To choose project management software, consider each provider’s costs and additional fees, overall feature and functionality offerings, reporting, integration options, required features versus feature overload, user reviews, and customer support. In this section, we walk you through how to approach this assessment.
Basic features of project management software
Project management software has the basic features that most projects need to be successful. However, additional or unique features make some software options better for certain teams or companies. It’s important to do your research to understand what unique features can make your project more successful based on your team approach, type of business, or type of project. Some commonly used project management tools and features include:
- Tools for budget planning: Budgeting tools allow you to load a set budget, then track costs and invoices to compare project costs against the planned budget. By tracking this variance, you can determine if you have a budget problem. Financial forecasting tools further help ensure that you don’t go over budget or, worse, have to stop the project due to lack of funds.
- Resource management tools: Resource utilization tools allow you to plan, track, and record where resources—such as your talent—are used in project execution. By doing this, it helps to detect gaps in availability or when certain team members are overused (risk of burnout) and then adjust resource allocation to prevent problems.
- Task management features: Task management features include automations (which remove redundant tasks from your to-do list). Examples include automating invoicing, identifying critical project changes, and managing project workflows. Other task management tools include dashboards (to visualize the progress of tasks through their stages to completion), calendars, timeline views, scheduling, task tracking, and task prioritization.
- Features of risk management: Common project risks include completing over budget, with an outcome of lower quality than expected, or not completing on time. Many tools within project management software can help you balance competing demands to complete a project as planned, including critical path charts, checklists, planning tools, cost breakdowns, cost variance reports, and timelines.
- Reports and Charts: Project management software provides digital charts to plan, monitor and adjust the timelines, budgets and quality of your projects as needed. For example, Kanban charts show tasks on a timeline and their status. Gantt charts also provide an overview of the project timeline along with its phases, tasks and deliverables. You can collect or input data into these graphs to update in real time.
- Mobile application: Mobile apps help teams easily track, manage and deliver project deliverables from anywhere, helping to keep all members up-to-date no matter where they are. Real-time knowledge can help them make smart decisions that keep projects moving forward on schedule. The apps also offer personalized content so team members know the tasks, activities and milestones they need to complete each day.
- Integrations: Integrations help improve the performance of project management software and meet your needs. Slack and Google Drive integrations, for example, allow team members to collaborate within the software on project deliverables. Stripe also allows your team to invoice clients for deliverables. Many project management software offers hundreds or even thousands of integration options.
- Client management tools: Many project management softwares offer various features to involve your clients in the execution of the project, keep them informed about the status of the project and maintain a professional relationship. Such tools include video conferencing tools, invoicing, and the ability to add clients as users to project management software while maintaining control over what they can and cannot see.
- Collaboration tools: Many project management platforms offer tools to help project team members work seamlessly together, even across locations. Some come in the form of integrations, like Slack. Others, however, are built-in. Such built-in tools often include shared calendars, group chats, document sharing, chat forums, and team email.
- Demonstrations and feedback from the team: Project management software may have all the features you need, but if your team isn’t happy with it, it may be worse at project execution. For this reason, many software programs offer demos that your team can use for testing, even allowing you to pilot a real project. From there, you can collect team feedback to find out the software’s suitability for your team and needs.
Ease of use
Look for tools and designs that can help your organization use software more easily, despite obstacles such as little knowledge of best practices or the overwhelming number of tasks that must be completed on a daily basis. Choosing the right easy-to-use features for your organization depends on many factors, including the technical savvy and size of your company. However, some easy-to-use features commonly used by small and medium-sized businesses are:
- Templates: Project management software templates incorporate project management best practices.
- Learning materials and opportunities: Software knowledge bases allow project managers and team members to learn how to expertly implement software features based on layman’s definitions, videos, and more. Demonstrations are another opportunity to learn through often live interaction with software experts who know how to present its features and answer questions in layman’s terms.
- Automation: Automation makes complex tasks instantaneous and effortless by taking repetitive and often tedious tasks out of human hands. Less hands-on interaction makes software involvement in project management more manageable. Preset automation recipes make this easy-to-use feature even more intuitive.
- Mobile applications: Logistically, mobile applications facilitate the use of software by facilitating the collection and dissemination of necessary information and helping team members complete tasks in a timely manner. Project specialists in the field, for example, can update relevant project status information without having to hold the project to return to the office to enter such information.
Reporting and analytics
Reporting within project management software presents key data in a meaningful way to help you understand the success or needed improvements in your projects. The best project management software offers dashboards that break down data in the form of charts, tables, and the like to make gathering insights from data immediate and intuitive.
Determine the types of key performance indicators (KPIs) you may need to track and the types of reports needed to help you track them. Then, when evaluating the software you’re considering, explore its reporting and analytics capabilities and dashboards to determine if they have what you need.
Common reports that can be helpful in project management software include project status, health, team availability, risk, variance, and timeline reports. Common KPIs include percentage of tasks completed, return on investment (ROI), schedule variance, budgeted vs. actual hours, and budgeted project value.
Then assess whether the software will continue to meet your needs by investigating whether you can customize the reports or dashboards to meet the needs as they arise. Customization options may include the ability to add or remove columns or create new report views.
Customer reviews
Customer reviews offer real-world insight into what it’s like to use the software you’re considering and do business with its vendor. Search for software you’re considering on technical rating sites like Capterra and TrustRadius. Read reviews from past and present users. As you do this, you’ll likely find out what problems the software encounters, hidden costs that aren’t highlighted on the service provider’s website, and how the software compares to competing solutions.
User support
Access to quality customer support ensures that, in the event of a software failure, your entire project is not interrupted. To learn more about your chosen provider’s customer support, look for it on review sites like TrustRadius and check the company’s plans to understand what will be available to you and when. At the very least, try to ensure that support is responsive during your normal business hours and through the medium your team is accustomed to using.
Company Size Considerations
As you look at the feature set, remember that startups have different needs in project management software than large enterprises. For example, enterprise companies may need to manage projects with execution steps that span the globe, while startup projects are more likely to span one or two locations. Demonstrations can help you determine which tools are useful for the size of your organization, and which will unnecessarily create a steeper learning curve.
While one software plan or tool may be best for your organization at your current size, those needs will likely change as you grow. For example, as you grow, you may need software or a plan with greater automation capabilities to scale operations or a larger file storage capacity. So while it’s important to choose software without unnecessary features, it’s just as important to choose one that will continue to meet your feature needs as they grow.
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