June 2, 2008
Project tracking: what going on
Any project coordinator works with four variables: expenditure, timing, time and quality. Professional PMs also aim at making the organization of business processes more efficient. Take any project and you will see that it requires people, money and tools to deliver needed outcomes. To supervise projects successfully you need to work on several things. You can see a number of these factors in the list below:
- Goal setting and assessing progress.
- Handling negative possibilities. The majority of projects have a this or that degree of uncertainty.
- Assigning and supervising resources.
- Having a clear idea about the result you wish to get when the project is finished.
- Managing what is happening: assigning tasks, controlling execution.
- Making sure that the products of the project are of satisfactory quality.
- Dealing with change. Circumstances change. Most projects occur in time, so the element of dynamics has to be accounted for.
- Communicating with sponsors and participants of the project.
Conventional ways of running projects, such a pen and a notepad, can be used to manage most of these things. However, you get some interesting pluses if you choose to employ project tracking software:
- Idividual jobs are easier to assign to time blocks. A program will process scheduling calculations. You can set work calendars for different resources. It also makes it simpler to track the work-in-progress on relevant jobs.
- Dealing with a number of projects and managing a number of requirements. Management can use progress management software to facilitate portfolio of projects analysis.
- Critical path is nicely observable. The critical path is a critically relevant concept in project planning. Should a task on the critical path change duration, the whole project will be touched by this change. It should be noted that for tasks that are outside the critical path small changes in duration can have no effect whatsoever on other activities.
- Distributing information among the team members. The more intricate are the project needs, the more of them have to be talked about. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of information simpler than it has ever been before.
Should you every time go for task tracking software?
Like any software solution, project tracking software has its limitation. It produces the best result when used for several large projects. It might be more appropriate to manage smaller projects manually, so that you do not have to incur large overhead connected with using complex software solutions.