Project Management Tools - What You're Missing is 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. read more intend to make sure you utilize the tools that reflect how your business works, but you also don't want to end up building your project around the tools you selected. Concurrently, you don't want to end up getting tools that don't embrace the entire scope of your work. Picking the right project management tools is tough, but there's no reason to think it's not doable. In fact, project management tools are simple enough to understand, in ways: you don't have to pay much attention to features when you're able to look at philosophy. Basically, there are three schools of thought: Do the right thing for one particular group: so you've got a giant construction project? Oracle Primavera may be the only choice you can go with. Sure, it's ugly, it's clunky, it's slow, and it's really pricey, nevertheless, 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 everyone: creating a house? Drafting a law? Building an e-commerce website ? Some folks think you ought to use the same project management tools for each and every one of those tasks. And somebody has given those people what they want. Broad, maximalist project management tools can simply give you all you want, but they're also likely to bog you down. You don't want to spend all your time mired in someone else's software bureaucracy, just because they spent almost all their time adding features and none of their time making sure those features added up. Do a simple thing well: here we go! Don't use the project management tools that are built for one particular industry (if you don't 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 to begin with. Instead, use project management tools that one thing, and do it really, really well. How can you tell that easy project management tools are best? The solution is, well, simple: every time you work on a project, you have to spend a certain amount of time taking into consideration the project's long-term goals, your personnel issues, etc. And you also have to spend some time running the project -- doing the day-to-day allocation of tasks and folks. It's the day-to-day work stuff that tools for project management are supposed to make easier, however they often fall flat. Every new feature means additional time users spend scratching their heads, or integrating disparate tools, rather than actually doing their work. And that time quickly results in project delays, cost overruns, and worse. The first step in any project is to avoid getting swamped -- and the best way to do that is to start with the right tools.Like it? Share it! More by this author |