Guide – Choosing The Best Application For Project Management

Looking for the best project management software to manage your projects? When you own a business, project management automatically becomes an important arm of your company. Your project management process can either make or break your company. Companies implement suitable methods like Waterfall and Agile methodologies to plan and develop their projects. A bit like how it is important to sharpen the axe before cutting the wood, it’s equally crucial to streamline the methodology adopted in your project scheduling to satisfy the project deadlines.

Now, you would probably raise an issue about the way to streamline your project management process. The simplest option for this is often to integrate your company with a project management application like Apptivo. According to Capterra’s Project Management User Survey 2021, 55% of users were able to use the project resources more effectively. This resulted in reducing redundancy, hiring additional resources, and enabled the teams to focus more on project implementation. In short, they stressed less about managing projects and focused more on completing their tasks.

However, change is constant and corporations do an entire analysis before signing up for any services, including Project Management Software. Understanding the business requirement and analyzing the selected project scheduling software is the key to sustainable project management. To make your task easier, Apptivo has come up with certain characteristics that you simply should consider before signing up for online project management tools.

Understanding Project Life Cycle

Regardless of the project scheduling software that you sign up for or integrate with your project management team, it should be noted that it is going to serve the complete process of your project team.

You are not signing up for a Projects app just to overcome a single drawback. For instance, your team is lagging behind in project time tracking and you sign up for expensive software to overcome this disadvantage. This is not a viable option in the long term. Hence, it is recommended to go for project tracking tools that provide a complete solution that can tackle multiple problems from a single system.

Project life cycle refers to the steps taken by managers in the completion of projects right from the beginning to the end. It is a stepwise process taken to meet the project deadlines and complete them successfully. According to a Study, only 2.5% of companies complete 100% of their projects. This tells a lot about the importance of the project life cycle. Before understanding the qualities of a project management tool, let’s go through the life cycle of a project.

Initiation – This is the first phase in the project life cycle. The initiation phase focuses on identifying the problem, business requirements, and how your team can implement them. This also includes the identification of all the stakeholders associated with the project. In this stage, the team studies the case identifies the problems, objectives and determines the most feasible solution.

Planning — This phase involves project scheduling and businesses can often use project planning software to move through this phase effortlessly. According to a Study, 39% of projects fail due to failure in planning. In this phase, teams break down their projects into smaller milestones and tasks. Thereby, the team leaders can assess the risks related to the projects. Furthermore, teams can estimate the budget, manage the finance, and study the overall scope of the project.

Implementation — Now that we have planned the structure and process of executing the project, the next step is implementation. Here, the entire planning and development are put into action to obtain the desired results. Here, team managers have to allocate the necessary resources, track the progress of projects through Gantt charts, control the budget allocation, and ensure the completion of projects before the deadline. With proper documentation, you can execute the project smoothly and achieve better results.

Closure — It is the final phase of the project life cycle where the primary process is to check if the project is completed in the right manner. Here, we provide the final results, associate with all the stakeholders, analyze the results, and have them approved by all the stakeholders related to the projects. Additionally, the budget should be assessed and the unused budget can be allocated for future projects.

The above section discusses the common phases involved in the project life cycle. Apart from these, there are also other stages that might differ based on the industry and business purpose.

Must-Have Qualities Of Project Management Tool

Your project planning software will turn out to be a boon or bane for your project team depending on the software that you sign up for. In this section, we have listed the top qualities that you must look into before signing up for a project management tool online.

1. Affordable Pricing

2. Secured Access

3. Smooth Collaboration

4. Automated Tools

5. Time Tracking Facility

6. Performance Monitoring

7. Integrated Solution

Affordable Pricing

Your business can have an honest reputation, better lifetime value, a loyal customer base, and better product value. However, the foremost important factor that investors consider is numbers. If your business has better profits, then you’ll expect more investments. When the profits generated are more than the total investment, your business is noteworthy. Hence, businesses should be very cautious while investing in any facility, including software.

The process of managing a company isn’t a simple task, and each decision involves proper analysis and detailed discussion. A budget is allocated based on which the investments and spending are categorized. This includes integrating with a project management tool. The software that you sign up for must get up to your budget. Be it companies of any size – the right Project Management Tool is that the one that meets your budget expectations.

Secured Access

We are a neighborhood of an era where technology has become a part of the lifestyle. With more experts explaining the importance of data privacy and nations across the planet chalking out their data security policy, your project management tool shouldn’t put your company in jeopardy. Once you purchase a project management tool, you want to make sure that the info of your company and your customers remain protected.

So, the project management software should abide by the laws of your country and not cause any breach in the data. Every interaction documented within the Projects App must be stored in a secured cloud database that cannot be easily accessed by unauthorized users and does not reveal any tip of your company.

Smooth Collaboration

There is no scope for project management without people. As quoted by Cornelius Fichtner, “The ‘P’ in PM is as much about ‘People’ management as it is about ‘Project’ management.” Hence, we cannot expect a successful project without a dedicated team with expertise in their respective fields.

Having the proper team doesn’t end in successful project implementation, the subsequent step is collaboration. This is often offered by the project management software. The smooth collaboration tools ensure that all the communication is documented and therefore, the right members are ready to access it without any hassle. The best project management tool provides an omnichannel communication platform for effortless interaction.

Automated Tools

What is productivity according to you? Is it completing a simple task with three people, or completing it with a single person? Imagine, the subsequent level – there’s no need for any human effort to complete that task. The primary option offers a smaller amount of productivity, the second option with one person is good productivity. Whereas, the last option with no human effort is the best productivity and proper utilization of resources.

This is what PM software is capable of. It eliminates the uncertainty in your workflow, automates repetitive tasks, and completes them in a jiffy with zero manual effort. The best project management software is meant to update records, send reminders on deadlines, and trigger actions based on certain prerequisites.

Time Tracking Facility

The reputation of a company depends on its ability to deliver projects on time. Your project can be extraordinarily, but you lose your credibility if you do not keep up with the delivery timeline. Making your customers wait leaves them unhappy and forces them to settle on a far better company. Hence, meeting your project deadlines is one among the primary requirements of project managers.

According to the PMI Report, 61% of companies integrated with project management software completed projects on time, compared to 41% of businesses operating without a project management app. The project management tool that you choose should be able to automate your timelines, create milestones, tasks, and keep you updated on the upcoming events and deadlines. In short, your team can work on the projects with the least worry about important dates and deadlines.

Performance Monitoring

Gantt chart and kanban flow are two important tools in any task management software as it assists team managers to track the progress of their projects from their desk. Gantt charts are powerful project tracking tools that display and track the activities, resource allocation, timeline, and the progress of projects from a single system. Kanban layout provides an overview of the different stages of tasks.

When your business has an efficient performance monitoring tool in place, team managers can easily get the tasks and milestones completed on time. Also, the biggest roadblock associated with managing projects is communication. When there is a Gantt chart and Kanban layout in your system, you can track the progress of projects in real-time and keep all the stakeholders informed on the latest progress with authentic stats.

Integrated Solution

The best project management application isn’t complete with one Projects app. It takes a holistic approach to ensure all the essentials of the project managers are met. A number of the favored PM applications include Timesheets, CRM Software, Help Desk, and other miscellaneous applications that make your project execution simple.

In addition to providing in-house solutions, it must also support third-party applications. Your company would have already put in use multiple applications from different providers to streamline your workflow. Signing up for a project management app must not hinder your usability of existing applications. Rather, it should boost the performance.

Conclusion

Regardless of the industry, you’re a part of, companies face tough competition owing to COVID-19, economic issues, the arrival of the latest players, rise in prices, and other pressures from different platforms. It is an honest choice to devise a strategy that will keep your business stand out from the rest. Some of the project management software examples show how they can make a difference to your business. It is advised to go through the project management list, assess their capabilities, match it with your requirements, and go for the right software. By signing up for the best project management application, companies can organize their project management process and complete them before deadlines.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What are Project Milestones and How do I use them?
• How do I Set a Project Manager?
• How do I create a timesheet with pre-defined period?