Grmena Abstract

Project management is a challenging activity that has to do with 4 constant variables: spending, schedule, duration and quality. A bit more challenging goal is to enchance business processes and resource attribution. The majority of projects employ such recourses as people, funds, and tools to achieve something of value and meet objectives. To work with projects successfully one should handle a number of things. You can see a few of these factors below:

- Goal setting and assessing achievement.

- Managing risks. Take any project and you will see that it involves a lot of uncertainties that should be dealt with.

- Allocating and managing resources.

- Defining the products of the project.

- Overseeing the project from the point of view of who is performing what and at what time.

- Managing quality.

- Dealing with change. Everything changes. All tasks occur in time, so the factor of dynamics should be properly considered.

- Speaking with everybody doing the project.

To deal with these issues you can employ pencil and paper or probably MS EXCEL. However, dedicated project tracking software has a number of significant advantages:

- It makes scheduling easy. The software can automate scheduling calculations. Every resource can possess their own calendar. Managing work-in-progress also becomes not that much of an issue.

- Dealing with a number of projects and managing a set of requirements. Management can use project tracking software to facilitate analysis of several big projects.

- Critical path is clearly visible. The critical path is a critically relevant concept in project management. Should an activity on this path take less or more time, the rest of the project is going to be touched by this change. At the same time other tasks that lie outside the critical path might take less or more time and not change the timing of the whole project.

- Distributing information to project participants. Complicated projects demand a lof of communication. 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?

Project management software could not be appropriate in 100 percent of all cases. The best time to use such software is when you supervisea few big projects. Small projects can be managed using a spreadsheet program which helps you save on overhead costs of handling such complex software.