What PM tools tell us about today’s project management
Research for the update to my course on choosing the right project management tool was enlightening: it offers an interesting perspective on what’s happening in project management today.
- Collaboration and communication are the focus. Today’s automated tools place significant emphasis on communication and team synergy. Tools can tag team members, integrate with email systems to alert people to upcoming tasks and status changes, and provide links to reports. This is a promising indicator for project management with communication always at the heart of successful project delivery. And this trend is perhaps due to more people work remotely or on hybrid remote/on-site hours.
- There is power in visibility. Graphical representations of project status, task status, and work queued up for team members are visible to all. This transparency helps management and team members respond early to project issues and backlogs, improving overall project delivery and helping balance workload across team members.
- Agile is the go-to approach. Agile methods are suited to businesses’ expectations for speed and developing solutions collaboratively. The benefits and popularity of agile are easy to see in the project management tool market. Compared with four years ago when the initial PM tool comparison course came out, project management tools almost unanimously embrace agile principles and deliver Kanban and Scrum capabilities.
- Scheduling isn’t where it needs to be. While agile is dominant, not all projects are suitable for agile methods. My recent research shows little progress in managing traditional waterfall schedules. Gantt charts are commonplace, but the logic for predecessor-successor dependencies is often lacking along with the absence of displaying critical path and managing baselines. These features are available in well-established PM tools like Microsoft Project Online and Primavera. For other tools, do your research if you require Waterfall-style schedule management.
- Cost tracking isn’t mainstream! The most surprising thing from the research is that cost management is rarely included as a basic feature. Some tools offer ways to add a fixed cost or a cost forecast to tasks. Seldom do you find the ability to estimate effort, enter an hourly cost rate per team member, and track the time team members spend on tasks. As a result, cost management is essentially a manual effort involving optional features or product integrations.
If you’re searching for a project management tool for your organization, keep an eye out for my updated course on PM tools.
Coming Up
Join Angela Wick and me on Tuesday, August 13, 2024 at 12:00pm MT for our live broadcast PMs and BAs: We need to talk…about AI…and how it’s impacting our roles!
Everyone’s talking about AI these days. But is anyone listening? The focus is usually on how AI can make people more productive. Productivity boils down to doing the same old stuff faster. Our teammates and stakeholders use AI too! We will explore the benefits of focusing on using AI to make our deliverables more valuable to the people we work with and also how our roles impact our stakeholders who use AI!
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