June 4, 2008
Project management: what is it all about
Any project manager works with four variables: expenditure, schedule, duration and quality. A bit more ambitious goal is to improve business procedures and resource attribution. Most projects utilize such components as labour, money, and equipment to achieve something of value and hit selected targets. To manage projects successfully one should work on a number of things. You can look through a few of these factors in the list below:
- Goal setting and reviewing progress.
- Handling uncertainty. Any project involves a number of risks that have to be dealt with.
- Allocating and supervising resources.
- Understanding the product you want to get when the project is finished.
- Controlling what is happening: assigning jobs, supervising execution.
- Ensuring that the products of the project are of satisfactory quality.
- Dealing with change. Everything changes. When you start out on the project, you should anticipate in what way it will develop with time.
- Talking to everybody involved with the project.
To manage these issues you can employ pencil and a notepad or perhaps MS EXCEL. However, dedicated project tracking software has a lot of relevant advantages:
- It simplifies scheduling. The length of work can be calculated automatically using the workload information. You can create work calendars for different resources. It just as well simplifies tracking progress on different tasks.
- Coordinating several projects with various prerequisites. Project tracking software allows project executives to observea larger picture and collect information on several projects.
- Critical path becomes clearly visible. The critical path is made of jobs that directly influence the actual length of the project. Should a task on the critical path change duration, the rest of the project will be affected. Whereas other activities that lie outside the critical path may take less or more time and not change the timing of other activities in this project.
- Allowing everybody involved be aware of what is going on. The more complex are the project requirements, the more of them have to be talked about. Groupware productivity tracking software enables everybody to know what is up at any given point in time.
Is it always a must to use task tracking software?
Project management software might not be suitable in every case. The most suitable time to use such programs is when you supervisea few big projects. It might be a good idea to operate simple projects by hand, so that there is no need to incur big overhead connected with using complex software solutions.