Project Management Tools to Keep Your Team on Track

Identifying a need for Project Management Tools

Getting a work team all on the same page and all directed towards a common goal can be be a challenge. Especially when the general trend these days is to be working remotely from home offices. Effective project management tools are needed to provide some assistance in coordinating all the various tasks and deadlines.

Using email and chat boards can be useful for general conversation and keeping touch with your team. However, achieving well managed centralised coordination of tasks and objectives really needs a specially built software tool.

Features to keep in mind

Not all project management software tools are the same and this is mainly because everyone’s needs are going to be different. The general idea though is that you’ll be setting up projects and tasks within those projects. Some software allows you to drill further down into subtasks, commenting on tasks, rating and so forth. Text editors may vary. Some offering fully-featured formatting control, others not so much. The ability to attach or upload documents to classify under specific tasks is always useful. You may already be working with Dropbox, Google Drive or some other cloud storage. So the ability to connect to those data sources enhances the experience.

Another key aspect of software management software is to the ability to set objective goals. The project manager will generally try to anticipate these milestones dates by reviewing all the various tasks and resources they have at their disposal. Gantt style charting is useful where there is a lot of task items. You can see visually how all the pieces of the workflow puzzle fit together. If there are delays in delivering task objectives the timeline can be adjusted to see the overall picture on when milestone dates are likely to be completed.

A list of project management tools to review