During the morning training today and after completing the activities we discussed different tools people had successfully used for managing major milestones, minor milestones and tasks. 

We wanted to create a post so people could comment below with their suggestions, feedback or experience. 

Tools:

Trello - a free tool that is great for both personal and work. Easy to create boards which are essentially a minor milestone and putting tasks below it. Tasks can then be assigned to people, be progress tracked and you can add detail, comments. etc. Minor milestones can be colour coordinated into major milestones. Multiple users can update at the same time and can use it in their web browser without needing specific software. Great for using as a visual aid during a team meeting or status update meeting. https://trello.com 

The whole visual of the tool can be customised to an organisation, changing background etc. 

One example - just from google images below to give everyone an idea of how the boards work and look! (Couldn't find a picture of a wildlife conservation one :( )

Monday.Com - a paid for, subscription based tool for managing plans, milestones and tasks. https://monday.com (approx £7.00 per month + additional users). 

Pros:  can set up templates that are re-useable and can use across an organisation, web based so don't need to download software, assign tasks/subtasks to owners and get them to report progress, visually can see plan and milestones.

Cons: paid for tool (pay per user so difficult if assigning tasks to lots of work stream members), not good for complex projects or technical projects, SO MUCH annoying advertising and marketing! A lot of the functionality can be used for free in Trello but I think you can get a free trial to see if you like it. 

Jira - (made by the same company as Trello) - really great for agile projects but can also work for managing milestones/tasks too. Excellent for technical projects as can link to software releases etc. Items are managed in a Kanban view and so move from left to right as they progress (example image below). You can title the columns whatever you want to fit your project and create as many as you need. This makes it really obvious which tasks are progressing and which are blocked. The downside is that board requires a lot of management, maintenance, updates to ensure things keep moving along. Might be useful for anyone working on more technical conservation projects. 

Not free, think you have to pay for licences which doesn't make it useful for a lot of smaller organisations or charities. 

Would be great to hear what tools other people have used/loved and any feedback.