5 Essential Features of Project Management Software
No matter how efficient a project manager is, the workload can get pretty heavy on some days. It is essential that they have a tool that helps them manage resources, schedule meetings, analyze reports, and more. A good project management software does all of this and more. Let’s take a look at the 5 must-have features a PMS solution should have:
1. Planning and Scheduling
Clearly defined tasks and responsibilities of all team members is essential, so that task delegation becomes easy, and there is no confusion. A good project management system allows you to define deadlines and priorities in addition to assigning tasks. Team members receive notifications when deadlines approach if the task is not marked as complete. Additionally, the PMS software should also allow:
- Prioritize tasks – enables to make changes in times of urgency without rescheduling the entire plan
- Agile task management – allows you to outline all upcoming tasks and increase efficiency
- Shared team calendar – this helps to schedule and organize meetings; syncing with popularly used calendars allows sending of notifications for meetings to everyone
- Time tracker – allows you to see how many hours team members have spent on a project, categorized by billable and non-billable hours; it also allows you to assign additional tasks to members who complete their assignments before schedule
2. Collaboration
A team working on a project may be quite large, and members may need to access each other’s work to complete their assigned tasks. This makes it imperative to have organized, easy, and quick communication via numerous channels. An efficient PMS software should allow:
- File Sharing – everyone on the project should be able to upload files so that others can access whenever they need it
- Communication – high performing PMS solutions have inbuilt messengers to facilitate easy communication whenever required
3. Documentation
Often, Excel spreadsheets contain errors, and excessive reliance on them can lead to trouble. Rather than have multiple spreadsheets stored in different locations, you can now have all of your data in one place, easily accessible to every member of the project team. With just a few clicks you can find out about tasks that are planned, completed, calendar events, customer information, project resources, expenses, client invoices, and more.
4. Reporting
For successful project management, you need to identify and quickly resolve shortcomings and problems. You can do have a comprehensive overview of the progress of your project with KPI dashboards and reports. A superior project management system has reporting tools that allow you to create custom reports from data you input previously. You can configure the software to get reports on budget and expenses, tasks completed, performance of team members, and so on. It allows you to track the good and the bad – for which you can take quick remedial action.
5. Resource Management
Apart from managing the time requirements of your team, you need a tool to track resources like materials used in the project, meeting/conference rooms, and more. A great PMS is one which has an inbuilt resource management module that allows you to record scheduled and planned resources and calculates their cost. This enables management to eliminate over exploitation of resources, and also to ensure that every team member has the necessary resources for performing their tasks.
To Sum Up
Ideally, a superior project management system software will have plenty of features, be flexible, customizable so that you can include features useful for your specific business, and so on. You also need to consider the cost factor – the cost of the software should be something that can be justified by your projects.
IPIX TMS is a project management solution that has all of these features, and is extremely cost effective. It is perfect for startups and small and medium businesses that don’t have a huge budget, yet want a quality tool that will help them manage their projects efficiently.
Contact us today to know how our project management software can help you to streamline your project management and increase productivity and efficiency.