Project Management SoftwareProject Management jobs often require prospective candidates to be familiar with at least one kind of Project Software. The most widely-recognised are MS Project and Primavera (now owned by Oracle), although MS Office Visio and Asta Powerproject are also popular.
The basic function of project management software is to help you organise project information, manage the progress of the project and communicate effectively with other members of the project team.
Organise
All project software includes some means of organising your project data.
For example, you might enter a list of project tasks, deadlines and expenses. The software program is then able to transform this data into a schedule, a budget and diagrams, illustrating what needs to be done, when you need to do it and how much it will cost.
Gantt charts are the most common way of organising task schedules. Developed in the 1920s by Henry Laurence Gantt, and first used on a major construction project in 1931, Gantt charts are now the method of organisation in most project management software.
GanttProject offers a free application that enables you to convert data into Gantt charts. More expensive project management software calculates the Critical Path Analysis, allowing you to work out time and cost tolerances with ease.
Manage
In order to manage project progress you need to be able to keep track of tasks and resources, to measure actual/expected results and to accurately predict the impact of risks and changes.
Project software is a tool that enables all of these activities.
By essentially functioning as an electronic archive, the program is able to log data regarding expenses and tasks, so that you can refer back at any time to specific points or periods in the project life-span.
Project management programs are also able to chart expected progress/costs against actual progress/cost by creating data-connected diagrams. By changing the data that has been entered you are also able to change the diagram. This means that you can not only measure progress, but you can also predict the impact of changes to one of the variables.
For example, if your data-connected diagram shows that at the current speed, your project is going to fall five days behind schedule, then you can adjust the data to work out what changes you need to make to finish by the deadline. This function also enables you to predict the impact that planning decisions, possible changes and risks might have on other aspects of the project - for example, the budget, the timeframe or the distribution of resources.
Communicate
Communication is a vital part of project success. If your project team or your stake-holders or you yourself do not know what is going on and what is expected of the project, then chaos will ensue.
The data that you enter might not be readily intelligible to somebody who is not involved in the day-to-day running of the project. Project management software enables you to convert spreadsheets into charts and diagrams for easy comprehension. Document templates mean that you will always present information in a standard, logical format.
Conclusion
Project management software does not do anything that you could not do yourself. However, using a pre-written program saves time and energy both resources that might be better invested in the project itself.
The Critical Path is the longest chain of tasks that must be completed for project success. Critical Path Analysis uses information about the necessary tasks, the order they must occur, dependency relationships and tasks that can be undertaken simultaneously to work out the minimum and maximum duration of the project.
A chart that shows a schedule of activities/milestones listed on the vertical axis and a time line on the horizontal axis. Activities are represented as horizontal bars measured to their proportionate duration."Dependency relationships" (when one activity cannot be started until another is complete) are often shown as arrows between activities.
