How does one track your projects

July 3rd, 2008

Any project manager works with four elements: cost, schedule, duration and producing a satisfactory result. A bit more challenging objective is to optimize work procedures and resource distribution. Take your project and you will see that it employes labour, finance and tools to produce end results. There are a number of things that are vital for effective project management. A few of them can be found below:

- Setting goals and conducting analysis.

- Dealing with risk. Any project has a number of uncertainties that have to be accounted for.

- Assigning and managing resources.

- Determining the outcomes of the project.

- Managing what is going on: giving out jobs, supervising the work-in-progress.

- Managing adequate quality.

- Handling instability. Circumstances change. The majority of projects occur in time, so the factor of change has to be accounted for.

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

To manage these issues you can use pencil and paper or perhaps MS EXCEL. Nevertheless, specialized project tracking software has a lot of important advantages:

- It makes scheduling easy. Duration can be calculated by the program depending on the workload information. You can create work calendars for various employees. Managing work-in-progress also becomes not that much of an issue.

- Managing several projects with various requirements. Productivity tracking software allows project managers and executives to observea larger picture and collect information on a number of projects.

- Critical path becomes nicely observable. The critical path of a project consists of tasks that directly influence the real length of the project. Should a task on the critical path take less or more time, the whole project will be touched by this change. Whereas other activities that are not on the critical path can take less or more time without changing the duration of the whole project.

- Distributing information among the team members. The more complicated are the project needs, the more of them have to be discussed. Groupware productivity tracking software allows each participant to be on the same page every time.

Is it always a must to use task tracking software?

Like any instrument, project tracking software has its issues. It delivers the best result when used for a number of big projects. Little projects can be supervised using MS Excel which helps you save on overhead costs of employing such complex software.

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