Complete Project Management Software Guide for Beginners

You may have heard of project management software many times before but do you really know what it is all about? Is it something you should get? Is it something you will benefit from?

In this Project Management Software Guide, I will tell you everything that you need to know about project management software and tools.

What is a Project Management Software?

Project management software is an app, downloadable or online, intended to facilitate the planning, organizing, and management of resource tools and develop resource estimates for a project.

It may include planning tools, organizing tools and even the scheduling tools, such as Microsoft Outlook.

All of these support resource assignment and leveling, critical path analysis, the estimation of activity duration, activity-based accounting, and probability-based simulation, and much more.

Your business have stakeholders and it is expected to provide them useful information. Project management software helps in that too.

With it you can offer your stakeholders an overview of the time it takes for tasks to be completed, workload details, historical information on project progress, as well as information on optimum resource utilization, and cost maintenance.

To help you decide if you really need project management software, evaluate yourself by going through the following work elements:

Planning

Planning sounds simple but it isn’t and you can easily mess up, especially if you don’t have the experience in managing complicated projects.

If you can’t do scheduling right and if you keep guesstimating (and get it wrong) your timelines or the time it takes to complete tasks, you really have to consider using project management software.

Similarly, if you find it difficult allocating resources or funding for different tasks and different stages of the project, it would be better to turn to a project management platform.

More importantly, if you tend to forget important steps or processes in doing a project, you could really use some help from a project management software.

Organizing

Lack of organization is a common problem in project management. It’s easy to lose important project-related documents such as proposals and invoices and fail to coordinate tasks properly, even forgetting some things to do along the way.

You may also encounter instances when you couldn’t find important details pertaining to the project because it was only sent to you via email or as a private message, and you don’t have a note-keeping app on your computer.

You will be getting information and inputs from various sources and you need to make sure that they are organized properly in relation to the planning and accomplishment of tasks.

Organizing information and tasks in a project require more than just common sense and a mastery of your own skills. You have to realize that you have to organize everything not only for yourself but also for others involved.

Information Tracking

A project management software serves as an excellent vessel for planning and operations information.

Even better, this information can be easily organized and presented to be more useful when doing analyses and changes.

If you have difficulties handling, finding, and presenting project-related information, you can certainly benefit from using a good project management software.

It can help you get an overview of the tasks involved, get early warnings on the risks to expect, obtain workload and task planning details, find cost-related information, and gather various other details without having to go through various documents.

The information you need can be searched, organized, processed, and presented within hours or even minutes.

Communication

Project management software can also be useful if communicating is a problem. Communication issues are particularly well-pronounced in settings involving creatives or meticulously demanding project stakeholders.

By using a project management software that can be synchronized among users or by using a web or cloud-based one, project information and updates can be easily shared. As such, inputs from those involved in the project, especially the client or stakeholders, can also be quickly taken into account.

There can be dynamic project movement as progress becomes trackable in real-time and tweaks or changes are introduced without major disruptions (instead of doing revisions after a major process has already been completed).

Trends in project management may change year after year but the need to have good planning, organizing, information management and communication are bound to remain constant.

There are many benefits in getting a project management software you may not realize yet so consider doing an assessment with the help of the discussions above.