Friday, January 15, 2010

Project Management Software- free process, techniques, tools, tips

A business plan for use project management software techniques needs to include a sales forecast, cash flow forecast and a projected profit and loss account for three years. Larger businesses should also draw up a projected balance sheet. The figures used must be reasonable - avoid being over optimistic.

Techniques of project management software

Project management software has a simple goal; to help those involved in managing projects to achieve their objectives of project management software techniques. For individual projects, the objective is to deliver the expected output from the project on time, within cost and to the quality expected. However, for those that manage multiple projects, project management software must do a lot more:

1. Check the skills capacity to take on new work as it arrives, considering resource commitments to current projects and business as usual work.
2. Ensure that projects are given the correct priority and that groups of related projects can be managed as a collection of project management software techniques.

Project management software achieves its objectives quite simply, by providing pertinent information that the key stakeholders have confidence in. So, in looking at how the benefits of project management software can be achieved, the starting point is to look at how credible information can be delivered to the key stakeholders via project management software techniques.

Where resource or skill bottlenecks can impact the performance on individual projects, the project management software needs to have a complete picture of the work that is planned for all resources. This needs to include not only resource assignments on projects, but estimates for non project work, such as operational tasks or business as usual work. If the project management software does not have these, including estimates or allowances for support type tasks that cannot be planned, then the true picture of resource bottlenecks will not be visible and some of the resource commitments will not be fulfilled. A lot of heavy duty project management software is too onerous for the more simple tasks, which is why it is so common to find spreadsheets used alongside the project management software - a situation that cannot provide the complete picture.

One of the long term goals of project organizations is to improve the accuracy of future estimates, by analysis of past performance across similar projects. This requires a consistent structure to project plans, so that, for example, the accuracy of estimates for the design phase across similar projects can easily be compared, for each type of project in project management software techniques. The best way of achieving this is by using project templates for each type of project, as a logical starting point to the project plan using project management software techniques.