Key takeaways:
- What makes project management software effective for education projects? Education projects involve complex scheduling, strict budgets, and diverse stakeholders. The right software provides customizable workflows, clear communication tools, and automated tracking to manage these challenges efficiently and keep projects on schedule.
- Why are generic or education-only tools often insufficient? Generic tools lack the flexbility to adapt to academic schedules and multi-stakeholder environments, while education-only tools often focus narrowly on teaching needs. A comprehensive project management platform bridges this gap, offering enterprise-level features tailored to large-scale education initiatives.
- How can project management software improve collaboration and accountability in education? By centralizing tasks, resources, and communications in one platform, education teams can reduce dealys, prevent inforation silos, and ensure accountability across departments, external partners, and funding bodies — improving project outcomes and transparency.
Education projects can be massive in scope and scale. You might be managing a technology rollout across a university, updating a curriculum for a whole school district, or managing a national marketing campaign. These projects all come with major challenges, like coordinating across departments, communicating with stakeholders with competing interests, and dealing with the time constraints of the school year.
The problem is that a lot of the project management software on the market hasn’t been built with the technicalities of education projects in mind.
On the one hand, generic tools tend to assume their users work in tech or as part of an agency, so they’re difficult to tailor to, for example, the complex scheduling needs of a college campus.
On the other, most of the tools sold as management software for educators focus on curriculum management and lesson plans. These tools help faculty members organize their teaching, but they’re not much use to the managers of complex projects who need to monitor their progress and prove their results.
In this post, I’ll walk you through a better option: Wrike, an intuitive, all-in-one project management platform you can customize for any type of education project.
4 key challenges in education project management
Whether you work in a college, for a school district, or as part of a non-profit with a teaching program, the challenges in education projects can be very different from those in other large organizations. Recognizing the ways these challenges shape your project management needs will put you in the best position to find software that can benefit your team.
1. Managing the needs of multiple stakeholders
Education projects involve a huge range of stakeholders. All these groups have different areas of expertise, different levels of technical experience, and different interests in your initiatives.
Imagine you’re running a project to renovate an old building on campus:
- Students may get on board from the very beginning because they want an improved space to study and socialize
- Faculty need to be consulted in detail, because they want to prioritize high-quality academic facilities like labs or classrooms rather than, for example, event spaces
- Donors may be more focused on their legacy and push for a modern and eye-catching design for the renovation
- Administrative staff will be keen to ensure the project doesn’t clash with teaching and testing schedules
- Heritage or preservation bodies may resist a project that makes too significant a change to the building
And as with any project of this nature, you’ll also have to consider government building regulations and the impact on local residents.
When it comes to coordinating a project in the education sector, you need a powerful platform to manage all these competing needs. Task management tools — like the workflow management and planning features in Wrike — help you break goals into subtasks and projects into phases, so you can plan an approach that satisfies all your stakeholders and gets your project over the line.
2. Budget constraints
Budgets in the education sector tend to be limited. Funding often comes from various grants and donations, and because so many educational institutions operate as non-profits, every penny needs to be accounted for. This brings a huge amount of scrutiny to your project budgets and the way you manage them.
The best project management tools for education help you track every aspect of your spending in detail.
Platforms like Wrike go beyond a basic burndown chart to show you exactly where your budget is being spent. By using integrations with other accounting software, you can make your financial overviews even more accurate. Plus, when you work in Wrike, you can process information relating to your project budget through document workflows. These workflows manage both approvals and file routing to designated project folders, so when it comes time to audit your work, your documents are easy to recall.
3. The academic year
Education projects also face tight constraints in terms of scheduling. The academic year influences the amount of time stakeholders have to contribute to a project and when work can be done without disrupting studies.
The strict due dates for grant applications also have a huge role to play in project planning. For example, if a delay in writing the final draft of your proposal means you miss a crucial window, you’ll probably have to postpone the work for another year. This is not the case in other industries, where projects can begin as soon as the resources are available.
When it comes to finding project management software, this means it’s essential to look for a platform that gives you complete — and ideally automated — oversight of your project status. When you have this watertight visualization, showing every subtask your work relies on, you can make sure you have everything in place ahead of your project milestones.
4. The pace of change
Education projects often go through rigid, multi-stage approval workflows before they can begin. It’s also not unusual for the processes that handle those approvals to be outdated — whether that’s because they’re handled manually through internal email and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, or because the designated reviewers have other roles to juggle.
All the points I discussed above — the long lists of stakeholders, the need to preserve tradition, the narrow funding windows, the financial considerations — can hold back your project progress. Compared to many other industries, education projects can be slow to get off the ground and can face additional delays as you move between project phases.
Put simply, when you’re looking for tools for an education PMO, you need all the features it takes to manage a large-scale, multi-phase project. But you also need your tool to offer:
- Complete customization, so it can centralize the project information for a wide range of different initiatives
- Easy onboarding, so you can coordinate effectively across a range of different stakeholders
- Streamlined communication and work management, so you can stay agile and efficient in terms of both time and resources
You can find all these features, and many more, in Wrike.
Build your ideal project management platform with Wrike
Wrike is a completely customizable work management tool ideal for project teams in large organizations like colleges, universities, and school districts.
When you plan, execute, and report on your work in Wrike, you have a real-time project hub where you can communicate across departments, monitor your progress, and evaluate your project’s impact in granular detail.
Wrike is a scalable option for project management, and our software is often used by enterprise organizations with wide-ranging project portfolios. If you monitor several education projects or a long list of different schools in your work, these same features can centralize a huge amount of project data for your team and keep you informed of the latest developments.
Here’s how it works.
Plan projects in more detail
Rolling out a new project in education can be complex, but the planning phase doesn’t have to be. Whether you’re consulting dozens of stakeholders, bringing subteams from multiple departments on board, or coordinating a distributed team, Wrike simplifies and solidifies your project plans.
For example, imagine the creative and marketing departments at a large college campus working together to roll out a new campaign to increase enrollment. Using Wrike, these teams can:
Invite stakeholders and team members to a shared workspace
In the very first phase of the project lifecycle, the project team can set up a dedicated campaign management space within Wrike and invite the designers, writers, student representatives, and support staff involved. This creates a strong foundation for the campaign by giving everyone access to the information — and a secure space to provide their input — from ideation on.
Define and prioritize the project goals
If the team doesn’t carry out goal setting early on in the campaign, they won’t be able to measure their success later. In the planning phases, they can look back at their past projects to find areas for improvement and the current enrollment statistics to find out more about the college’s needs. Once they’ve set measurable goals — like increasing attendance at open days or boosting enquiries – they can track those metrics in a project dashboard to keep them focused once the campaign work begins.
Break down deliverables into actionable tasks
Once the team decides the assets they’ll produce, they can use their Wrike workspace to list the tasks, break them into subtasks, plan workflows, and automate the repetitive tasks. For example, the workspace could include custom items for social media or print assets, each with its own specific workflow.
Create and visualize the schedule
Once the tasks and ownership are clear, the team can choose the best way to display the work to keep them on top of their project deadlines. In Wrike, they can switch between a Gantt chart timeline showing the dependencies between the tasks and a Kanban board showing the current status of the workflow and alerting them to bottlenecks.
These benefits aren’t just theoretical. At UNSW Sydney, the marketing department uses Wrike to manage requests and project intake with dynamic request forms and workflows. The team is small, but it handles requests from over 6,000 university staff. With Wrike, they’ve improved communication by 250% in just three months.
Similarly, Wrike has boosted collaboration at Emory University. Lea Labastida, the Director of Marketing Project Management, planned 165 simultaneous alumni relations projects with Wrike. Task management, communication, and version control tools helped her team connect and collaborate, and took the guesswork out of project planning.
Before Wrike, we relied on estimates and guesswork. Now, we have concrete data that enhances our planning and efficiency.
Lea Labastida, Director of Marketing Project Management, Emory University
Work more collaboratively with your stakeholders and team
As a project management platform, Wrike is built for teamwork. In education projects, where PMOs often work with multiple departments, faculties, or individual school boards, these features streamline team collaboration and combat many of the issues education projects typically face.
Information silos, for example, are a common reason for delays and confusion in education projects. These projects often include groups of people who are not used to working together. While one group might take certain information for granted, it might never have occurred to the rest of the project team.
Wrike helps break down those silos by bringing every aspect of the project into a central hub where everyone can view and discuss the project information and see how their checklist of tasks fits into the whole.
Another common barrier to collaboration is long wait times for information, resources, or responses. These issues can be worse in education projects because some team members might be on different schedules or work short-term contracts. Again, when you centralize your work in Wrike, more of your project resources are easier to access, which dissolves these bottlenecks and makes your collaboration more productive.
Wrike also makes it faster and easier to communicate when you need to consult another team member or an outside stakeholder. Our collaborative communication tools include:
- Automated notifications for team members when a task is assigned to them
- Rule-based notifications, for example, when there’s been no progress on a task for a certain period of time
- @mentions to alert team members when a new comment needs their attention, including pixel-accurate feedback with our Adobe integration
- A live editor feature to work on shared documents in real time
- Integrated email tools to message non-Wrike users from within the platform and save their responses alongside the task you want to discuss
One of the biggest benefits of these tools is that they consolidate all your project communications in the same space where you’re tracking your progress and sharing resources. Wrike can virtually eliminate the internal emails associated with project work, drastically speeding up communications in an education setting where time is often of the essence.
Wrike users from both Western Colorado University and the University of Michigan reported a 99% reduction in email and a big productivity boost when they started using Wrike to manage their projects.
Share resources effectively across your project team
Resource allocation can make or break an education project — not least because those resources are often in short supply. It’s especially important when projects involve teachers, support staff, or students who need to balance their role in a project with other responsibilities. Clear expectations, smooth lines of communication, and a shared structure optimize your resource use and keep your projects on track.
When you work in Wrike, resource management is transparent, responsive, and tracked. You have all the information you need to make data-driven decisions when you assign tasks or funds. Plus, the steps you took to make that decision are saved, so you can call up more information if your work is audited later.
Wrike includes tools to share both the resources you need for your projects and the workload those projects involve.
Throughout your project, your files are stored in secure folders within your workspace. You can also attach them to the task cards that represent your work. This way, whenever it’s time for a team member to start their stage of the workflow, they can access the files they need.
As well as making the resources more readily available, Wrike shares your project tasks more fairly.
Our collaboration tools include capacity planning software, time-tracking tools, and detailed team calendar functionality for transparent scheduling and full visibility of your team’s workload. These features help you distribute your project work more accurately and reduce the risk of burnout as your project — and the academic year — progress. 
The team members juggled curriculum planning, event management, and training — a huge number of tasks that could easily creep in scope or slip through the cracks without project management software.
With Wrike, they used workflow management tools to optimize their processes and boost accountability, and capacity management tools to assign task ownership. They also find Wrike makes it easy for their team to step into projects with very little onboarding or catch-up time, because there’s such a high level of visibility into the ongoing status.
As managers, Wrike allows us to better support the people who work with us. It also allows us to ensure that, if I’m leading a program, I know that everyone clearly understands what they’re supposed to do.
Katy Scott, Digital Learning Manager, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Measure your project’s impact with Wrike’s analytics
When you’re managing education projects, your OKRs aren’t always about profit margins. More often, you measure success by efficiency, awareness, and student satisfaction. This makes reliable, flexible reporting even more central to your project management.
With the right level of detail and customization, you can see exactly how your projects influence results across schools and school districts. Wrike’s powerful reporting tools track your projects — and even your entire portfolio — from every angle. Then, when it’s time to check in, you can filter that data to zoom in on the metrics that matter most.
Wrike’s reports are easy to generate and interpret. Whether you’re looking for a weekly check-in to track your progress or a more detailed report to evaluate your work and compare your results with the previous academic year, Wrike helps you uncover the statistics that inform your decisions and prove your results.
Our reporting software also makes it easy to share these reports with stakeholders and donors. Because reports can be customized and generated on demand, you can tailor the snapshots you share to your different audiences, summarizing the information that’s most relevant to them. Simply adjust the permissions in line with the information they need and your institute’s IT governance policies, and share. 
Best of all, you can build these robust analytics tools into your Wrike workspace from day one. Many of our project management templates include reporting features, so your team can hit the ground running.
To set up your workspace with reporting built in, try our:
- PMO Template, for full visibility
- Adaptive Project Management Template, for flexibility and continuous improvement
- Complex Project with Phases Template, for a visual, efficient approach to long-term projects
- OKR Template to define the steps toward your goals
Scalable, automated project management for education, with Wrike
With a 360° overview of your education projects and a suite of powerful collaboration tools, Wrike centralizes every aspect of planning, communication, and reporting. This is the best way to improve project coordination in an education setting and prove your impact over time.
Find out more about how Wrike can help you work collaboratively to make the best use of your resources.
