What makes project tracking tools essential for software project management?

Project tracking is standard communication on the plan, the committed work and where things stand at any given moment. IT Team members contribute to these tracks -- enabling leaders, customers, consumers and cross-functional teams to understand where the project is at. This is the foundation for Project Management. If all impacted parties have access, awareness and understanding of the tracking tools - it's a win-win across the entire project!

3 key benefits : 1/Most project work is siloed and tools give all up visibility, 2/you can breakdown bigger tasks into smaller chunks once you’ve visibility, and 3/quickly identify dependency and accelerate.

In my experiencie for over 15 years as PM in the private and specially in the public sector tracking and follow up, is imperative to get things done. Strong asertive communication is the perfect complement.

With any successful project delivery, there are three core things: 1) Alignment 2) Visibility 3) Communication. None of these can be accomplished if there is no project tracking. Project tracking will align all the team members on scope, timeline, quality, dependencies, risk and its mitigation plan, collaboration and communication. It will answer the question of "how is the project going?". "Are we on track?". One can validate by providing data - reports/dashboards for different stakeholders.

In my experience, project tracking tools are indispensable. Tips for effective utilization include defining clear project goals and metrics, regularly updating the tool to reflect real-time progress, and using it as a central communication hub for the team. Additionally, tailoring the tool's features to align with the project's specific needs can enhance its effectiveness. Most importantly, fostering a culture of accountability and transparency around the tool ensures that it serves as a valuable asset for both project managers and team members.

Furthermore, within an Organisation geared towards software development, it is extremely helpful to be able to rely on project tracking tools which contemplate integrations with the most common code versioning platforms and continuous integration and delivery flows; relating tasks to code branches and pull requests allows both technical and non technical team members and stakeholders to visualise what is being worked on and foster collaboration.

Extending thoughts from above to build traceability between tasks, milestones and leading all the way up to business values. With delivery of each sprint, project management team monitors progress and adjusts way forward.

OK be serious how else are you going to document the process? Drawings will be out of date the minute you finish them. Tasks that say "paint it blue" (decided by little boss) that are changed to "paint it purple" (decided by CEO) are informative and answer the questions that arise in future years. Collaboration creates documentation and guidance on the thinking at the time. If you want to work with CI/CD then tools should allow you to record the process as it happens with ease.

The single most feature of project tracking is that it shows the variance, highlights the deviations, critical point and helps judge the health of the project.

From my perspective - mostly as a software developer but also on occasion as a technical project manager - I loved being able to see progress from team members at the end of each day and before daily scrums. About one hour before the daily meeting, I would review the current status for each deliverable and so be better prepared during the meeting. Scrums are supposed to be short and to the point but this can't happen unless everyone in the meeting is already informed about the latest status of the project. Another nice feature is when a team member cannot make a daily meeting, then they can leave detailed notes and possibly instructions in the tracking tool where the remaining team members can discuss when they meet.

Jira, Monday.com, MS-Project, Primavera, clarity are all good. I worked extensively with Primavera. It enable management of not only projects but also programs and portfolios. Helps in implementing organizational strategy to maintain the resources and schedules

I prefer using Smartsheet as I like to automate and depend less on manual tasks. Smartsheet provides plenty of automation options for workflows, alerts, document collaboration, formulas, roll ups, templates. I can create surveys, collect data, create reports and a dashboard for different stakeholders without leaving the application. Ultimately a project tracking tool should not only deliver on tracking the project but also ability for one to scale with tracking multiple projects and its type.

No Devops? Having used JIRA & Devops both are great for project tracking. They allow you to itemise deliverables and the steps to deliver them. In my opinion Trello & Confluence are more about creating documentation and lack the monitoring of tasks developers need. They do integrate with other tools though.

Could depend on the size of the projects. - Small projects can be managed using MS excel & extension in Team (like planner) . - Waterfall type of projects can be managed using MS project. - Agile projects can be managed using DevOps

First thing to consider is the project methodology. Though now a days you have most of these tools cater to planned or agile or hybrid models, it is always good to choose the one that fit to the project size. Having said that consider the integration opportunities with rest of the framework of the organization, otherwise, it is an isolated tool and increase the workload. Finally, it becomes a white elephant.

Though the features of the project management tools are generic, their usage varies from team to team and project to project. Along with communicating the details of the project, the project team should have the guidelines to keep the management tool updated. It is critical as the project would rely on the outcome of the project management tool. The project manager should have a process to validate the usage of it against the guidelines.

Another unspoken, rather simple usage of a project tracking tool is to have a baseline and at any point of time , factor the change to see and assess the impact. I.e its also an important impact assessment tool. It can also provide a rather comprehensive analysis of comparison of different approaches that could be taken for a project. E.g. This approach will project this scope , cost and timeliness, while Plan B projects to a higher cost but quicker release.

Assign Ownership: Assign clear responsibilities for each task or project. Team members should know who is accountable for what. Regularly review and update task assignments as needed.

As Rahul mentions assign ownership, also every time you talk about a task or user case record a sentence against it. Use the status & swim lanes properly so reporting makes sense. Agree how each fragment should be used.

If the schedule exceed about 200 lines, then a dedicated project co-ordinator is required to effectively manage the project schedule and tracking.

Project tracking should be integrated with the system to trace requirements, design artefacts, production support issues etc. This would enable a centralized knowledge repository powered by Generative AI and generative BI tools. The business outcome delivered has to be about enabling all stake holders in the software development including management and business users as well

This article and many such articles are quite generic. It nowhere talks about what makes project tracking tools essentials, it only talks about their usage and benefits. Well, what makes these tools essential are: 1. Complexity and size of project 2. Size of team 3. Risks and tracking of risks 4. Budget and reporting requirements 5. Effective Project Management And sometimes mandates from management and stakeholders. I guess, the generative AI lost track somewhere.

As with most software these days, there are a ton of options that an administrator can turn on or off. It's important that the tool being used has been properly set up by someone well-versed in the particular needs of the project being tracked, the company culture, naming conventions and other specific factors. Also important is to obtain full buy-in by all staff on the project, each member learning what type of entries they'll be adding and where they can look to see the overall project status. I've seen this a few times, where a system admin will install the software and allocate user accounts, but then from there it seems that just the default settings are used, with insufficient project structure.