Software License Management Tools

[Janeen Bahrke]

Projectmanagement tools are software that bring order to your projects by tracking your tasks and issues, allocating the right amount of work to your teams, and helping you and your teams stay on schedule. In short, project management tools manage your projects effectively.

These tools are designed to assist project managers in quantifying their outcomes and ensuring they align project goals with the scheduled timeline. They allow teams to collaborate effectively, diligently monitor issues, weigh potential risks, and stay on top of major updates.

It is helpful in tracking your project schedule, checking for any deviations from the project plan, and identifying delays. Businesses can use Gantt charts to stay on track with their planned schedule and budget. And if things don't go as planned, they can also use these charts to spot critical tasks that will ensure the project gets completed on time.

Gantt charts are one of the most important tools used in project management. They provide a complete picture of the work breakdown structure and aid in allocating resources efficiently, be it time, money, or people. These charts also map the interdependencies of different work items, help in prioritizing the critical tasks, and reduce scope creep.

Gantt charts in Zoho Projects are an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that makes your planning and scheduling easier. The simple drag-and-drop interface to adjust your timeline, four types of dependencies, and critical path, baseline, chart scaling, and task management capabilities within the chart make this type of chart one of the indispensable project management tools. Plus, this feature is even available in our free plan! Check out more information about the Gantt chart features in our various pricing plans here.

Among the surplus number of tools for project management available on the market, the work breakdown structure (WBS) undoubtedly comes first. It offers a hierarchical breakdown of your project goal into actionable work items.

WBS follows a hierarchy where your end goal is split into stages that can be further divided into tasks or sub-tasks. This helps in planning every single aspect of your project without leaving anything to chance. The breakdown gives clarity on the time and resources needed and helps in setting the planned constraints for a project.

Create a WBS in Zoho Projects with its hierarchy of milestones, task lists, tasks, and sub-tasks. With customizable settings, multiple views, templates, reminders and recurrence, it takes no time at all to set up your project.

A project baseline is a graphical way of representing your project values by comparing the baseline, which is the standard you set for your project, against your actual performance. Project baselines are tools of project management that encompass the scope baseline, cost baseline, and schedule baseline. Your baseline also acts as a project tracking tool that helps in tracking your real-time progress. It can also help avoid scope creep by keeping the unplanned work in check.

Unplanned work is a major factor that can affect your project's cost, time, and scope. It causes a domino effect. Firstly, there's a risk that the project has gone out of scope by including this extra work. Even if not, the time and cost of the project will have increased. If you do not wish to compromise on those constraints, the quality of your project will have to take a back seat.

Measure your performance by comparing real-time progress with the baseline set in Zoho Projects' Gantt chart. Easy to set and analyze, the baseline in Zoho Projects works in conjunction with Slack to track the time lost.

Team-building activities are a way to improve morale and boost productivity. From group surfing lessons to team pot lucks, there's a wide range of fun activities you can use as part of corporate team building.

The connection between team building and PM tools may not be obvious. But the relationships between the teams, as well as with the stakeholders, are as important to a project as the planning or execution. And this is an easy way to strengthen these relationships.

Team-building activities may include healthy competitions conducted in a controlled environment; these work as a positive disruption to everyday workplace culture. They can also encourage creativity, highlight your team members' various talents, and motivate people to work together to find the best solutions.

A project communication plan ensures there's a regular, relevant flow of information between the project members, clients, and other stakeholders. While many project planning tools aim to keep everyone in the loop, this particular tool helps maintain relationships and includes details regarding who communicates what, to whom, and how often. There's the obvious benefit of keeping your stakeholders in the loop, since satisfying their needs is an integral part of a project's success. A communication plan will help tackle any risks that may arise and improve collaboration among the members of your team.

Nail down your communication plan with the extensive collaboration features in Zoho Projects. From the Discuss module with its built-in chat, virtual calls, and meeting capabilities to the social Feed to discuss ideas, feedback, and media, Zoho Projects has you covered with all means of communication.

To ensure your project succeeds, it's important to not only track the real-time progress but also to estimate the project constraints based on your current performance. This could be in the form of budget forecasts, EVM, or baselines.

Manage your costs to stay within the planned budget. Track expenses, track actual costs to invoice clients and pay employees, compare planned and actual costs, forecast the budget, and analyze your budget health.

Make sure the right people work on the right tasks. Avoid overworking or under working your employees by using the workload report. These project management tools also help in assigning work based on the employee workload and availability.

Keep all the project stakeholders on the same page. Effortless collaboration is an essential aspect of an online project management tool. Virtual collaboration tools like chat, web meetings, and forums are some great features to have.

Always put out your best work by constantly reviewing the quality of your project. Issue tracking and resolution capabilities serve pivotal functions in a Project tracking software. Automation to escalate and deal with bugs is a bonus.

Onboarding your workforce, clients, and organizational structure to a project management tool is important. From industry-specific templates to various third-party integrations, there are several ways project management tools can help you with project administration.

People also use online project management software to deal with uncertainties in the estimated duration of each task. Arrange tasks to meet various deadlines, and juggle multiple projects simultaneously as part of an overall objective.

Among different tools of project management, Gantt chart software is one that helps best in accommodating delays. Task dependencies and their effect on the time taken to complete a task can be captured and managed with Zoho Projects' Gantt chart software.

WBS is one of the project planning tools that helps in ideation and is heavily relied upon during planning. It provides an outline to establish your cost, schedule, and work hours. It also helps in identifying risks.

Cost baseline is the comparison between your initial estimate and your actual project spending. It works closely with schedule and scope baselines, since these factors are interconnected and can easily cause the cost of a project to deviate from its plan.

Promote effective team communication. The best project management tools for teams encourage people to ask questions, ensure balanced workloads, raise questions about ideas that may not work, and achieve success in work.

Streamlining cross-functional communication with proper project planning tools ensures that all the stakeholders are aware of how to get hold of relevant information. The PM tools ensure that important decisions aren't delayed and all project activities proceed smoothly.

Let's face it: there's a wide range of project management tools available with numerous features, catering to businesses with different requirements. The whole process of choosing the right project management app can be confusing, to say the least. But we're here to help you with that. Here's a list of questions to ask yourself before you make the big decision:

If this looks familiar, your quest to find the best project management tool has gotten some headway. Feel free to add to the list; consult with your teams as well, since they'll be using the tool on a daily basis.

At this point, you should've shortlisted two or three tools for project management that are worth the investment. Test them out by yourself, and then with a pilot team. Gather feedback by asking users if:

Next, see if it fits well within your budget. Even if it does, you don't want to put your money into planning tools that reap little to no benefits. You can also request a free demo to better understand the product. See if these project management tools are solutions to your pain points listed earlier. Weigh pros and cons, and pick a winner.

From project initiation to closure, Zoho Projects has your back. With features like milestones to mark every progress made in the project, tasks and sub-tasks that break up your project into simpler pieces, and Gantt charts that help visualize and monitor your project, you are well on your way to achieving your project goals.

No one likes seeing bugs where they shouldn't be, especially if they're causing a ruckus. Our project management app comes with an issue tracker that automates tracking, from the time you create it until it is no longer a threat.

Simplify task tracking, management, and completion with Workflow Rules that execute your rules with triggers, Webhooks that send out notifications to third-party websites, Macro Rules that bulk update your work items with predefined criteria, and Blueprints that automate all your workflows.

3a8082e126