Tag Archives: Project Management Software

guest blogger, Project Management Software

Advantages and Disadvantages of using a Free Project Management Software

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Projects are a sequence of some planned activities which an organization undertakes for the attainment of some specific objectives. Accomplishment of a project will likely result in monetary, commercial, intellectual, organizational, social or other gains for the organization.

A project has to be researched and planned about before execution. In online project management important aspects like the team members, budgetary allocation, starting date, closing date, tasks, activities, responsibilities and duties have to be properly defined and documented. The sponsors, consumers and other stakeholders have to be determined and effective communication has to be maintained with them. Every minor detail which is going to play a significant part in a project’s execution is given due attention.PM Software

A project manager is appointed as the head of a project who is going to track, control and oversee the operations involved in a project. He is responsible for the conduct of the project and has to play an active role in coordinating and organizing men, resources and other processes involved in a project.

A project manager has to arrange meetings, read emails, inform members, review progress reports, meet and brief the sponsors and communicate with the customers. Managing these tasks manually can be cumbersome and can result in some serious flaws in communication and operations of a project.

Online Project Management Software are the tools of assistance which help a project manager in performing his duties diligently and with more control.  Project Management Softwares can perform a variety of tasks like documentation, communication, arranging tasks lists, sending email notifications, arrange to-dos and highlight milestones with the help of some useful features contained in them such as Calendars, Dashboards, Gantt charts, etc.

These Project Management Softwares are extremely useful tools in managing projects, but organizations have to shell out a huge sum of money for using them.

Providers of such software spend million of dollars in their research and try to recover the costs by offering them at a huge price.

Only the organizations which are financially well off can afford these.

The organizations which are new and are in not so good financial health cannot go for them due to their high price. But their projects are also too complex and in need of such highly priced software. But where is the solution.

Free Project Management Softwares have been specifically designed for these kind of organizations.

All they have to do is to visit the site of a free project management software provider, download it and install in their organizations and use them.

But these free software have their own share of problems and limitations.

A free project management software might be providing some very basic features which may not serve an organization well enough or they might be full of bugs which can put additional financial burden on the organization.

But at the same time, there are some very useful and unique free project management software which have some very useful features which cannot be matched by even paid software.

Another disadvantage of using these free software is that there is no provider support available when needed. An organization might come across situations when it needs provider support, especially when it faces some technical problems or if it needs to enhance the functionality of a free software. In these cases, there is no help available from the provider’s side. **This can result in a major problem at times when an organization has spent a considerable amount of time in using this and cannot shift to other software at a short notice.

Organizations can also switch to a free software on a trial basis. If an organization is thinking about using project management software for the first time, it is a nice idea to start with free software. Once they get the experience in using them, they can switch to paid software for better productivity in the long run.

It is a great practice to read a lot of reviews about the free software to choose any free software. By reading other users experience, you can make up your mind about choosing a particular software and how it can be of benefit to your organization.

Now the question arises why a company which is pumping million of dollars in research for inventing a new project management software is offering it free.

This might be a marketing strategy to popularize it. When a lot of organizations start using it, the providers can come up with a new and paid offer.

An organization wanting to go for a project management software has to analyze and study which software it should opt for paid or free. Only a truthful analysis can be a better guide for an organization in choosing the project management software that can prove productive for its working.

 

Sharon is a business manager of a ProofHub.com, a web based project management software that provides features like discussions, time tracking, file sharing, inbuilt browser chat and more. Her interest includes blogging, traveling and exploring new places.

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 Scheduling, Project Management Software

Project Management vs. Task Management Software: What to Choose?

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Increase productivity. Save time. Get organized.

Both task and project management software share these three goals. To make that happen, they both offer features for collaboration, coordination, status-tracking and planning. On the surface, they often look similar, but despite these similarities, there are certain differences in the company’s needs that they address.

So how do you decide which one is best for you? Just check out our short comparison below and pick the type of tool that suits you best!

Task Management Software

Task management tools, by and large, are about organizing, assigning and prioritizing ongoing activities. These tasks may or may not have deadlines, and they don’t involve complex scheduling. For example, a journalist handling multiple articles can see each of them as a task and then cross them off as they are completed.

Task management software can help to keep employees focused on priority tasks and make juggling multiple responsibilities less overwhelming, as they can more easily decide what to work on next. All the workers need to do is work down the prioritized task list.

Task management software may be a good match if:

  • Your goal is to better prioritize your tasks and your team’s tasks.
  • You need a place to track an individual’s or group’s “to do” list.
  • Your tasks are not dependent on each other.

Schedule

Project Management Software

Project management tools are more about scheduling, setting deadlines and tracking progress on a bigger scale. Sure, you still have individual tasks, but when those tasks are part of a larger project, you need to complete them in a particular sequence. This sequence of tasks is heading toward defined milestones, marking the completion of the project’s major stages or the whole project.

So while an individual journalist might go with task management to make sure he turns his articles in on time, the managing editor needs to think about how the deadlines for those articles affect the deadlines for the department editor to proof the article, the photographer to shoot images to accompany the piece, the layout editor to plan where the article will fit and the printer to produce the final magazine. And the sequence of all their actions eventually leads to the big milestone, i.e., the publication of the monthly issue.

Some of these tasks may be worked on concurrently (the photographer and layout editor can do their jobs before the department editor delivers the final draft), but others are dependent on the previous task’s completion to move ahead (the printer can’t do his job until everything else is complete).

Project management software helps you to see these dependencies more clearly and set milestones that a project (or its phase) is heading toward. By monitoring the progress every step of the way, you can plan ahead more accurately and carefully manage your team’s resources.

Project management software may be the best way to organize work for your company if:

  • Your goal is to better schedule and monitor the overall progress of projects with defined due dates.
  • You’re managing the workload of multiple people performing different tasks for the same project.
  • Your tasks are dependent on each other.

What’s Right for Your Company?

If you’re just working on a few tasks, you might think that task management software is all you’ll ever need, but you never know what the future will bring. Maybe those tasks will evolve into a connected project. And while those who use project management software may be more concerned with the bigger picture, they still need to keep an eye on the details and progress of separate tasks.

That’s why choosing an all-in-one tool that incorporates the best of task and project management features can be the most efficient (and scalable!) solution for a company that wants to manage its work more efficiently and, therefore, achieve more!

Change, guest blogger, News, Technology

Changing with the Times – ERM & CRM Systems

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The terms Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) have been buzzwords in modern and efficient businesses for some years now. However implementing change can be difficult when there are in-built procedures that are working, but may not be as efficient as your competitor’s streamlined system. Jon Mell from IBM says there are some environments that still operate with huge mainframes that are unlikely to ever migrate. Yet innovation is the only way to remain competitive today and resistance to change will have a detrimental impact on business.

The problem most businesses face is accepting the initial cost expenditure in order to reap the rewards in the long-term. There is always a problem accepting that something needs to change when there seems to be little wrong with existing systems. In many situations it is hard to attribute a rise in costs because of extra marketing and sales efforts to lowering levels of competitiveness. It is easy to assume our businesses are suffering from the effects of the global downturn and shortening margins are an industry problem.

This is the best time to bring in some business analysis so a suitable design solution can be presented that can highlight where your business is haemorrhaging profits and falling behind similar businesses chasing the same clients. Data migration is almost always possible in modern systems and migration presents a perfect time for a remodelling of your data structure and this provides opportunities to streamline and improve efficiency.

In a world where data accessibility is improving productivity in workforces, empowering employees to implement change and giving leaders the tools to monitor and improve, the trend to encapsulate data in a decision centric environment is more critical in competitive marketplaces than ever before.  Some businesses will only need help on project management for specific initiatives, whereas others would require a complete design and build for an enterprise wide evolution. Whichever it is, there are obviously many ways to squeeze maximum profits from any operation.

Many companies have adopted ERM and CRM systems in the last ten years, but a lot has changed in computing in that time. Ten years ago, social networks were a concept and ten years before that we had no internet worth speaking of. Technology is constantly improving our lives in every way and businesses that are able to benefit from the right attitude to change will profit as a result.

Speaking to a professional who are specialist Netsuites consultants can give you a better idea of how a change can bring massive improvements in efficiency and profitability.