Project Management Tools

Choose your project management tool

The Center for Project Management in San Ramon, California reports that 99% of commercial software products are not completed on time, within budget or according to specifications and that the average project is underestimated by 285%. Given these statistics, its no surprise that project managers are turning to project management software tools. Project Management tools will help you make the best of the money, time and resources you have for your project.

Considering a tool and utilising it is all well if the efforts are directed in the right areas. Whether a tool is necessary or not will depend on

• The magnitude and complexity of the projects you have to manage
• The number of resources involved
• The time frame of the project and the degree to which the processes are documented
• The complexity and diversity of interdepartmental interfaces and budgets involved
• The project manager’s experience with project management software tools.

Task status, cost reporting and other communication forms are the other considerations.

Project Management Tools
Project management tools are many. The most common categories of project management tools are project planning and estimation tools, project tracking and communication tools, risk management tools and quality management tools. Some project management tool suites, such as ABT’s Results Management Suite, Platinum’s ADvantage and Eagle Ray’s ER Project 1000, offer a complete package of tools to help project leaders manage one or more projects. Individual modules can be purchased and integrated with other project management tools, such as Microsoft Project.

Here's an overview of some of the most common project management tool categories.

Planning, Scheduling, and Reporting
If you've decided on project management software, start the process prior to developing your project plan. This will help make the task of creating a project plan less daunting. Most planning tools help automate the tasks required for an effective project plan by helping you:

• Define project goals, size and scope
  
• Establish tasks and processes
  
• Identify resources (people and tools)
  
• Estimate deadlines and deliverables
  
• Set the budget.

Most project planning tools provide wizards that help you create your plan and use repositories or knowledge bases to help establish estimates. These knowledge bases, which feature data from numerous development projects, help project managers establish sound estimates based on similar projects.

The repositories offered by Platinum Process Continuum and ABT Corp.’s Results Management Suite let corporations capture project knowledge and leverage expenditures across a large project base. Each project leader can add to the repositories as his or her project progresses. Both repositories come with the processes and best practices of leading consultants and corporations. These processes can be customised and saved for future use.

Quality Management
Project management and quality management are greatly intertwined. By defining and continuously improving processes, quality is an integral part of project management. Some project management suites integrate process improvement methodologies, like the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or ISO standards or they let you integrate your own processes. Platinum’s Process Continuum, part of Platinum’s ADvantage package, integrates various best practices into an online-help-style feature, so your team can follow and develop the practices that you’ve established for process improvement.

Risk Management
A must-do for a project manager is identifying what can go wrong and what the resultant impact will be. Some of the leading planning tools feature what if analysis, to help managers estimate all kinds of different scenarios (what if the deadline moves up how many programmers will I need to add to the project? How would adding six developers affect my cost or the other projects I’m managing?) Products like Primavera’s Monte Carlo can take a scenario, simulate the situation and provide a list of probabilities.

Risk management tools, however, are complex and require high levels of expertise.

Project Tracking and Team Communication Tools
Project tracking and communication tools are the everyday help tools of all on the project team. Most project tracking tools help you establish calendars, prioritise activities and, of course, track the team’s progress using Gantt, Pert Charts or more elaborate graphs. More recent tools help you track resources to determine what people or tools, you’ll need for a given task and when they’ll be available.

With the latest versions of project tracking tools, you can publish project views and data to internal web sites so that everybody knows what the status is. Some tools—such as ABT’s Publisher, Welcom’s Spider, Computer Associates’s CA-SuperProject/Net and Platinum’s Advisor, let you tailor the view to the user’s needs by filtering out certain information and concentrating on information that’s relevant to his or her job. Mesa Systems Guild’s Mesa/Vista helps teams collaborate by bringing together information from the various tools used by team members, letting you access all of them via a common web interface.