Introduction
Project management may be one of the vaguest roles in a company, but it is key to a company’s success in the long run. Lucky for project management teams and personnel out there, there is an arsenal of tools available to help you out.
Project management tools are highly valuable resources for the entire company when it comes to keeping track of progress. For example, if you’re involved in a construction project, from planning to execution, project management tools help you and your coworkers monitor the status of your site in an orderly and objective manner.
Efficiency is the most basic goal of project management tools. Studies have shown that companies that employ the services of project management software or tools save 28 times more money than those that do not.
Hence, taking the time to evaluate and choose the best project management tool for your company are crucial hours that should be invested.
Project Management Tools
Choosing the right tool also entails understanding the capabilities and uses of project management tools. These tools are used by project management teams in many companies as they help you to facilitate and organise projects with ease.
Projects are a complex process that involves many different stages. These tools aid in the planning, management, and more importantly optimization of these different stages. There are many project management tools available, each boasting its selling points, but the best out there have a few similar capabilities.
Task Tracking And Assigning
The most basic yet useful aspect would be tracking and assigning tasks to facilitate efficiency.
Parent-Child projects
Large-scale projects often require the need for tasks to be split and delegated under a secondary smaller project, often called a child project.
Collaboration
Teamwork is arguably the most valuable asset available, and project management tools can capitalise on creating a framework that is efficient and allows for easy collaboration between team members.
Document Sharing
The digitalization of information means platforms have to have the means of allowing information to be easily accessed, and document sharing is one of the many ways that allows for this.
Why Are They Important
Project management tools are a valuable resource for many different reasons. The main goal of these tools is to ensure efficiency in all aspects of the project. Projects are run on a variety of resources, and each resource incurs a cost. Efficiency ensures that this cost is kept as low as possible to avoid unnecessary wastage of resources.
These tools help managers, and team members as well, with organising and keeping track of the progress of projects. Furthermore, through these tools, team members can communicate efficiently in an objective manner regarding matters related to the project.
How To Choose The Best Project Management Tool
1. Establish Your Project Needs
With a wide array of different software to choose from, establishing your needs and ranking them is the best way to thin out your options. Each software has the basic tools that a project management tool should provide, but some excel in a certain area or even bring wholly unique solutions for unique problems.
Ensuring a tool can provide a solution to your problem is the key to choosing a good project management tool. This prevents you from choosing a tool that may have powerful features but fails to solve your project’s problems.
2. Research The Best Project Management Tools
With an idea of what is needed in mind, it is time to scour the internet for software that can address issues needed to be resolved. Alternatively, asking around about what kinds of tools other people have used is a good way of gathering opinions.
Making a list of the pros and cons of different potential software is also a good way to start trimming down your choices until you eventually have the right tool in mind.
3. Test Out Your Options
Just like how shows often have a pilot episode, having a pilot test for your tool of choice is also a good way of ensuring you get what you need. Most software comes with free trials, and making use of these cost-free resources is always a good move.
From this test period, you can gather more information about your options and weigh the pros and cons with a better understanding of what they offer.
4. Gather Feedback
As a manager, making assessments can be a tough decision, and garnering the feedback of your team members often provides valuable insight that you may have missed out on. There is no difference when it comes to making a decision about what software to use.
Gathering feedback from your employees in the pilot test of different software can provide you with valuable insight into what they like and find cumbersome about certain software.
Your team’s opinions matter as they are after all the people who will interact and benefit the most from project management tools.
5. Evaluate The Cost
One of the key objectives of these tools is to create efficiency in resource usage which translates to lower costs. Going back to this principle, it is only right that the cost of using a project management tool is justifiable as well.
These tools take time as well as money to implement — resources valuable to a company. Ensuring that the benefits to resource management outweigh the cost of using software should be a determining factor in your decision-making.
6. Purchase And Implement
With the software in mind and after all costs and feedback has been evaluated, you can now purchase the software. The important part comes after. Implementation is key to getting your team rolling with it.
Setting a timeframe in which training and integration will be carried out will help your team take advantage of the benefits provided by the software.
Conclusion
Project management tools are a great way of creating an efficient work environment to optimise a project’s progress. With a wide array of tools available, deciding on the right one may seem like a daunting task, but it is indeed worth the effort.
The guidelines above provide you with a framework that you can follow to narrow down your options and ultimately, pick the right software. Going forward, do remember to carry out evaluations along the way to pick out any problems and other potential software that can be explored as well.
Quoted from Various Sources
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