What Makes a Great Project Management Software?

What Makes a Great Project Management Software?
By Arup Maity

Here are a few key takeaways on what constitutes a great project management software tool, based on what I picked up from my last 20 or so years of project management experience – in construction, real estate, business consulting and lately, software development – and roughly 12 years of product development experience.

• 9 knowledge areas of PMI: Schedule, Cost, Scope, Risk, Quality, Communication, Procurement, Human Resource & Integration. For a project to succeed, the tool should help with more than just managing scope and communication and cover these areas, to avoid a myopic view of project management.

• Agile vs. PMI: Agile, through its innovative means, reduces or eliminates the need for close monitoring of all the 9 areas, however we still need to keep an eye on them and the system should provide an integrated way to track those that need to be monitored. The software should also provide the capability to handle different project management methodologies in one system rather than forcing users to choose one over another.

• Communication & Coordination: The key to successful project management is close communication with tasks at hand. This holds true in agile, particularly in how it eliminates documentation and other heavier monitoring. However, with larger and geographically-distributed teams, communication and coordination can become a major challenge. Unless your tool takes care of this in an integrated manner, your project can easily spin out of control.

• Project Tasks vs. Organizational Tasks: Every member of an organization needs to handle more than just project tasks, even though that might be their primary responsibility. In smaller organizations, there is always set of tasks that are strategically important but not part of any project. Most PM tools miss out in managing both kinds of tasks in a synchronized manner, to help people in their daily responsibilities.

• Ease of Use: I have used some very sophisticated software, but they are so difficult to install, implement and understand that a major part of my time goes into learning them. Add to that the fact that human error is highly likely during use because of their complexity. A good tool should be intuitive enough, should not take more than couple of hours to get used to, and should feel natural while using on day-to-day execution of a project. The social aspects in software today are also very interesting to induce improved usage and communication, the latter being the key to success.

I can go on with more points to add to the list, but that might just dilute the value of each item above. There is not one way to handle all projects well, and some models like the Diamond Model for project analysis can be a helpful tool to understand and segregate the sub-modules/systems by its profile and manage appropriately to improve success rate. Of course this is not up to the software to analyze and decide, but the people in charge of the project. However, when project leaders decide on a methodology, the tool should provide enough flexibility to manage the project and its parts in an integrated manner, and the tool should be suitable for the increasingly global team structure.

Arup Maity is president at Xamun Inc. – a company specializing in project management products.