Project Management Software

Project Management Software Buying Guide

For any business, having a comprehensive project management tool is essential for optimal efficiency and hassle-free operations. Such software helps the managers as well as teams to meet client requirements by effectively managing budgets, time, and resources within the scope constraints.

As a fact, getting the most suitable project management software for your company can prove to be somewhat daunting. This is because of the multitude of tools available in the market, each differing in terms of features and price. Therefore, here are some key features to consider while deciding the right project management software for your firm.

Online or On-Premise Deployment

Broadly, many project management solutions fall into two categories namely, on-premise and online. In case of the former, the software is deployed in the server of your company, which sits in the data center. On the other hand, the online deployment uses the cloud-based technology and is available as the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) by the service providers.

Of the two, the cloud-based ones are evolving rapidly in terms of functions and features, making themselves affordable and reliable. As a result, small to big scale companies are increasingly favoring these online solutions.

Project Management Features

The best project management solution comes with all the essential features such as creating templates, splitting projects into sub-projects, and creating timelines and milestones. Other features to look for include calendars for marking events, critical paths for estimating the best duration to complete a task, cross-project dependencies that affect priorities, issue management, and project hierarchy for organizing a project on multiple levels.

Task Management

This feature set enables creating and managing tasks across projects and teams. Look for a solution that facilitates sub-tasks, task dependencies, private tasks, task importing, allocation to multiple users, and recurring tasks for flawless management. Other important features that may be useful to you include commenting on tasks, setting task dependencies, finalizing task duration, sending task notifications, and creating task templates.

Team Collaboration

This is essential if your team with members separated geographically needs to work together. Most solutions come with an activity streaming feature to keep team members updated by showing recent activities on tasks and projects. Similarly, they also offer wikis, notes, discussion sections, notifications about updates, message exchanges, and whiteboards for brainstorming in real time.

Integration with Email and Other Project Management Apps

One of the best features of any project management software is e-mail integration. This helps in receiving or providing progress reports, creating tasks, and replying to comments or discussions automatically without logging into the system. Apart from that, many online solutions are integrated with other useful apps such as MS Project, MS Office, Google Drive, Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box so that you can easily exchange files with your employees and clients.

Reporting and Scheduling

Because reports are the backbone of any improvement efforts, a business will wish to have a report on all different aspects such as expenses, hours spent on tasks, budget, resources, e-mails, time, and users. Therefore, it is ideal to choose the project management software that can generate more number of reports based on these criteria.

Just like reporting, scheduling has its own significance in the professional life of managers. The scheduling feature should allow arranging tasks and timelines as per the set deadlines per task, view timelines in a Gantt chart, and assigning a task temporarily for determining resource needs for new tasks. Such options make it easy to forecast and manage the resource time.

File Management

Project management is incomplete without document management. Therefore, look for file management features such as sharing files, uploading multiple files, attaching files to tasks, versioning, archiving task-related files in once place, commenting or marking a file, and organizing files as per criteria such as date and version.