What is Project Management Software (PMS)?
Project management software refers to various programs designed to facilitate project administration. From simple tools such as checklists or calendars that help organize smaller jobs to comprehensive packages that enable oversight over all aspects of a project's lifespan.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Project Management Software?
The features of an application only tell you some of its benefits. You'll likely see some benefits when you start using project management tools in your company:
- Project planning is important
- Communication is easy
- Project completion is faster
- Better budgeting
Project Planning Is Important
As a company owner, you must maintain an overall long-term view of all business projects you undertake. By doing this, the odds of avoiding common pitfalls increase considerably, and your team can work more cohesively while staying focused along their journey - project management software provides this high-level overview and ensures they stay on task as necessary.
Communication Is Easy
Maintaining an office team requires an effective tracking system to manage every member effectively and efficiently. Project management software makes this easier with task management, communication between team members, client history overview, and eliminating email use as it keeps everything under one roof. You're freed up from distractions while remaining organized.
Project Completion Is Faster
Project management software can assist in staying organized and on schedule with projects. With built-in task management tools such as task reporting and collaboration features, you can easily achieve your goals while keeping an eye on project progress status updates.
Better Budgeting
It's simple to estimate the cost of your project if you have a well-organized plan and know how your time will be spent. You can combine this information with your billing data to get an exact estimate before the project begins.
Project Management Features that Will Shoot Up Project Performance
Project managers must perform numerous duties throughout a workday - from running meetings and planning budgets, managing resources and scheduling resources, and analyzing reports. Their workload may become burdensome on busy workdays. Project management software offers project managers an effective solution for automating tedious tasks while overseeing an international group.
As much as we'd love to find one tool that fulfills all our needs and features, the sheer range of available PM software makes selecting one a daunting challenge. Many software packages focus on tracking, organizing, and improving team collaboration.
Consider which features are necessary to effectively oversee your project and ensure no critical elements slip past you when searching for software solutions. Such features of high-quality project management tools could include:
- Planning and Scheduling Projects.
- Collaboration
- Documentation
- Resource Management
- Reporting
- Project budgeting
- Billing & quotes
You can choose the best PM software after you finish this guide:
-
Plan And Schedule
As part of your team effort, it is critical that tasks and responsibilities for every team member are clearly defined and made visible to avoid miscommunication, as this helps avoid misunderstandings and provides insight as to who best to assign new assignments to.
Online project management software makes it simple and effective to assign tasks, set deadlines, and prioritize priorities for them all. When due dates are added to tasks, a reminder will be sent each time that date approaches, but the task still needs to be finished.
Prioritizing Tasks
It is vital to be capable of highlighting your assignement. It is extremely helpful to prioritize tasks when urgent issues arise. You can easily make space in your schedule using a tool with time slots.
Agile Task Management Tool
It would be best if you had a way to assign team members tasks and outline your activities when you are leading a team. Finding a web-based planning tool with a task management feature isn't difficult. It's important to consider when looking for a new PM program as teamwork is essential.
Team Calendar
PM software should include an essential feature - a team calendar to plan meetings. A shared calendar that syncs to popular calendar tools ensures everyone receives notifications about meetings at their appointed times. Adding key milestones is an easy way to keep an overview. Find a project management software program that integrates well with calendar tools like iCal or Google Calendar.
Task and Planning Scheduling Tool
The Planner is a great way to get your team working together. It outlines your planned tasks and allows for easy scheduling of new activities.
How the Planner can enhance your project management:
- The time slot view shows the available unscheduled slots for all team members. It also gives a quick overview of each member's booked tasks and hours.
- It will help you know who should be assigned new tasks at the next project stage.
- A quick overview of all tasks, unscheduled times, and people's availability helps set realistic deadlines.
- You can prioritize tasks by moving others ahead to make space for the high-priority ones.
- You can give them additional responsibilities if needed.
- The project team will be more productive.
-
Collaboration
Teamwork often comprises hundreds or even tens of people from diverse fields who specialize in one specific task and collaborate toward completion. Project team members may require guidance and input from each other as they complete their respective works, so quick and organized communication must be established via multiple channels.
File Sharing
Project management software should offer features like file sharing, calendar sharing, and contact lists so each team member can add information quickly when needed and other group members have fast access to it whenever required. Some Project Management software allows users to upload files directly into projects. When selecting one for yourself, check whether enough storage capacity is available for your data and files.
Team Communication
Software providers are building a messaging app into their project management tools. It's not a must-have, but it is nice to have (IF your messenger software covers the needs of all team members). For easy and rapid team communication, you can use Slack.
Team Dashboards
Opt for a solution that allows you to create dashboards for your team that everyone can see, including graphs, charts, visual metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Dashboards can be an extremely effective tool during meetings to present metrics to all attendees and compare actual performance against predetermined plans.
KPIs give team leaders and members a glance at the progress made, helping to facilitate more accurate decision-making and collaboration on improving project performance. You may share graphs with team members for input into improving overall project efficiency.
Share the Customer Data
As part of an agency, it's vitally important that client data is safely kept. You can create custom cards using project management software.
Your CRM solution provides the capability of adding client contact details and linking projects and invoices directly with customer profiles - this way, you can efficiently organize and manage clients by categories - for instance, those owing unpaid invoices or waiting on product deliveries.
-
Documentation
Excel is one of many tools you use to manage your project information. You may not be aware that almost 88% of all spreadsheets have errors. Look at the different business processes for which you would need an alternative to Excel.
Access To All Data In One Location
It would be great to have your entire project data in one location. Included are planned and completed projects, calendars past and future, client data, resources for the project, and invoices sent to customers.
Access Your Data Quickly
Your team can easily share all your data within seconds with just a few clicks - no need to navigate between spreadsheets to locate information. Ask companies which project management tools they offer and what data types their software can store and manage before selecting one; some PM software does not cover CRM or invoicing automation features.
Reports generated when compiling all your information into one location is another advantage rarely considered when conducting data-gathering projects, which we will review below in more depth.
-
Reporting
Successful project management demands knowing about any obstacles or shortcomings quickly to address them immediately. Two tools provide a complete picture of project progress: KPI Dashboard and informative reports.
Reports That Can Be Customized
Top project management programs include reporting tools that enable you to generate customized reports based on project data easily. Your project's budget, costs, completed tasks, and team member performance can easily be reported on. By taking advantage of your PM tool's large data database, you can quickly create reports by selecting categories or parameters you would like displayed as graphs on a graph.
Reports will give you a good overall view and identify teams performing exceptionally well so that if an incline in graphs indicates a decline, you can quickly respond and take appropriate actions to address any possible concerns. Locating the source of an issue makes solving it much simpler. Comparing reports or consulting colleagues may assist in pinpointing its origin.
Project KPI Dashboard
Start tracking your project's performance using an updated dashboard in real-time, including metrics such as its planned and actual values, schedule variance, and percentage of completed tasks.
Multiple KPI Reports for Different Purposes:
- Shared Team Dashboard
- Financial KPI report
- Dashboard for project performance.
- Project Manager dashboard.
-
Resource Management
Not only the time of your team needs to be managed. You likely need to keep track of the other resources in your project: meeting rooms and materials.
Plan Your Resources
Project management tools with effective resource management features typically offer this feature to identify scheduled resources and calculate their usage costs; this feature helps avoid conflicts caused by insufficient resources being made available to assigned tasks, helping reduce conflicts over-assignments due to resource limitations and overburdening assignments due to inadequacies in resources available for their assignments.
Resource utilization should be easy to spot. Once spotted, the next step should be deciding if their use needs to be reduced or whether new rules must be set for exploitation. As a project leader, you can assign and oversee resources for specific tasks to ensure everyone has everything needed to complete each one successfully.
-
Budget Management For Projects
You will need more expense management information the larger your project. Excel is a better option for efficient expense tracking.
Budget Reports
An effective project management tool requires tools that enable budget tracking and provide short reports on performance. Budget software gives you weekly and monthly reporting of project expenditures, total expenses, and any budget overages. In addition, notifications will be sent when budget thresholds have been crossed. Export the necessary data and save it to your computer.
Project Budget Dashboard
Add multiple KPIs and create a dashboard for financial reporting to track your project's progress. Add charts and graphs to your dashboard for real-time information about your project. Set up access rights to share dashboards or budget reports among team members. This will ensure that only the correct people see the data.
-
Automated Invoicing And Time Billing
When working with multiple clients and agencies, it would be best to have software that allows you to bill and invoice time. It is important to keep track of your time on each task, add an hourly rate to all users, and compile bills based on the work performed.
Time Tracking
You can automate the invoicing process by using time-tracking software. PM Software can be found with time-tracking tools integrated, but this may come at the expense of other features. You can always integrate time tracking into the PM software to track your progress and link to client profiles and projects.
Automatic Invoicing
Time can be wasted creating and sending bills manually, but you can streamline this process quickly with software or pre-designed PDF templates that simplify creating invoices. Furthermore, some billing programs even enable email reminders to reduce workload further.
Time-billing features in project management software can save project managers up to 10 hours each week through automated invoice processing, providing insight into how much time can be saved by automating invoices and saving yourself valuable work hours in administration time. Find out just how much you save.
Project Management Software: Top Benefits
When considering whether Project Management Software would benefit your organization, one of the primary concerns should be "What are its benefits?". PM software provides an ideal means of improving team productivity and increasing sales - we will now discuss the further:
- Plan and schedule your project with Fluent Planning.
- Effective Budget Management.
- Real-Time Reporting
- Remote Work
- Transparency
- Simple and secure file sharing.
- Better Communication and Collaboration.
- Refined resource management.
- Productivity Enhanced
- Better Risk Mitigation
Plan And Schedule Your Project With Fluent Planning
Over time, project managers have recognized the critical nature of effective planning and scheduling as the cornerstones of success in any task. A timely project completion requires clear plans with prioritized tasks; modern project management software offers you an advantage over traditional management by providing precise AI predictions, such as estimated completion dates and details, such as budgetary considerations or scope and schedule issues.
By setting an efficient foundation from the very start, teams can better understand important milestones, deliverables, and roles within their project. Once established, this foundation helps teams plan overhead expenses effectively while allocating time toward areas that produce desired results. These tools also track Project Performance continuously while periodically revising plans accordingly.
Effective Budget Management
Project Management can only be accomplished by keeping an eye on project budgets. There's always the risk that as time progresses, your project may deviate from its original plans and cost more money than planned - Project Management Software helps ensure you remain within your budget throughout its completion.
Managers can then identify where money is being wasted on leakage in their projects and make the necessary changes to keep costs under control. Modern Project Management Software automates billing processes so you have more time for other activities that matter more to you than billing.
Real-Time Reporting
Monitoring Project Status continuously is paramount to successfully carrying out tasks. Project Managers can use visually appealing Reports and Dashboards as a single point of truth when using Project Management Software; real-time tracking gives greater insight into whether tasks will be finished on time.
Arion ERP, a Project Management Software that lets users easily create and customize reports for business cases, gives more control. You can easily identify which teams are performing well while monitoring negative trends - giving a deeper insight into any issue by comparing multiple reports side by side.
Remote Work
Sometimes team members find it impossible to attend or organize project meetings due to schedule conflicts and distance issues; these delays may only exacerbate things further. Many organizations offer remote working options and flexible hours as part of the workplace environment, while Project Management Software contains meet-and-chat functions which offer additional solutions.
Working remotely allows you to stay productive. Your colleagues can connect instantly, and by having access to a stable Internet connection, you can eliminate collaboration problems and foster interactions among teammates.
Transparency
Knowing who has what task, when the deadline will be for the project, and its current state is essential to avoid overlap in roles and encourage dialogue among employees working on similar projects. Project Management Software gives major stakeholders an overview of Workflow. The tools create an open work environment which reduces bottlenecks. They keep everyone informed on upstream and downstream workloads as well as deadlines.
Simple And Secure File Sharing
Maintaining confidentiality within an organization requires safeguarding files securely stored and shared among members. Project Management Software such as Arion ERP provides secure document sharing and storage solutions where users can make edits, provide feedback or annotate directly within these documents; these tools record any changes, so fostering an audit trail is possible for transparency purposes.
Better Communication and Collaboration
Communication lines that bridge all departments enable transparency and collaboration, both internally and externally. Project Management Software makes sharing Dashboards and Reports with your entire team easier. At the same time, Access Management enables customers and suppliers to access relevant project info, while clients can provide feedback or make any required modifications directly in one convenient place.
Acclimatizing new members quickly is often challenging. Project Management Software makes this easier by maintaining an automatically updated project log which can provide visual documentation.
Refined Resource Management
Project managers implementing an appropriate Resource Management Strategy can allocate the appropriate resources necessary for successful project implementation, using Project Management Software as an invaluable technological resource to simplify this process and generate real-time reports, which assist in keeping an eye on deadlines and prioritizing tasks.
Using intuitive features like Heatmaps, your team can easily keep tabs on each employee's workload. This ensures no one sets unrealistic deadlines while assigning team members who finish projects early high-priority tasks based on this feature.
Productivity Enhanced
Project Management Software can be an excellent way to ensure your team works efficiently and on schedule. When team members know their roles and responsibilities, they can focus more on their tasks while all files and documents for projects can be kept centralized, making quick decision-making easy.
Better Risk Mitigation
As any project will likely face its share of obstacles in its journey towards completion, a Project Risk Management Plan must be in place to analyze, identify and mitigate any possible threats during its journey - this will keep things moving in an organized fashion and ensure success.
Project Management Software can also assist in pinpointing bottlenecks accurately and providing effective countermeasures. Furthermore, this tool reduces risks by allocating resources more effectively within teams, improving team performance, and increasing team efficiencies.
Conclusion
This article has presented the advantages of project management software. Project managers in modern offices often must oversee multiple projects at once; using Project Management Software allows you to focus on more strategic planning activities for business strategy development.
You can assign roles easily, create deadlines on resources allocated, generate custom reports, encourage collaboration among teams, and boost productivity/sales by optimizing resource allocation. It will increase productivity while increasing resource utilization, resulting in sales and productivity boosts.
Implementing Project Management Software into your company will generate massive amounts of information about employees, customers, suppliers, and projects - from employees through customers and suppliers down to projects themselves. You'll use this data in Accounting, Human Resources, and Customer Relationship Management applications, and this should give a deeper insight into company performance.
To effectively handle such large volumes of information and further understand its impact on business, you will require engineering time dedicated to Integrate Clean Transform Load (CTL) in your Data Warehouse so it can further analyze it - cloud ETL tools like Arion ERP are perfect solutions. Get in touch with the most effective and efficient project management software solution in order to make your business operation smoother.