How To Choose Project Management Software

How to choose project management software

I doubt that there is a need in pointing out the benefits of using a project management software, in today’s hard time, especially for small businesses it is a great opportunity to optimize their project management costs and increase their companies effectiveness. But there are hundreds of tools to choose from, how to find that right one that will do the best for your company? Well check out my suggestions below what you should look for in project management software.

As you probably already know project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. Here are the key things that you should keep in mind when choosing the software that suits your needs best:

• Project Task Management – how convenient is it to manage tasks with this software? Can you easily organize and schedule tasks to your project team?
• Document Sharing – even small projects usually have loads of documents, requirement reviews, specifications, agreements etc. so fast and convenient file sharing between project team is a must I believe
• Resource management – can you delegate people and other resources that are related to the project? What about resource working times? Most importantly, can you track resource cost?
• Communication and Collaboration – communication is probably the most important part in any project, so if your project management tool can’t provide with great communication and collaboration features your project is doomed to fail. I would look for features like wikis, project blogs, maybe even closed project forums or twitter groups, the tool should have a good email integration as well, video conferencing.
• Project tracking features – it should fast and convenient to get an overview of the project, project baseline should simply but effectively outlined; you should be able to track the progress of your project (ideal, when it is done automatically, when your team members are finishing tasks, though manual control is a must as well); ability to track your teams project work in real time.
• Deliverables and reports – project schedule view, the best things of course are interactive Gantt charts, but very few tools offer them; ability to generate project reports real time, like for example time spent on preparing a site design by the designer etc.; critical tasks, project risks and issues
• Security – you should be certain that at least 128 bit High Grade Encryption and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is used to secure your data using server authentication and data encryption.

I could go on and one, but the fact is that every company, every business, no matter big or small, they are unique and so are their business processes and so are their requirements for project management software. But is always possible to find the solution that suits your need, even if you can’t find, there are tools that offer fully customizable project management tools like http://www.comindwork.com

And here are a couple project management tools where to start your research:

http://www.basecamphq.com/

http://www.activecollab.com/

http://projects.zoho.com

http://goplan.info/

http://www.teamworkpm.net/

http://www.huddle.net/

http://www.wrike.com/

http://www.5pmweb.com/

http://www.liquidplanner.com/