Warning: That free project management app cost my crew 3 days last week

I checked out a job site in Austin last Thursday and saw my foreman using three different spreadsheets just to track material deliveries. Turns out the free app he downloaded doesn't sync properly across devices, so half the team was working off old info. Has anyone else had a cheap tool or software really screw up their scheduling on a big project?

2 comments

2 Comments

ben_shah935d ago

Man that sucks, I feel for you. My buddy runs a small crew in Houston and he tried one of those free scheduling tools last fall. It was supposed to let everyone update completion times from their phones but it just randomly dropped half the entries. They showed up to a job thinking they had a full day of framing left and the material was supposed to be there already, turned out the app had been showing them a cached version from two days prior. He spent all that Saturday driving around tracking down lumber yards and apologizing to the homeowner. Really makes you wonder if these "free" apps are ever worth the headache when you can just pay a few bucks for something that actually works.

robinmason22h ago

I get what you're saying but I’ve actually had the opposite luck with those free tools. I used a simple one for a while with my side gig and it worked fine once I set it up right and told everyone to refresh instead of just trusting the cached view. Your buddy’s crew might have been better off with a shared text thread or a cheap whiteboard app than a tool that was clearly too flaky for framing. Sometimes the free stuff forces you to think about your workflow more, which isn’t a bad thing.