3 – Essential Features for Project Management Software

Project Management Software: – Do you tend to drive your projects on sight? Every day, you lose precious time classifying your employees’ messages and searching for information that cannot be found. Your working papers are out of date and errors occur.

As you know, project management is a complex activity that consists of several stages, brings together many actors and regroups multiple parameters. It is therefore impossible to have everything constantly in mind unless it is a machine, or to have a minimum of organization.

Today finished the wrong project management! Project management software is a computerized solution that facilitates and optimizes project management. Thanks to them, you have no excuses for not being an organized, efficient and effective project manager.

Online, often free or inexpensive, the project management software is an indispensable tool to help you realize your projects. Simple, flexible and functional, it promotes collaborative work and allows you to easily plan and follow the evolution of your projects. With this tool, you have control over all aspects of your project. So you have every interest in using it.

Features of Project Management Software

There is much project management software. It is up to you to choose one adapted to your needs depending on the size of your project. To help you in your choice, here are the three essential features that a project management software package must include.

1. Planning and Monitoring of Activities

This is one of the main features of the project management software. You can plan all tasks of the project, classify and prioritize them, assign a deadline, distribute them among the different teams and track their progress.

Depending on the size of your project, planning is more or less complex. The project management software allows you to:

• Be organized 
• Make decisions more quickly
• Know the dependence of the tasks on each other
• Perform urgent priority tasks
• Efficiently distribute the workload between the project team
• Foster collaboration among team members

Manage any delays and delays that affect the timeline of the project.

Most project management software incorporates the Gantt chart, the essential tool for planning and monitoring your project. It allows you to visualize the different stages of your project and improve your time management.

2. Control of Costs

In order to control costs and respect the budget allocated to the project, you must efficiently manage your time and resources. Good software helps you accomplish your goals and allows you to complete the project on time and on budget.

With project management software, you follow the workload of your team: you know who is available and who is overworked. You optimize task management and save time.

On the other hand, it is up to you, the project manager, to assign the roles and functions to each team member, to specify the requirements to be met and the constraints to be respected, and to train all of your team members and collaborators in the use of the software. You are the thinking head of the project and you are in charge of its organizational aspect. Project management software is only your implementation tool. It is there to assist you and to facilitate the work to the whole project team.

3. Collaboration and Management of Information Flows

One of the main advantages of project management software is that it promotes collaborative work. Thanks to it, you can easily, quickly and in real time share all the information about the project with the various stakeholders:

• List of tasks;
• Document sharing;
• Wiki (sharing and knowledge management);
• Collaborative messaging to instantly trade online;
• Project schedule to track the availability of your employees;
• Presentation of the time required to carry out a task and a summary of the hours already worked;
• Visualization of close deadlines and possible delays

Each member of the team therefore has access to the information it needs in order to carry out the mission entrusted to it. You no longer waste your time searching for the data and documents you need. Everything is perfectly organized, classified and easy to access.

Another advantage is that the software can also work with independent tools (such as Google Drive or Yahoo Mail) and be available as an application so that you can use it from your Smartphone or tablet as needed.

The Benefits of Project Management Software are many:

• You save time by centralizing all project data.
• You respect your deadlines by planning your tasks and optimizing the distribution of your resources.
• You promote the collaborative aspect.
• You communicate more effectively with all project stakeholders.
• You better manage your priorities by closely following your due dates.
• Your files and data are accessible to everyone and secure.
• You navigate through an ergonomic and simple interface that offers a quick grip.