Best project management tool

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What is the best project management tool?

Kritika Pandey
78 months ago

6 answers

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Well, it is difficult to pick a "best" because the user profile for these is quite varied. Even what is meant by "project management" can cover a pretty diverse landscape. On the one hand, you have the systems that provide just the "basic" project tracking tools. On the other, you have systems that cover expanded resource tracking and even things like billing. On top of that, do you want to enable collaboration and at what level.
On the project tracking side, I used Microsoft Project, Quick Base, Smartsheet, Excel, and a few others that claim to do this (some better than others). Project has the industrial strength functionality but Quick Base and Smartsheet are more user-friendly and work well in a collaborative setting. And if you're just doing smaller projects, Excel still gets a lot of use. While you have more options in Excel, I typically will use Quick Base or Smartsheet if I need more user interaction. I've even had clients where the projects were managed in Project and then a lot of the reporting done in Quick Base (although it wasn't perfect).
On the expanded side, I've heard good things about Assana, Clarizen, and Accelo but never used them. I know some folks that swear by Jira. I've used Jira and liked it but the use case wasn't traditional project management/tracking (e.g., we weren't producing any Gantt charts or assigning resources).

John P.W. Brown
78 months ago
1

The best tool depends on the context of the project. How complex is the project, how many tasks and dependencies, how many resources and how long is the duration.
MS Project is a comprehensive tool for tracking all related project tasks, resources, budget and attributes and it allows for baselining, ghant charts and other helpful tools to track progress and identify risk. Few other tools have the same level of features for large scale complex projects. For program level project reporting I have also used Project Server which although clunky, integrates project and team foundation server for actual vs estimate hours and task status tracking.
JIRA is a good agile development team workbench but pretty terrible for tracking a project or program of work.
For smaller engagements I use excel with formulas to track tasks status and percent complete including actual vs estimated hours and it is the easiest to manage, a familiar tool to all resources and quickly implemented for new projects using a template I created for types of projects.
I have also used Changepoint, & Rally, and reviewed a handful of other cloud or SAAS based tools and none of them stand up to a client based tool for the project manager side of project management. Every tool seemed to have a cool feature that MS did not but then would not do simple things like baseline or refactor tasks or dependencies when things moved around.

Barry Williams
78 months ago
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When choosing a project management software it is important to make sure you first find out what you want to get out of the software. This is key to finding the correct software product. Also any project management software will create some kind of change in the organisation workflow. It is important to make sure you and your team is ready and accepting for this change in order for a successful experience out of the software product you choose ultimately. I think you can get best tool from Yiioverflow

Mark Anderson
74 months ago
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The best tool is the Project Manager's brain. Being able to see the big picture, making the plans for the project, gathering people in a team, and executing a project per the scope, cost and schedule while achieving quality and safety targets are attributes of a successful project manager. These qualities come from aptitude, education and experience.
No specific software or advertized PM software will replace the above qualities. I don't know about the IT business but every EPC company in the oil and gas business has its own suite of PM tools to help the PMs on board and they are company specific.

Dilip Deka
78 months ago
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Excellent - I couldn't agree more!

John P.W. Brown
78 months ago
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Building on the excellent points above, absolutely let it depend on the specific need. Two things I like to focus on:

  • Does it enable the project manager AND the team to understand the full picture
  • Does it enable the team members to understand their role & responsibilities and enable them to take accountability for this (e.g. move work on a Kanban / update a Trello board)
Bart Groenewoud
74 months ago

Have some input?