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4 Things You Need To Look For in Project Management Software
Free Online Project Management Software | OfficeTimer
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Firms offering consulting advice often have to help their clients grapple with multiple scenarios related to the technology adoption, change management, growth challenges, new business unit development. But most often at the heart of all this lies the issue of internal project management, which is applicable to consultancy firms themselves as well. This often encompasses the issues related to project tracking, employee productivity, activity and timesheet management, billing and much more. As the projects get bigger and complicated so do the teams and its functioning. This is where Project Management Software helps in getting your work done easier.
The metrics related to these functional requirements if collected and interpreted correctly, are very crucial for any firm as it helps the firm to analyze the current business operations. The analysis can be done in the form of employee utilization charts to understand the gaps in the process execution at different stages of the process. This further enables the firm to come up with a better functioning model.
The insights can then be further used to mitigate problems related to the following:
- Turnover Time – The efficiency of a company to produce results for the projects depends on the teams working on it. Thus the team has to perform at its peak potential, prioritize its action items and churn out maximum amount of quality deliverable s in the shortest amount of time.
- Deadlines – Projects irrespective of their sizes, always have a timeframe within which it must be executed. The time taken to deliver the output often determines the future viability of the client engagement. Project Tracking Software helps in tracking missed deadlines and incomplete project executions that always lead to adverse future engagement terms.
- Resource Allocation – Every project needs the proper allocation of the people, tools, workstations, hours and workload. In the absence of proper monitoring, mismanagement and resource capacity wastage will ensue.
- Budget and effects on cost – Profitability is always one of the top priorities of any company. The very existence of a firm depends on its own ability to sustain. Exceeding budget limits due to excess time spent on the project completion to over allocation of resources to a project, all lead to poor performance.
The first step towards resolving any issue is the identification of the needs and requirements. Points to consider before narrowing down on a Project Management Tool are
- Team size – Structured and sequenced project workflows demand can work with a good amount of standardization. But teams working in the agile setup which is the norm of today, need an abundance of customization’s and flexibility. For small teams working in the same location having all the features of these sophisticated tools wouldn’t really help.
- Location – In today’s world of global disconnectedness, teams are often spread across various geographies and time-zones. To facilitate the functioning of these units which are working remotely Project Management tools play a big role. These ensure that a proper handover of the tasks happen and there is least amount of information loss in the process.
- Client requirements – These can be defined in the form of the type of involvement they are looking forward to in the execution of the process. Does the client need visibility into the daily functioning of the project and modules or are they happy getting updates about the progress.
- Social Collaboration Tools – The tools such as Yammer, Slack, Trello and Asana cater more to the efficient transmission of the information between the various team members. A major drawback of these offerings is that they can often become a channel for irrelevant information dissemination. Although these days these tools are very widely used as a substitute to the conventional project management tools. Despite these tools lacking the integration of the vast multitude of features present in project management tools, they come in handy in several other scenarios.
- Features Required – The Project management tools available have offerings ranging from the standard team monitoring abilities to even recording the employee payroll management activities.
Comparing couple of conventional project management tools available out there
Compare With Others
Thus every firm needs to perform a due diligence and an in-depth research into its own needs and then drill down on the set of features needed for maximizing their output. OfficeTimer certainly provides Online Project Management Software required by consulting firms for their project management purpose with the most value for money.