Project management is a challenging activity that has to do with 4 traditional variables: cost, schedule, time and quality. Professional PMs also aim at making the organization of business processes better. Take any project and you will observe that it requires labour, funds and tools to produce satisfactory outcomes. To supervise projects successfully you have to work on a number of things. A couple of them can be found in the next paragraph:
- Task setting and reviewing progress.
- Dealing with risk. Take any project and you will see that it involves a lot of uncertainties that should be accounted for.
- Assigning and supervising resources.
- Determining the outcomes of the project.
- Controlling what is happening: giving out tasks, controlling execution.
- Ensuring that the products of the tasks are of satisfactory quality.
- Handling instability. Change is constant. The majority of tasks occur in time, so the factor of change should be properly considered.
- Communicating with sponsors and participants of the project.
To handle these components you can use pen and a notepad or probably MS EXCEL. Nevertheless, dedicated project tracking software offers a lot of important benefits:
- Idividual jobs are smoothly assigned to time blocks. Duration can be calculated by the program using the workload information. Every worker can possess their own calendar. It also makes it simpler to track the work-in-progress on various jobs.
- Managing several projects with various requirements. Management can employ productivity management software to facilitate portfolio of projects analysis.
- It assists you in finding the critical path. The critical path is a primary notion in project management. If a task on the critical path takes longer than the manager planned, dates of work on other tasks will be altered. At the same time other activities that lie outside the critical path may last longer or shorter without changing the duration of the whole project.
- Allowing all involved be aware of what is happening. Complex projects require communication. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of data simpler than it has ever been before.
Should you every time go for task tracking software?
Like any software solution, project management software has its limitation. It delivers the greatest result when employed for a number of large projects. It might be a good idea to operate smaller projects by hand, so that you do not have to deal with large overhead associated with operating complex software solutions.