Project Management Tools

Project management software is designed to coordinate effort between members of a team and impose order on the projects they are juggling. Core features allow the organization and assignment of tasks as well as higher level visualizations of project timelines and processes. This keeps team members organized and on task while management can shuffle resources, plan workloads and budgets, monitor projects as they progress, and report on delivery success. Some of these systems employ time tracking or collaboration tools, like document versioning, comments and chat. This is a wide and various space, from simple to-do lists to large enterprise suites, and from very niche products specialized to certain industries to highly customizable, admin-intensive tools. For every remote workforce and cluttered inbox, there are project management solutions purposed to solving a firm's missed deadlines and disheveled portfolio.

Project Management Software Comparison Overview

The best Project Management Software products are determined by customer satisfaction (based on user reviews) and scale (based on market share, vendor size, and social impact) and placed into four categories on the Grid:

• • Leaders offer project management products that are rated highly by G2 Crowd users and have substantial scale, market share, and global support and service resources.Leaders products include: JIRA and Wrike

  • High Performers provide products that are highly rated by their users, but have not yet achieved the market share and scale of the vendors in the Leader category.High Performers products include: Trello, Basecamp, Workfront, Wunderlist, MindManager, Workboard, Harvest,Central Desktop, Celoxis, Apptivo, and RationalPlan

  • Contenders have significant market presence and resources, but their products have received below average user satisfaction ratings or have not yet received a sufficient number of reviews to validate their products.Contenders products include: Microsoft Project, Podio, andMavenlink

  • Niche products do not have the market presence of the Leaders. They may have been rated positively on customer satisfaction, but have not yet received enough reviews to validate their success. Niche products include: Smartsheet, Assembla, Asana, Clarizen, LiquidPlanner,ArchiOffice, Tenrox, and Workamajig

Buying Considerations for Project Management Software

Managers know different projects require different team structures and management tactics. Project management software products are either built to support a specific kind of management schema or are customizable and require initial setup and configuration. Knowing what types of projects your team will be tackling and how you imagine organizing them in a PM system will help you select a product that fits your process. Some example questions to ask might be:

• • Do I need create a queue of tasks for my team to claim and complete?

  • Do I need to assign due dates to tasks?

  • Are they one-off tasks, do they recur, and/or do they occur over time?

  • Do my projects consist of interdependent tasks?

  • How many projects will my team work on at once?

Some products are better built for orchestrating a large number of team members than others. If you will require organizing users into different teams, assigning certain users to certain projects, or some other permissions structure to control which users can access or edit which information, then be sure to investigate products that scale appropriately. Many project management programs also charge per user, so budgeting for PM software should include discerning which users will reap the most benefit from management software. You might have to decide between a more powerful and expensive solution to manage your most mission-critical resources or a less expensive but perhaps less robust system for your entire enterprise.

Does your project team consist entirely of in-house personnel, or will you be managing contracted workers, consultants, or agency resources as well? Some project management software have special access and payment structures for sharing projects with people outside of your organization. This kind of tool can be a great aid for managers organizing efforts across many projects with various outside firms.

The project management market has found some success in specialization. Many industries have management software tools that are optimized and marketed primarily to managers in a single vertical. Hospitality, food and restaurants, marketing, architecture, and IT are just some of the industries that have dedicated project management products. These vendors can build tools based on an understanding of the intricacies of that industry’s work environment to provide the best available instruments to manage that environment’s projects. Additionally, there are bulkier time and expense software tools for firms that require time tracking or expense management, and professional services automation (PSA) software is available for consultants and other professionals.

Key Benefits of Project Management Software

With project management software, you can:

• • Organize projects and orchestrate team members

  • Improve teamwork and collaboration on project planning and execution

  • Keep team members accountable by monitoring progress and set realistic and accurate benchmarks

  • Improve team communication, awareness, and efficiency

Common Features

These are the common features of Project Management Software

Tasks

In-house team or contracted resources?