What to look for in Project Management Software

Posted on January 25, 2010
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What to look for in Project Management Software

As a project manager once you are got into the project, you will be starting listing to-do list, getting involving with your team members and start allocating and scheduling the task. No matter the scope of the project, the phase in which your project lies you will be involved in the set of activities carried out at same period of time. This is the time to look upon some good project management software which can fulfill your project planning and executing requirements.

There is lots of software available in the market, but it is your job as project manager to identify your needs to manage your project, team and your project management style. You should ask following questions before choosing project management software. What do you mean by project management? Do you need to map out project plans and schedules? Collaborate on documents? Track tasks? Time? Documents? Issues? These answers can vary which will become criteria to select your project management software.

Following are the basic functions ideally project managers should look into the software:

Project Management
Project management software should guide you by providing the valuable contribution towards strategic interest of your company to work upon particular project. The key parameter of strategic planning is to perform continuous evaluation, prioritization, budgeting and selection of investments.

Projects Planning

A good project management tool should provide a powerful way to define project schedule, understand the critical path, assess and allocate resources. It should allow mapping project tasks and creating visual display (Gantt charts) how they interrelate which can be further used as the reports.

Managing Tasks and Resources

You software should have the ability to define a task, assign it to proper resource, create a deadline, and know when it’s complete. Project management software should manage and control the time, resources, money and equipment to execute a project.

Collaboration

This is required feature of your project management software especially to build, share and manage a central repository of all your project documents and information and increase productivity when your team does not exists in a specific geographical boundaries. It should also target to the issues such as communication between team members, including email, conference calls, meetings, web-based locations. SaaS (Software as a service) is a web-based solution with numerous communication and remote management capabilities. Mainly you should make sure that the web-based solutions use a trusted SSL certificate so that all your information is transferred securely.

Customer Support

You should make sure that the vendor should provide a real support. You can make a test to verify the quality and speediness of the support team to respond your queries. You should also check the reaction of the vendor when you ask to include additional features which can be your project management requirement.

Pricing

Make sure you have not paid extra just because you made a quick decision.

Free trial

Make sure that the vendor provides a free account type to evaluate the tool to check whether it fulfills your project management requirements. If the vendor does not offer a free trial, then surely the product must not be according to your expectations.

If you do not have time to evaluate project management software, you can take quick overview from following websites:

http://www.project-management-software.org/

http://project-management-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

http://download.cnet.com/windows/project-management-software/