Project management is a complex activity that has to do with 4 traditional components: expenditure, schedule, duration and producing a satisfactory result. A bit more challenging objective is to optimize business processes and resource allocation. Most projects employ such components as people, money, and equipment to achieve something of value and meet objectives. There are a number of factors that are very important for effective project management. Some of them can be found below:
- Task setting and reviewing progress.
- Managing uncertainty. Most feature a certain degree of uncertainty.
- Choosing people and machinery for the project.
- Defining the products of the project.
- Managing what is going on: giving out jobs, controlling execution.
- Ensuring that the outcomes of the project are of satisfactory quality.
- Managing changes. Change happens. When you start out on the project, you have to anticipate in what way it will evolve with time.
- Communicating with sponsors and participants of the project.
To deal with these issues you can employ pencil and a notepad or probably a spreadsheet program. But you get some interesting pluses if you decide to use project tracking software:
- It makes scheduling easy. Duration can be calculated by the program depending on the workload information. Each worker can have their own calendar. It also simplifies tracking the work-in-progress on different jobs.
- Working with a number of projects and meeting a set of specifications. Project tracking software allows project executives to seea larger picture and collect data on several projects.
- Critical path is nicely observable. The critical path is made of tasks that directly influence the real duration of the project. Should an activity on this path change duration, the whole project is going to be touched by this change. Whereas other tasks that are not on the critical path can take less or more time and not change the timing of the whole project.
- Allowing all involved be aware of what is going on. The more intricate are the project requirements, the more of them have to be discussed. Groupware productivity tracking software enables each participant to know what is up every time.
Should you always go for task tracking software?
Similar to any other tool, project tracking software has its limitation. It produces the best result when used for a number of large projects. It could be a good idea to manage smaller projects manually, so that there is little need to deal with big overhead associated with using complex programs.