Best PM tool for non-traditional industry use
I work in field sales and execution. I'm increasingly of the opinion we have a glaring need for better task management. I'm part of a 7 person team (technically comprised of two sub teams) that typically juggles between 5-10 different "objectives", at a time. In addition, we regularly get pivoted with "Fire Drills". Then there are events that get thrown in the mix too. Sometimes, it feels like we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Don't get me wrong. Things get accomplished. But not without enduring levels of stress that could be avoided with better planning and communication. We still hit our goals. But I wonder how much more successful we could be if our workflows were both more comprehensive and more efficient. Tracking progress mid-objective and follow up tasks, in particular, are always sore spots. It's not uncommon for in-progress tasks to be in a status where we are "waiting" for outside parties to complete their side of things. These are areas where I feel like things fall through the cracks more than we may want to admit.
I really want to get my team on board with utilizing a PM tool. I'm fairly literate with most common coding languages. So, I'm comfortable with taking on any involved set-up and integration processes. But the more intuitive and easy the user side of things are, the more likely they are to actually adopt it. i'm trying to decide the best platform for our needs. I think getting our company to eventually foot the bill is very possible -- if we can show proof of concept. Until then I am looking for applications with free tiers. We also tend to do the majority of our work on iPads. So, bonus points for interfaces that function well in a mobile environment.
We already have enterprise Microsoft accounts. So, Planner is available to us. However, it seems very bare bones? It strikes me as more of a dressed up to do list than a true PM tool. Jira might be overkill for our needs? It's hard for me to tell without committing time and diving in. Trello sounds like it could be a good compromise. I don't understand why it's free tier seems significantly more limited than Jira's though? I'm still doing more research on Nuvro, Asana, ClickUp, Kantata, Workfront, Monday, and Tempo. Any suggestions and feedback anyone has to offer is appreciated.