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. (read more » )