How To Choose the Right Project Management Software?

Here are some significant indications your business requires project management software:

• Projects are often hampered due to redundant communication issues, and tasks get forgotten by team members.
• Currently, project management is carried out through confusing and non-user-friendly spreadsheets.
• Employees miss deadlines on individual tasks and team projects, because of a lack of transparency.
• Communication among team members and managers is poor leading to incompetency in reporting on the progress of projects or individual tasks.
• There is confusion regarding the specific roles of each team member and this often leads to overlapping and redundancy in work

Implementing an employee monitoring software with project management features can optimize the entire process, and enable your team to produce results of higher quality in a lesser time. The project management software permits you to maintain and follow multiple projects together, making it effortless to monitor deadlines and individual employees’ progress.

Things to consider while choosing project management software?

These are a few of the most significant points you should examine when choosing employee monitoring software or project management software.

Size of your organization

A big company has different needs from project management or employee monitoring than a small startup. It’s essential to consider each use case before settling on a solution.

Scalability

As your company grows, your project management and employee monitoring requirements will also evolve. You need to make sure that your employee monitoring software can keep up.

Pain points

It can be valuable to identify the project management and employee monitoring challenges faced by your company. By understanding your pain points, you can find the project management software that is more suited for you.

Ease of use

If you don’t select an employee monitoring software that is complicated for your workers to understand and use, you’ll end up amplifying the difficulties you already bear.

Organizing the work is a challenge for all people rather than completing the work. When it is project management, organizing the task with all the available resources is sometimes hectic and it needs a dedicated project management software that allows effective collaboration and interaction between the team. This wakes up in our mind how to choose the right project management software.

In this article, we will look into the factors that will help you in choosing the right project management software.

Desklog is a free project tracking software and Employee Time Tracking Software

Before looking on how to choose project management software, you need to know the below information:

Project management became ineffective with the spreadsheet

Spreadsheets were the most widely used tool for any project related solutions. As the project managers need to be deeply involved in the successful execution of the project, there will be continuous updates during each phase of the project and this has to be shared to or interacted with the team via email. It became tedious and ineffective to use spreadsheets further.

When the team needed more interaction, collaborative work to be done, dedicated and efficient project management software needs to replace the spreadsheet usage.

Why you should choose the right project management software

Project managers try to manage their complex projects manually or by using ineffective ways like using spreadsheets. Your project may involve never-ending issues, no proper resource and risk management, sometimes not covering the deadline of the project.

Choosing the right project management software extends its usage from all the aspects like organizing the work, assigning the task, planning and executing the project, resource management, reporting and cost control by effective collaboration and interaction of the team. Additionally, it enhances the transparency of the team members and satisfied stakeholders.

Check how project management software empowers your project

This makes the project managers take the right decisions from the initial stages of the project to the final stage. It enables them to a foothold business process and it answers all the queries of management like what should be carried out during any particular time, how it should be performed and who should perform and it also enables to fix the deadline of the project execution.

As it helps the project managers in all aspects of project management and also helps to authorize the activities involved in the project, the right and efficient tool manages, organizes the project more effectively. To streamline the entire process of the business, you need to deploy and leverage the right tool.

The right project management software is very crucial in the project management to improve the overall productivity and this will help the project managers to accomplish the project more successfully.

How to Choose the Right Project Management Software

A step by step guide on certain factors for deciding how to select the best project management software.

1. Sketch your needs

You can choose the right project management software after identifying your requirements. This gives you a clear picture to select accordingly.
Here your team should support and be ready to accept the new way of managing your project.

What requirements should be considered when selecting project management tools for an organization is given below:

Identify the limitations of your existing system

Suppose you have your existing project management tool, you need to know the limitations of the tool.

The limitations could be with the following features:

• Any problem facing with scheduling and planning the task
• Allocating the resources and streamlining the task
• Tracking the work progress
• Monitoring and managing the resources
• Effective reporting solutions
• Any issue of interacting or communicating with the team for work collaboration

To allocate, estimate and manage resources and tasks you need to switch over to an efficient project management software.

What do you require in a new tool?

Before shifting from existing tool to the new tool, compare the features and list all the features which are required in your existing tool and you need to understand how well the features of the new tool can be implemented in your project.

Have a look at the project management software features

You can also look at whether any customization options, level of access, screen monitoring options available with the features of the new tool.

You need to know whether these features will be suitable for each phase of the project like planning, scheduling, reporting, etc. Check all the terms and conditions of the new tool that comply with the terms legally.

Compatible with the latest project management methodology

There are several methodologies or approaches to manage the software project. The latest and the existing methodologies should be supported by the new tool without changing any approaches.

The users of the new project management tool

You need to identify the users of the new project management tool. It is equally important when compared to the features of the project management tool.

Analyze your stakeholders, their requirements, project team size. If it is an in house project you require a normal approach rather than a professional tool. If it is a very big and complex project, it is always better to choose a professional tool with more features like ERP software.

2. Look for other options

Once you have identified the feature requirements, users, compatibility you will be able to search the best project management software accordingly. You can collect the top project management tools from the reviews, recommendations from colleagues, the social media community, trade magazines or by researching via any search engines.

The more you search for the efficient project management software tool, you will end up with a wide range of tools from which you choose as per your requirements.

Once the list is created, you will be able to shorten the list by testing their services or by considering the advantages and features, if the services are affordable.

Check whether any service is falling out of your budget range and also not supporting your existing project methodologies, you can discard such service providers from the list.

3. Test the new tool and assess against your requirements

Once you have shortened the list of service providers, you have to test all the services and evaluate as per your requirements of project management features. Evaluating project management software is a very difficult task to get solutions out of the list of service providers.

You can always try the demo of the service providers. It is always better to try a demo of all the shortlisted service providers. The demo picturizes how it works but you can also verify whether it matches all your requirements.

There are several service providers which offer free trials for a certain limited period or limited accounts. If not provided, you can request the service provider to offer so that you can have a trial of the project management tool.

It is very essential to test the new tool by emulating the real process with the new tool. For this, you need to collect your client and team feedback since they are going to use your product frequently. Collect the feedback and address the issues faced by them to fix any problem.

Exact evaluation is very crucial in this phase, you can try all the demos of the shortlisted service providers and create a report based on the evaluation. Rank the performance of all the shortlisted providers with the help of your team members and client’s feedback. This will make you choose from the list easily.

Data security is also the main factor to be considered along with the requirement matches. While working with your clients it is very important to maintain confidentiality and their trust in your business process. Client data should be secured to avoid a negative impact on your business.

4. Estimate the cost to implement and adopt

Once you have rated the service providers, estimate the cost of the project6 management software tool.

It varies from one service provider to other service providers. Analyze how affordable the service is when compared to the benefits of the service provider. Whether it offers good payment options. Check whether the subscription is suitable for your requirements or is it supporting trimestrial payments.

Know how much does it cost to build project management software

While estimating the cost, check whether the implementation cost will benefit you in the later stage i.e the cost to adopt or whether it enhances your overall productivity and profit on investing in this new tool.

Also, see to it that you don’t compromise team communication and collaboration for the cost involved to implement and adapt the project management tool.

5. Final Implementation

This is the final stage to choose the right project management software. This is the implementation of the software into your project.

During the implementation phase of the software, you need to plan how your team members will start working on the new tool. It is always better to conduct training sessions to train your team members to use the new solution.

Conclusion

Hope in this article, you will be able to understand how to choose the right project management software.

Consider the above steps to wisely find the right project management software. Only the best project management software will be able to take you to the peak of project management.

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