Project Management Software

Types of Project Management Software

Most places you hear people describing project management software they seem to be talking about planning tools to generate a Gantt chart such as Microsoft Project, Primavera or Workbench.

The more experienced project manager and certainly someone who has tried to establish some consistent project management processes across an organisation, knows that the requirements for project management software goes so much further than this and might include the following feature set:

• Scheduling and resourcing
• Process or workflow management
  
• Task definition and management
• Document management
• Time sheets and project finances
• Risk and issue management
• Quality management
• Collaboration and communication tools
• Guidance, support or mentoring systems
• Project audit, governance or oversight
  
• Project Reporting
  

Until relatively recently an organisation looking to establish a consistent project management methodology generally had to develop their own as there were no sufficiently robust or widely enough used methods available and this had major impacts on the project management software which often had to be customised to fit each organisation making it very expensive.

In recent years PMI PMBOK™ (in the US) and PRINCE 2™ (in the UK and RoW) have become sufficiently robust and widely used to be able to be relied upon as standards.  The indicators of this are the availability of regulated and consistent training, pool of available trained resource and the development of supporting or leveraging project management software tools and systems.

PRINCE2™ is particularly powerful here because it provides a clear and generic process model which can be scaled to meet the needs of a wide range of projects assuming the right project management software is used to support delivery.

The Project Management Software Challenge

The project management software challenge is about providing individual project managers and organisations with tools which make it easier to structure work into projects, manage them and derive the benefits this approach offers.  To be successful in this your project management software must support you across your desired project management needs and also be easy to adopt and implement as the single biggest cause of failure when implementing new management systems software is the rejection of new, complex tools by end users.

The following sections explore some key attributes of project management software you should expect to find.

Project management software - establishes strong processes

Absolutely key to implementing consistent project management in an organisation is the concept of the process, users need to understand that each action and activity is related to other activities and this needs to be communicated clearly to all users of the project management software.  Many  project management software applications are little more than tool kits and have no process structure to unite them to provide direction and context for the user.  This sort of tool should be avoided as it  makes establishing a strong and consistent culture very difficult.  PROJECT in a box project management software achieves this by providing users with process diagrams which they can simply navigate with point and click making it understandable for even novice users.  Once in a sub-process the PROJECT in a box project management software shows the user which management products (documents) they should be managing here.

Project management software - supports scalability

Scalability should be at the heart of your project management culture and your methodology should be tailored to the needs of each individual project, so it is essential that your project management software supports this.  Most form based project management software systems (and there are a lot!) provide a rigid methodology or at best can only provide one project management style which is applied to all projects with the guarantee of under or over management of projects away from this norm.  PROJECT in a box project management software enables users to launch multiple different varieties/methodologies of projects (each with different processes, products etc.).  This enables organisations to manage PRINCE2, PMI PMBOK and projects with any other methodology all within the project management software at the same time.  In addition, our project management software enables users with sufficient permissions level to alter a launched project on the fly adding or removing documents and changing their status for users.

Project management software - easy to adopt

Project management software needs to be as easy to use as possible for end users because rarely when an organisation is trying to standardise its project management techniques and methodology will it put all its employees through formal training, especially those on the periphery of project teams.  Project team members should therefore have to learn the minimum of new tools to enable them to contribute effectively to the project and the software should be easy to implement.  PROJECT in a box project management software provides the methodology structure and supporting project manager administration tools but enables the project team members to continue to work almost exclusively with the tools they are already familiar with such as MS Project, Word, Excel etc.  When starting a new project users can launch each new activity from a template file provided by the project management software in a familiar format and including headings and guidance on the information them might add.  When migrating an existing project into the project management software, users simply add their existing project documents into the relevant locations and off they go.  This approach applies to tools and techniques including providing risk, issue and quality logs as excel tools, or attaching any type of Gantt chart tool file, enabling them to be circulated to users who don't have a licence for the PRINCE2 software before being reloaded to the system for inclusion in the reporting.

Project management software - provides appropriate management oversight

However involved and 'hands on' your business management team are, the project manager ultimately has to deliver the project to agreed plan and tolerances and has to report progress to his management chain at defined intervals, your project management software should be able to support the PM and the business management in this model.  PROJECT in a box project management software uses a simple yet customisable permissions model to enable the project manager to provide access to different parts of the project and different capabilities for each member of the project team, project board and also suppliers, partners and other stakeholders providing a great deal of flexibility around the desired separation between business and project.  This includes the ability to produce reports on the current status of the project as held in the project management software including finances, risk, issue and quality status, stage and project status, commentaries etc.  Users with portfolio permissions can report aggregated and individually on these information sets across their portfolio of projects even if the projects are each of different varieties/methodologies.

We hope you have found this guide to project management software helpful and that it has provoked some thoughts about what you should be looking for when looking to specify and buy a solution.  Remember, make your project management software work for you, don't buy some over specified, over constrained, form based and rigid system because all its bells and whistles look impressive.  Time and time again project management software like this will be difficult and expensive to implement, your project team will recoil against it and it will be discredited and unused.


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