Category Archives: Project planning

guest blogger, Project Management Software, Project planning

Why Project Management Software is Important for Your Business

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The goal of project management software is to support your organizational team with collaboration, achieving milestones, keeping the work budget within given limits and effectively completing the work on schedule. A project management software system can help you to manage complicated projects and avoid the common pitfalls of doubtful roles, communication gaps, complex tasks and insufficient responsibility.

Project management software is becoming an essential part of the present day business world. It manages the action of planning and acquiring the required people and resources, keeping costs within budget and scheduling limits. In any kind of industry (and some of the most common include construction, IT, architecture, software development and banking) you can use it to manage projects effectively and efficiently. The global project manager, along with other team leaders, uses this software to evaluate, plan, schedule, and manage the projects. However the project management software can also enhance the productivity of the entire project team.

Project management software includes programs that companies use to plan tasks in corporate programs (rather than ‘projects’). The software enables the manager to monitor the results of team members, restrict cost issues and ensure effective completion of corporate initiatives. Indeed it is often quoted as one of the easiest ways to enhance the process of efficiently allocating talent.

 

What makes for good project management software? Firstly using it will make your working existence more organized and structured and, ultimately, simpler. Secondly, everybody in your organization should be able to use and understand the application within a couple of days, with hardly any training needed.

Project management software is a good way to control four of the key project factors: work, time, budget and personnel. With the aid of relevant software, viewing the progress of a project should be simple. What’s more, viewing the length of time a specific project needs means that you can plan tasks accordingly. Project management software that includes time monitoring tools will also allow you to look into the performance and achievement records of personnel.

Organizing people and projects can be a frustrating and tiresome task, but if you understand the proper application of project management software, you’ll be able to easily handle all tasks, projects and team people. This can help in staying up-to-date with the marketplace changes, and you’ll be able to plan your moves accordingly.

Project Management Software and collaboration software provide many services. Let’s talk about a few of them:

  • Team collaboration: Forget office conference rooms and late evening conferences. No need to travel to different locations for discussions and demos. Your team and clients can collaborate online. It will save energy and keeps your team and clients up to date with the latest information.
  • Versatility: Web project management software provides versatility in company projects. Online project software typically provides up-to-date dashboards for rapidly reviewing the latest events in a project. When combined with online collaboration, these tools can keep everybody in your team on ‘the same page’ and helps to ensure each group or resource knows what others are doing. This then allows project managers to assign tasks and to-do lists, monitor progress, schedule due dates, accomplish key events, and much more.
  • Accountability: When used well, the software increases personal and financial accountability. The majority of the online project controlling system provides graphs, feedback, time sheets, key events and task assignment. The more sophisticated or specialized ones also monitor project costs, checks expenses, adjust assets and provide estimations about future project expenditure.
  • Organization: Effective resource management is flexible. The project controlling system handles all assets-employees, free-lance talents, budget and time. Often knowing your teams’ potential and effectively applying their abilities can mean the difference between failure and success. The right resource management enables you to build a thriving team.

Your company is important, and so is your ‘bottom line’. If there is a means to increase your productivity and improve your profits, why not take advantage of it?

Whether opting for online or stand-alone software, do try to make use of the many reviews available. They honestly do assist you in find the solution that best matches your needs, and (most of the time) are genuinely written by people who have used the program.

Author Bio:

UntitledSeamus Collins has 18 years of experience in the Project Management industry, and has completed assignments with leading global companies in China, Argentina, Israel, Malaysia, the UK and the USA. He is also the founder and owner of Velopi, – a PMI Registered Education provider that has helped hundreds of people obtain their PMP certification

guest blogger, Project Management, Project Management Communications, Project planning, Team building

Project Management Communications

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Project management encompasses a large range of skills; leadership, planning, scheduling, communicating, decision making and being a visionary. Being able to identify these vital skills and fully develop your understanding of these abilities will ensure that you not only survive, but you excel within the field of project management.

Organisational skills

The role of a project manager takes on many forms, and due to this; organisation and planning skills are listed highly as required abilities. Of course there are very few professions that do not require extensive planning, but project management demands a highly skilled approach as a skilful execution equates to outstanding results.

Project management requires the preparation of project documentation, requirement information, memos, project reports, personnel reports, vendor quotes, contracts and the supervision of the entire processes involved. An essential part of daily working includes organising meetings, developing teams and also, in some cases, organising media relations such as press releases and conferences.

Methodologies such as the PRINCE 2 (an acronym for projects in controlled environments, version 2) enables project managers to organise and control the six major variable factors of any project, these factors are cited as:

  • Cost
  • Timescale
  • Quality
  • Scope
  • Risk
  • Benefits

Much of the benefit of the PRINCE 2 methodology is its transferable and highly scalable nature. PRINCE 2 can be utilised across any project, including highly specialised and industry specific models (engineering models or developmental lifecycles).

Comms

People management skills

Strong project managers should display excellent people management skills. The human dimension bears little relation to the technical ability of an individual, but closely relates to leadership, conflict resolution and ultimately communication. Author and expert within the area of project management Steven Flannes, actually cites that, 80% of project management success comes from people skills and 20% from technical expertise.

Why are people skills so vital?

  • The cyclical and stage nature of projects
  • Increase in complexity of client remits
  • Continual outsourcing of finite and cost effective resources
  • Increased movement toward client driven project management structure
  • Challenges of leading in matrix management structures
  • Increase of virtual team coordinated efforts

Communication skills

Often, problems that project managers are faced with are completely unrelated to their technical competence, but interestingly it is the lack of interpersonal communication skills that pose the largest threat. The latter of course is an essential facet, but is vitally a core skill of a project manager.

It is argued that project managers who demonstrate a high degree of technical expertise are actually hindered within their ability to negotiate. Often great project managers take a more generalist point of view. Generalists, typically, elicit a higher degree or resourcefulness and tend to lean toward being more open to suggestions and ideas. This in turn increases the momentum of a project due to the fact that compromises have a higher degree of continuity.

Adversely to this notion, experts within a particular field tend to display a narrower mind-set that may or not be conducive to the end result.

Financial skills

An exhaustive breakdown of project activities and associated costs enable the project manager to identify trends quickly and plan pro-actively. Although, no project manager is expected to be an accountant but a thorough understanding of the “estimated cost process” clearly would be listed as integral. Cost planning is not only vital for your reputation, but also for maintaining strong and healthy relationships with clients.

Estimated costs should take into consideration for the entire lifecycle of the project. A detailed cost breakdown of resources (labour and materials) along with any regulatory implications should be undertaken. The cost analysis process should also insure against other extraneous factors. An estimated cost analysis must include all factors fixed and variable; this will essentially ensure that the entire project runs efficiently, effectively and to budget.

James King is a construction industry expert who has 20 years’ experience in the field of core cutting project management. He writes for Corecut, the UK’s leading diamond drilling and controlled demolition company.

financial reporting, Negotiation, Project Management, Project Management Communications, Project planning

What could possibly go wrong? Irrational fears

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We’ve all had a nightmare at work at some point and project management in its own right is probably home to more war stories than most professions – but how does this affect our lives and perceptions moving forward? For most of us, we learn from our experiences and carry a great deal of battle scars which tend to make us a little more wary if not more prepared when venturing into a new challenge, however sometimes we can let our thoughts and actions go into overdrive and start having irrational fears.

I will share with you an irrational fear I used to have when I worked for a large blue chip business. On a Monday morning – I was tasked with gathering the weekly financial data for output of all the European manufacturing sites. Once I had all the data I had to produce a report of all the figures for a meeting with the heads of sites, company president and other senior managers’. So as you can imagine – this was a task which could not be put to the back of the “to do” list, in all fairness I found the task a bit of a bore but also knew the importance of having the report ready an hour before the video conferencing. I would contact all of the logistics managers across the manufacturing sites every Monday with a friendly email reminder, followed by a call for those who still hadn’t sent over their reports. Now I don’t want to single out a particular site but there was one which was notoriously late with their reports, in fact they were so bad that I would have called at least 3 times after the initial email which never generated a response. I would be patched through to various departments on each call and basically told that the relevant staff had gone for lunch. Sometimes this was mid morning (even with the time difference), so it became a bit of a joke that this site were basically always eating. This is where my irrational fear came about – as I got it in the neck for my report being late and it was always this site which made me late (despite many meetings /conversations and discussions trying to clarify what the issue was at their end) that I began to believe that they were in fact all sat eating ALL DAY on a Monday.

From then on, I have always been very keen to plan project meetings well ahead of deadlines with the manufacturing site in question – even making up deadlines to be well ahead of the real deadlines in a bid to try and get my projects completed on time; it worked and I did just hit my deadlines on projects but the financial reporting never got in on time from them.

I would love to hear of your irrational fears – whether at work or home, sometimes they can prove to be productive.