How to Select the Most Appropriate Project Management Tool for Your Business

Index:

·?????? Introduction

·?????? How to select the most appropriate pm tool

·?????? Which pm tool to select

·?????? Process to choose amongst various tools and single down one

·?????? Most popular pm tools

·?????? Why do pm tools fail

·?????? Conclusion

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INTRODUCTION

Project management helps to detail what tasks will be accomplished, who will be involved in completing the tasks, and when tasks should start and finish.

The origins of project management can be traced back to ancient times when builders and construction workers had to coordinate with each other to build pyramids and cathedrals. This coordination of building materials, resources, architectural plans and other labour-intensive resources led to different stakeholders collaborating to complete a particular project.

In modern times, it began with Henry Gantt inventing his charts and then the emergence of project management could be attributed to the world wars, space missions and the invention of the Internet.

There are reasons you need to manage a project efficiently. However, in large organizations and teams, there is always the necessity of tools to overcome project failures.

In this section below, we look at some of the key reasons why a project may fail and the various problems that a project manager might encounter while managing a project:

1. Tracking project progress - unless you know where you're headed at every juncture of your project, you cannot envision a completion on time with the stipulated resources and within the budget.

2. Missed deadlines - unfortunately, missed deadlines and violation of critical milestones can cost your project heavily.

3. Communication Gap - when different stakeholders have different plans and they aren't able to communicate those effectively, it leads to a wide communication gap.

4. Team Collaboration - sometimes there could be overlap between the work that team members could be doing. Also, the team may not function as a cohesive and collective unit capable to pulling through a tough and long task.

5. Too Many Tools - too many cooks spoil the broth, similarly too many tools spoil project management as there are only bits and pieces of communication and collaboration that can go inside each of these tools. Have only one centralized tool to save yourself from these perils.

6. Stakeholder Alignment - the project manager should align the stakeholders with the project's mission, vision and goals. Unfortunately, a lot of project mishaps occur when the mission and vision aren't clear to the stakeholders.

In such hazardous situations, there is plenty of thought and work that needs to go inside the job of a project manager. He must understand the typical conditions at work, the mental setup of his team members and also the complexities of the project to be able to arrive at selecting the best possible project management tool.

In the article below, we look at the various methods for selecting the best pm tools.

How do you select the best project management tool for yourself?

With so many tools and techniques for project management these days, how would you select the right tool for your project management needs? Well, the answer is simple. You need to ask yourself a few questions. Answering these questions while evaluating the needs of your team, business, technology, project and other parameters will help you narrow down the right tool for your project management requirements.

Let’s look at a few parameters that help you decide which tool to select for your project management needs:

? Business needs: What your business needs to accomplish

? How does your business function – is it an online business or an offline business? How do your employees collaborate – online or offline, via emails or offline meetings?

? What kind of a business are you? What is your domain of work?

? Are you following Agile? If not, what software development methodology do you follow?

? How do you run your finances? Do you have payroll management software? Do you have an ERP?

Answering these few questions should help you pick and choose the right project management tool for your business. If your business already consumes an ERP tool or a payroll processing tool, then integrating your project management tool with your existing tool is an option for you to be able to streamline operations. If your business is an online business, then you could opt for a cloud-based project management solution. If you’re following an Agile method of software development, then an iterative-modular approach to project management should work best for you and a tool that supports such modular work should be your first go-to tool.

? Team needs: What your team needs to do their jobs

? How does your team function – do they have their jobs delegated by managers?

? How tall is the hierarchy and how is the company structured?

? How frequently do their jobs get delegated?

? How cohesive is the team?

These are also pertinent questions that you need to answer while selecting the right tool for your team. If your team is not cohesive and if their jobs aren’t delegated frequently, then there could be a different tool for your team than the standard project management tools in the market. A team that is tightly bound and works according to the manager’s instructions with a well-defined hierarchy can easily adopt a hierarchical project management structure where a team lead or manager can delegate tasks and track down efforts regularly.

? Budget: How much you can spend

Probably the first question that you should be asking is the budget you can afford to reserve for your project management tool. Make sure you get the right plan and the right subscription package according to your user and project volume needs. Are you following a monthly or a volume-based subscription model? How would you evaluate which subscription model works best for you? Some tools may have a lower upfront cost but require a subscription or additional fees for features that are essential for your project. However, the long-term costs of a tool also include growth projections for your PMO. These are a few questions you need to answer while you select the right tool for your team.

? Ease of use: How easy it is to use the tool

If your business is a software business, then you shouldn’t worry about your team using a complex software project management tool. But if your business isn’t a software business and your employees aren’t tech-savvy, then you need to start with the most basic tool and slowly look to upgrade to more complex tools.]

? Integration: Whether it can integrate with other tools your organization already uses

Interoperability is a big concern for any organization. You would have to migrate the data from different tools being used for purposes other than project management and integrate different software. That’s the only way you can streamline your operations without manually having to move data around from one place to another. That manual operation is not only time-consuming but also very costly.

? Communication: Whether it offers smooth communication

As a business owner or leader, you must assess whether the project management tool is the correct tool for you to be able to communicate with each other in the team and the greater organization. Does the tone and language offer a comfortable mode of communication to you and your team? Are you able to understand the features comfortably?

? Collaboration: Whether it can help foster collaboration.

Not a lot of organizations pay attention to this feature but is a very important feature that enables smooth functioning between different departments of an organization. Collaboration is essential because it helps every team member keep track of each other’s work and ensures that no overlap between work is being done by so many members in a large organization. Also, tracking your work is important, collaborations help undertake group work and group activities where the dependency of a particular task is upon multiple stakeholders. If you’re a project manager who works with multiple stakeholders and with people higher up in the hierarchy, then this question is a must-answer for you before you choose which pm tool works best for you.

? Reporting & Analytics: Whether it has a reporting & analytics tool

You cannot track what you cannot measure. A reporting and analytics tool is very important for any project manager. S/he must track and measure progress made by every team member and that can be possible only through effective reporting and analytics. To improve on the metrics and track progress effectively, a reporting mechanism that displays the progress made so far is very critical for the success of any project or any organization.

So which project management tool should you select for your organization, now that you have answered these questions?

There are plenty of project management tools available in the market.

Managing a project management tool across a team and an organization requires a significant amount of time and effort on the part of the project and program manager. If you’re looking for a tool that manages the entire lifecycle of a project, then you could consider a pm tool that gives you a wide variety of features. But if your needs are not that wide or do not require robust representation of project data for your management, then you could choose a much smaller and quicker solution.

How to select the most optimal project management tool from a set of tools available in the market?

While selecting a project management tool, please create a checklist of requirements that you need for your team or organization.

Then you should enter those items inside that checklist.

Then draw vertical columns for different pm tools that you could narrow down using these questions and draw horizontal rows with attributes that you need for your pm tasks. While doing the checklist, you could then select the pm tool that matches most of your attributes and at a reasonable budget.

Choose wisely – only after considering these above factors and answering the checklist should you narrow down your preferred pm tool.

Which are some of the most popular project management tools that exist in the market today?

Asana, Trello, JIRA, Clickup, Airtable, MS Projects, Zoho Projects, etc. are a few options available in the market today. Each of these pm tools will have its strengths and drawbacks. It is for you to do the due diligence on which works best according to your needs and requirements and then shorten down on a few project tools to eventually create a checklist of requirements vs options available and then narrow down further.

Why do project management tools fail?

It must be remembered that project management is first and foremost a philosophy of management, not an elaborate set of tools and techniques. It will only be as effective as the people who use it.? - Bryce's Law

The Project Management Institute (PMI) says the chief reason projects fail is because of weak processes.

Companies make use of Project Management Software tools to plan projects, allocate resources, assign tasks and track progress. However, some tools fail to measure accountability, track milestones, or worse, they don’t even offer a consistent approach to planning and executing projects. This can cause teams and projects to suffer, ultimately affecting a company’s bottom line.

Let’s look at some of the pm software fails to deliver as per expectations:

1. No group selection process - The team members don't have a say in the buy-in and are often left out of the process of selection. Their opinions are not taken into consideration and that affects the projects adversely because it is the team that shall be using the pm tool.

2. No rollout plan - Having the team present during the onboarding and roll-out is essential otherwise they wouldn't know how to embark on the usage of the pm tool.

3. Project Management tool is too complicated - Sometimes project teams may take too long to learn a pm tool. It’s not that the team is slow to learn, but it’s that some tool's design is clunky, complicated and inefficient. You must dig through various menus to find commonly used features.

4. No time - The team might not have enough time to spend on the learning curve - the manager needs to be aware and give enough time and the liberty to go through training documents and organize sufficient training programs to educate the teams.

5. Too expensive - Some pm tools, especially at an enterprise level might cost too high. Why pay for features that you don't need? Speak to your account manager and freeze paying for features that are too expensive and you don't need. You could utilise this money in more productive work.

Always talk to your customer support and account management teams to ensure you get the best support and the best deal for yourself.

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Conclusion:

Project management is not a panacea, but rather an important instrument in the long and tiresome process of growth and renewal of the business. It allows the business owner to minimize and mitigate risks and increase the potential for success of the launch and the ongoing operations. For the successful delegation and tracking of tasks in a project, a project manager therefore must make sure that he selects the most appropriate tools for the success of the project.

Any tool selection should always follow the process definition. A process should not be defined based on the tool & its features.? The goal of the PM Process, and the enabling PM tool, should always be to reduce friction & delays, and not add to the overhead and complexity of work.

Let us know in the comments how you have selected your project management tools in the past and what has worked for you. Is there anything that is holding you back from buying or subscribing to your chosen pm tool? We would love to know more!