4 Essential features of Project Management Software
Successful project managers have a great deal of duties – operating meetings, planning and scheduling, managing resources and budgets, and analyzing studies to call just a few. On a busy day, the workload turns into fairly overwhelming. To automate time-consuming duties and run a big staff of pros, managers want one of the best project administration software solution.
While we’d all like to obtain the magical device that implements all of the duties and covers all the things in our required function set, the plethora of choices out there make it a frightening process to seek out an omnipotent PM device. There are tons of if not 1000’s of software program options all specializing in the identical options – monitoring and organizing the challenge administration course of and enhancing staff collaboration.
To discover one of the best software program in your staff, consider which options you should handle your initiatives effectively. To be sure that you don’t go away some essential points uncovered when trying to find new software program, check out the must-have options of project administration tools. Good challenge management software program options include:
- Project planning and scheduling
- Team collaboration
- Time monitoring
- Reporting
1. Planning and scheduling
When managing a team, it’s extremely essential to have everybody’s duties and duties outlined and visual. Helping to keep away from misunderstandings and understanding who to delegate new duties.
The greatest on-line challenge administration software program allows assigning duties to staff members and setting priorities and deadlines. Adding due dates to tasks robotically sends a notification every time the scheduled completion date approaches and the exercise continues to be incomplete.
Prioritizing duties
Goes with out saying that you simply also needs to be able to prioritize your actions. Prioritizing duties is extremely useful at any time when pressing issues come up. By utilizing a planning device with scheduled time slots, you can shortly make room in your deliberate schedule with out manually rescheduling the entire project plan.
Agile process management tool
When main a project staff, you need a device to stipulate all of your upcoming actions and assign duties to staff members.
Task administration features are almost ubiquitous among the many web-based work planning software, that means that discovering one isn’t a difficult process. But don’t ignore it whereas trying to find new PM software solution because it’s important to environment friendly teamwork.
Read on: 43 Best Project Management Software and Tools
Shared team calendar
A staff calendar for scheduling and organizing meetings is one other must-have for PM software solution. Establishing a shared calendar that synchronizes with in style calendar instruments ensures that everybody receives notifications and attends conferences on time. You also can add essential due dates to your group calendar to have a fast overview of upcoming milestones.
If your team members use totally different calendars, discover a PM tool that integrates with in style calendar instruments similar to iCal and Google Calendar.
Planning and process scheduling tool
An ideal device for teamwork is the planner function that outlines all of your deliberate project duties and makes scheduling new actions extremely simple.
Here’s how the planner enhances your project management:
- Time slot view offers an summary of what number of hours and duties have been booked for every staff member, showing the unscheduled time slots
- You’ll get perception to whom assign new duties within the subsequent step of a project
- Quick overview of everybody’s duties and unscheduled time helps to set real looking deadlines and to keep away from overbooking individuals
- Whenever an pressing process must be prioritized, you possibly can transfer different duties forward and make room for these high-priority ones
- If one team member finishes their process forward of the deliberate schedule, you’ll be able to assign them additional duties if vital.
- You’ll find yourself with a vastly extra productive project team
2. Collaboration
A big project staff could encompass tens or tons of of individuals, every engaged on particular tasks and having expert knowledge in a unique field.
Frequently, challenge team members are required to entry each other’s work in order to complement their very own. Meaning that it’s extremely essential to determine an organized and fast communication by a number of channels.
File sharing
The best project administration software solution consists of features for file sharing, shared calendars and phone lists. Every staff member can insert data into the system and others could have fast entry at any time when and wherever they need it.
Some Project Management tools allow including files to projects for fast sharing. When selecting your project software, verify whether they provide free storage for importing your files and data.
Team communication
Some software service providers have built a messenger app contained in the project administration tool.
While it’s a nice-to-have (IF the messenger tool covers all of your team’s wants), it’s lacking shouldn’t be a deal breaker.
You can all the time use Slack for easy and fast team communication.
Team dashboards
If attainable, select a software solution that allows creating team dashboards that everybody can access. You can add graphs, charts, visible metrics and key efficiency indicators (KPIs) to your dashboard.
A staff dashboard can function a project KPI report and is the right tool for using throughout meetings, presenting to everybody your tracked metrics and evaluating actual real time outcomes to the deliberate schedule.
Viewing the KPIs gives a fast overview of whether the staff is reaching their objectives, resulting in extra knowledgeable decision-making. Also, you possibly can share the graphs with staff members so that everybody can specific their concepts on the way to enhance project performance.
Learn extra about KPI dashboards and how to create one.
Sharing the customer data
If you’re working in an company, it’s extremely necessary to retailer and manage your client data. The finest project management tools help you in doing that and allow you to create a buyer card you can share with different team members.
For more examples of useful buyer administration tools, see the listing of 20 essential CRM features.
For instance, insert your clients contact information and hyperlink projects and invoices to buyer profiles. Later, you may shortly handle and set up your customers by totally different categories similar to firms with due invoices, individuals ready in your product, and even reliable partners.
3. Documentation
You’re not managing all of your project information on Excel spreadsheets, are you? Did you already know that as much as 88% of spreadsheets comprise errors? Have a look at all of the enterprise processes that you need an Excel alternative for.
All data accessible in one place
Wouldn’t it’s good to have all of your challenge data accessible in a single place? Including deliberate and accomplished duties, previous and upcoming calendar occasions, buyer information, project sources, bills and payments despatched to shoppers.
Quick entry to your data
Having all the data collected to a complete Project Management tool means you can simply share it with your team and entry it in a number of clicks. No need to modify between a number of spreadsheets to seek out bits of knowledge.
When looking for one of the best project management solution, ask corporations which kinds of data their tools allow to retailer and handle. Not all Project Management tools embody a customer relationship management (CRM) or invoice automation.
Another underused advantage of gathering your data in a single place is the detailed reporting you’ll get. More on this within the subsequent part.
4. Reporting
To efficiently handle your initiatives, you want to concentrate on the shortcomings and issues that require a fast solution. To receive a radical overview of your project progress, you want at the least two options – insightful studies and a KPI dashboard.
Customizable reports
The best project administration software solution contains reporting tools that acquire your beforehand inserted project information and allow creating customizable reports.
For instance, you may get studies in your project budget, bills, accomplished duties and staff members’ efficiency. As you might have already gathered a big data set to your Project Management tool, you possibly can create new reports anytime and select the parameters and data categories you’d like to incorporate on the graph or chart.
Reports allow to get a fast overview of how the project is doing and also you’ll additionally discover the best-performing project groups. If there’s a adverse development outlined in your graphs, you possibly can take rapid motion.
It is less complicated to deal with an issue if you already know it’s root trigger. You can decide the problems by evaluating a number of studies and discussing together with your staff members.
Project KPI dashboard
The quickest option to maintain observe of your project efficiency is to create a project dashboard that updates the data automatically in actual time. Include essential metrics like deliberate and precise challenge worth, schedule variance and the share of accomplished duties.
See the slideshow of 16 essential project KPIs to seek out metrics to incorporate in your dashboard.
Create multiple KPI reports for a number of functions:
- Shared staff dashboard
- Financial KPI report
- Project efficiency dashboard
- Project Manager dashboard