Project Management and Collaboration
Projects are the building blocks of large organizations. As organizations scale, projects often become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. Efficient Project Management becomes pertinent to deliver projects from engineering-to-order efficiently and on time.
Project Management and Collaboration systems play an important role in designing, organizing and executing these projects. Not only can you estimate budgets, resources and costs, but you can also improve collaboration between teams and streamline execution. It is also easy to perform risk assessment and quality management for these projects. Further, business leaders can view entire portfolios and can make strategic decisions based on project health and progress.
What is Project Management and Collaboration?
Project Management software is a technology solution that is used for planning, scheduling and executing projects. It allows Project Managers to allocate and manage resources and budgets and streamline delivery by ensuring quality. An essential component of these projects is to encourage collaboration and communication between different stakeholders of a team.
For instance, if you are planning a manufacturing project, you can visualize the project in a single unified view, plan your capacity and resources, create and store relevant documentation at each step, predict bottlenecks and ensure execution without any delay.
What do a Project Management and Collaboration system do?
On an enterprise level, project management software helps to centralize processes to design, schedule and allocate budget and resources in order to achieve business goals. From the management’s perspective, they can prioritize projects in the portfolio, oversee and manage current projects and strategize for future projects.
Managers can also efficiently distribute resources across projects and also within a project. These could be machinery, financial, technology or human resources. Further, by identifying risk across different projects, business managers can also minimize the risk from poor investments.
Features such as document and file sharing along with internal messaging, note-taking and video conferencing improve collaboration, transparency and trust within the team. All of these come together to improve the efficacy of the project management team and its stakeholders.
Functional areas of a Project Management system
The main aim of a Project Management system is to streamline and facilitate the planning and execution of a project across an enterprise and it often has the following functions:
- Pipeline management: Business managers can oversee a set of projects in the portfolio and take decisions based on project status, strategic importance and maximize operational efficiency of the company.
- Project Planning: Designing a project schedule and identifying tasks and dependencies is one of the key functions of a Project Management system. Project Managers can further assign timelines to tasks and allocate tasks to resources.
- Collaboration: Document sharing options as well as tools such as messaging boards and internal messaging improve collaboration between team members and increase transparency.
- Risk assessment: Periodically raising risks and creating risk mitigation strategies helps in ensuring that deliverables are met on time.
Handling Errors and Issues: The system also encourages the identification and reporting of errors. These can then be addressed in a timely manner.
Trends and Industry Needs
Project Management systems are here to stay and are an integral part of different industries. These are a few key trends:
- Improved innovation across the value chain: While innovative solutions address one or the other of the various needs in the management of projects, fully developed solutions are still missing. For instance, a project management software may lack advanced collaborative tools.
- Machine Learning in risk analytics: Accurate estimations of risk based on past performances and future predictions will be a critical feature of Project Management software.
Cloud-based solutions: Mobility is here to stay and enterprises on legacy systems will need to plan to move to the cloud to ensure agility and scalability.
Top Project Management and Collaboration software vendors
- Microsoft Project: Microsoft Project is one of the most popular and easy to use tools for project portfolio management. It also packs in integration with Business Intelligence to provide advanced analytics and improve decision making.
- Clarizen: Another popular project management and collaboration system amongst small, medium and large enterprises, Clarizen has state-of-the-art project management and risk management features.
Zoho Projects: Zoho provides project management software that powers both small and large organizations. It helps to plan, track and collaborate on projects of all scales and scopes.