly platform, your central source of truth is intuitive, accessible, automated, and seamlessly integrated with the tools you use to tackle your project tasks.
Find out more here:
3 reasons to avoid traditional project management databases
Picture the scene: your team is scaling up their workload, and you’re asked to set up a project management database to keep you organized and track the results.
Right from the start, I see three good reasons to push beyond an old-fashioned database solution.
1. Traditional databases are tough to use
Designing a fully functional database is specialist work. There’s no guarantee that you’ll have these skills within your team. And even for the experts, it takes a lot of time to get a new database up and running.
What’s more, databases aren’t just tricky to wrangle during the initial building and launch; they have to be manually maintained if you want to keep them relevant.
This presents another challenge, as you’ll have to build a workflow (and train someone) to update the records and fix the database if it breaks. After all, we’ve all heard of companies where the person responsible for the database moves on, and the team effectively loses access to the information because no one else can figure out how they were keeping the database running.
Even if you manage to sidestep these issues, you might find your database gets unwieldy as you add more information to it in new sheets or tables.
In a nutshell, databases are often confusing to build in the first place, and then they can be intimidating to work with. No amount of color-coding will make them genuinely visually appealing, and the harder they are to work with, the smaller the section of the team they serve.
2. Traditional databases are vulnerable to human error
Putting new information into a database is a laborious, repetitive process. But it’s also delicate. There are countless opportunities to introduce errors — whether that’s losing a subtask in the shuffle, switching due dates, getting a decimal point in the wrong place, or accidentally deleting an essential formula.
If your company relies on a traditional database for project management, you’ll also need a rigorous backup system to protect and store your records.
But even then, relying too much on a database can compound any mistakes you make.
Put simply, not all the information you use to inform your management decisions can be easily shown in a database cell. A database might show your project progress, but it doesn’t give you a way to track client discussions, task dependencies, shifting project priorities, or any of the other qualitative insights that help you move complex projects forward. You’re likely to overlook feedback, miss opportunities to adjust your approach, and struggle to deliver a smooth project experience.
3. Traditional databases silo your project information
In theory, a database should help you manage your projects more effectively, but without the right tools, you’ll always come up against roadblocks that obstruct your team collaboration:
- Databases can build barriers. If they’re vulnerable to errors and difficult to use, project managers won’t want to share them, and team members will be reluctant to use them.
- Databases often suck your project time. From extracting data from one platform, cleaning it, and inserting it into the database, to creating reports for people who don’t have direct access, you can easily spend more time managing the database than putting your insights into action.
- Databases are usually cut off from your day-to-day project work. When you keep your records in a different platform than the one where you complete your tasks, you’ll always be working around a gap in your process. This means you’re never 100% sure whether what you’re looking at is the most up-to-date version of the data.
I’m not here to tell you to uninstall dedicated database software and start from scratch. Databases have their place, especially in a team of pros that speak that language and have the skills to put these tools to work as a central touchpoint.
But for the day-to-day work of project management, where you’re managing a team with diverse skillsets and experience levels and where your goals are alignment, transparency, and team collaboration, databases can create more problems than they solve.
4 reasons to upgrade from databases to the project management platform
It’s time to change your perception of what a project management database can be.
A database is a central hub where you can track and view all your project metrics on one screen. But there’s no reason why that data has to be confined to tables and spreadsheets.
If your goal is to track key metrics and risks to your project, create accountability, and improve your project planning, it’s more effective to look beyond traditional database software and find a modern work management tool that covers all the same bases — and more.
1. Project management tools are more intuitive than databases
I’ve already established that databases usually require specialist skills and experience — and sometimes even diplomas — to use.
On the other hand, project management software is designed to be intuitive.
Solutions like our platform, Wrike, will feel instantly familiar if you’ve ever used a spreadsheet. However, in comparison to rows upon rows of cells and custom fields, the interface is clean, uncluttered, and easy for anyone to interpret.
Plus, it’s often easier to customize the data you see in a project management tool, which makes it far more efficient to find the information you need.
Whereas a database usually offers a table of endless data, project management software can display that data in a range of user-friendly visuals, like:
- A burndown chart to show percentage completion
- A Gantt chart to track project schedules
- A pie chart to show the number of tasks at a certain status
- A bar chart to show your team’s capacity
This helps you to access your project insights at a glance, in one platform, rather than parsing dozens of tables to compare values over time.
2. Project management tools automate your overview
Project management tools, including Wrike, work by tracking the way your tasks move through your project workflows and filtering that data to show you the KPIs you want to focus on.
When you adjust these filters, you can tailor your central project hub to your needs. You can include the most important aspects of your tracking in a top-level project overview, and minimize the data you don’t always need to see.
Project management automations also give you a level of certainty you mightn’t see with an old-fashioned database. When you track all your tasks in one place, your overview updates in real time, without the need to step outside of one tool to manually update another. You base your project management decisions on the very latest data, and you close the cracks that your tasks could fall through.
Plus, instead of training your team to understand the parameters of a traditional database, you can tailor your workspace and your automations to their everyday tasks. This removes countless points of friction from your process, encouraging wider adoption and boosting productivity across your projects.
3. Project management tools show your project’s history
A database is a snapshot of a project at a certain point in time. Then, when you update your tables, you’ll often lose your overview of where your project was. Even if you get around this by saving previous versions of your database or adding fresh tables for each new quarter of work, comparing versions is a time-consuming, headache-inducing way to get a view of your task’s history.
In comparison, project management tools tend to treat project tasks as cards in a deck. Every task card saves a record of its history — from the person who created it, to the team it was assigned to, to the milestones it was broken down into, to the comments on the first drafts, to the person who gave it the stamp of approval. 
4. Project management tools serve the whole team
If a database is a tool for a project manager, a project management system is there to support the entire project team.
First, a project management system translates the raw project tracking data into a form that’s easier for everyone to read and interpret.
Then, you can tailor your workspace to your specific projects and your team’s preferences, so your team members can see how their tasks fit into the bigger picture. 
By creating profiles for your team members and adjusting the permissions for your project space, you can limit the number of people with the ability to change the workspace settings or view the most sensitive project information. They have instant access to the data they need to see, while your private management data stays confidential throughout your project.
For the rest of this post, I’ll show you what’s possible with the project tracking and reporting features included with Wrike.
What to expect from Wrike’s centralized project management system
Wrike is the only tool you need to ditch your project management databases for good.
With our work management tools, you can track your project data smoothly, efficiently, and transparently, and you’ll find it far easier to draw out the insights you need to keep your team on track.
In one central, interactive platform, Wrike tracks all the statistics you would in a database, in granular detail, and your records update automatically whenever a task in your project changes status. You can track every aspect of your projects from ideation to approval. And, instead of siloing the project data with the project manager, Wrike puts this informative overview in front of your team members, so they can use the tools in their daily task management too.
Take a look at some of the features you can expect from our market-leading collaborative work tools:
- Robust integrations with the apps your team relies on, so you can take your project data straight from your work to your work management system
- Powerful workflow automations to update your project progress in real time and eliminate repetitive tasks
- Custom reports, filtered from your Wrike data on project scheduling, team capacity, resource management, and project progress, so you can drill down into the aspects that interest you and keep on top of the challenges to your project
- Risk management alerts, so you can step in to support your team before your work is derailed
- Personalized overviews in user-friendly dashboards, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, task lists, and more, to translate your project data into the insights and priorities your stakeholders need to see
- Work Intelligence AI to suggest more ways to streamline your project management setup, based on the ways you work best
- Wrike’s project management mobile app, so you can access your latest project management data and team communications on the go
- A dedicated integration platform called Datahub, designed to seamlessly connect your data with Wrike tasks, projects, and spaces
With Wrike, there are no more silos and no more database wizardry. Just a clear, real-time view of your projects from every angle, wherever and whenever you need it.
