Project Management Tools - What You're Missing is SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN What You HavePosted by Slater Tucker on April 24th, 2021 For anyone in the business of managing projects, the question of what kind of project management tools to use looms large. You want to make sure you use the tools that reflect how your business works, but you also don't want to find yourself building your project around the tools you selected. Simultaneously, you don't want to end up getting tools that don't embrace the entire scope of your work. Picking Basecamp Management is tough, but there's no reason to think it isn't doable. Actually, project management tools are fairly easy to understand, in a way: you don't have to pay much attention to features when you can look at philosophy. Basically, you can find three schools of thought: Do the right thing for one particular group: so there is a giant construction project? Oracle Primavera may be the only choice you can opt for. Sure, it's ugly, it's clunky, it's slow, and it's pricey, but you need project management tools that get the job done, and it's going to at least do that. Tools like this are a last resort. Do everything, for everybody: creating a house? Drafting a law? Building an e-commerce website? Some people think you ought to use the same project management tools for each among those tasks. And somebody has given those individuals what they want. Broad, maximalist project management tools can certainly give you all you want, but they're also going to bog you down. You don't want to spend all of your time mired in someone else's software bureaucracy, just because they spent all their time adding features and none of their time making certain those features added up. Execute a simple thing well: here we go! Avoid the project management tools which are built for just one particular industry (unless you have to): they'll just make you turn out cookie-cutter projects. Don't use project management software created for nobody in particular; you'll just spend all of your time wrangling them into doing everything you wanted in the first place. Instead, use project management tools that one thing, and take action really, really well. How can you tell that easy project management tools are best? The solution is, well, simple: each and every time you work on a project, you will need to spend some time taking into consideration the project's long-term goals, your personnel issues, etc. So you have to spend some time running the project -- doing the day-to-day allocation of tasks and people. It's the day-to-day work items that tools for project management are likely to make easier, but they often fall flat. Every new feature means additional time users spend scratching their heads, or integrating disparate tools, instead of actually doing their work. And that point quickly adds up to project delays, cost overruns, and worse. The first step in any project is to avoid getting swamped -- and the ultimate way to do that is to start with the right tools.Like it? Share it! More by this author |