As you all know managing any project manually is not quite easy, all entrepreneurs or project managers look for an optimized solution to manage their project more effectively. So you require a unique project management software with all exclusive features to handle the project from the beginning phase of the project to the final stage or a successful project deliverable.
I hope you all know a project involves different phases like requirement gathering, planning, and scheduling, task management, team collaboration, documentation, analyzing reports, conducting meetings, and many more project-related activities to support the flow of work.
Just imagine how it would be if all the activities are running via a single platform? Yes! here comes the place of project management software.
In this article, here you will be able to find how the project management software works and how the project managers or the business owners will get benefited from the features of project management software.
What Is Project Management Software?
Project management software is a central platform to interact, manage, collaborate with all the resources of the project to share the knowledge of the project within or across the organization. It enables us to meet the objective of project goals within the deadline to deliver the project successfully.
To understand how the project management software works? you need to know how the project is carried out from the initial phase to the final phase.
Different Phases Of Project
Yes! have a look into the different stages of a software project.
Requirement gathering phase
The initial stage to collect the exact information from the client or the customer regarding the project.
Planning and Scheduling the project
Plan the project as per the resources and the budget allocated for the project.
Implementation or Execution of the Project
Execute the task involved in the project and analyze the task productivity, reports.
Maintenance
Provide support for the project after the implementation.
In all the above phases of the project, the common challenges to be faced by the project manager are resolved via a single and central platform to plan, organize, schedule, evaluate the project related activities. Let us look into the features of the project management software to manage the real-time challenges involved.
Features Of Project Management Software With Its Benefits
Project managers always look for effective project management software with all enriched features so that they can manage all the real-time challenges in one single platform.
Look into the important features of project management software to understand the working procedure of the project management software.
1.User-Friendly Dashboard
The user-friendly dashboard of the project management software is required to have a quick overview of the project. For example, it shows the number of the employees assigned under any specific project, the most productive employee list, overall productivity report of the project with productivity graph, etc.
Benefits
It allows the project managers to quickly view the ongoing status of the project.
It also enables the employees to view the most productive list to benchmark themselves and it makes them commit themselves towards their task.
2.Resource Management
Planning & Scheduling the Project:
The project manager needs to plan and effectively schedule the project in order to complete the project before the deadline.
Planning helps to identify how many resources are required to complete the overall task associated with each project milestone.
Effective scheduling makes the team or the resources to work according to the time assigned for each task.
User Registration with specific roles
The specific roles or access can be provided to the resources with this feature. It makes it easier to build different teams to achieve each project milestone.
Attendance Management
This feature will enable to track the attendance of the resources. It provides the monthly attendance report and also assists the human resource management to track the attendance of all the employees. It also displays the arrived time, logout time, time spent at work, etc.
Benefits
1. Planning and scheduling will make the work more efficient.
2. The resources are managed effectively without any miscommunication or lack of accountability.
3. It becomes easy to assign roles to the user like TL, Admin, Normal user, etc.
4. Attendance management helps to track the real-time data of the login/logout.
3.Task Management
Once the resources are identified, the project manager needs to manage all the tasks and need to assign in order to complete the project before the deadline of the project.
This feature allows project managers or team leads to create the task and assign it to the respective employee. Once the task is started by the employee, the task status (ongoing or pause) and estimated end time of the task can be viewed by the project managers and can analyze whether the task will be completed within the allocated time. It also shows the completed task percentage.
Benefits
The completed task percentage will provide an overview of how many hours are left out for the assigned task.
It helps to assign all the tasks more effectively.
The timer shows to whom the next task to be assigned.
It helps in case there is a lack of accountability and helps to interact with team members to create a productive team.
4Team Collaboration
This feature allows all the resources to interact with all different teams or between the team members within the team. A chat messenger or instant messaging feature within the project management software will enhance team collaboration.
Different team members will work on a different task. A team dashboard indicates the task progress of all the team members of the project. Interacting with each other via the software will help to enhance the overall team productivity.
Benefits
It helps in sharing the views and files related to the project.
The team dashboard helps to benchmark the performance of the individual against the top performer.
Enhances team communication.
All the project related data will be easily available to all the team members.
5. Time & URL Tracking
The time and URL tracking feature will enable project managers to analyze the productivity of the employee.
URL tracking feature will enable to track the URL accessed by the employee. It shows whether the tracked URL of the application is productive or non-productive.
The time tracking feature will record the time spent on productive apps and non-productive apps and it also acts as a time tracking software
Benefits
It helps as a remote employee tracking software, especially when the employee is working remotely or working from home.
It becomes easy to track the productive time of the employee.
Easy to analyze the performance of the team.
6.Effective Reporting
The effective reporting feature is a must for the perfect project management software. This tracks the real-time data and generates the report accordingly. The following reports help to evaluate the performance of the employees.
Automated Screenshot capturing
This feature will enable to capture the working window of the employee when the employee is online during their work. It captures the screenshot of the monitor screen at certain time intervals automatically. The report shows the idle screen capture and the working window screen capture.
Productivity Report
The productivity report is generated based on the time tracking and URL tracking feature. The productivity report shows the productive time and the idle time of each employee.
Productivity graph
This graph shows the productivity level against certain time intervals.
Benefits
The performance evaluation becomes simple with the effective reporting features.
All the reports are based on real-time data and it cannot be simply manipulated.
This allows the project managers to provide the required appraisal for the top performers and the poor performers.
7.Project Budgeting
Automated Invoicing with time tracking
The time tracking feature will assist to identify the productive time spent by each resource. Depending upon the real-time data it generates invoices automatically and helps to analyze the project budget
Time billing
The time billing feature generates the billing amount for the productive time spent by the employees.
Benefits
This feature helps in generating the invoices automatically.
Billing becomes an easy procedure for the project managers.
It helps in providing the exact performance appraisal for the employees.
Enables easy project budgeting and forecasting by identifying project KPI (Key Performance Indicators).
Identifies the overall project expenses and can plan the project budget accordingly.
8.Simple Configuration
All the settings of the project management software need to be configured easily. This feature of project management software provides a user-friendly interface to accomplish all the project related settings.
Benefits
It helps to customize the project management software as per the requirements.
It provides a user-friendly interface.
How Project Management Software Works
If you are the admin or the owner of the software and looking to track your employees, then follow the below steps to use your project management software effectively to track your employees and enhance your project productivity.
Create your company account with your project management software
Go to the settings of the project management software and create your company profile. For example, you can update your Company name, Logo, Phone number, Email, Social profile, etc to create your company account.
Register the employee as the user of the project management software.
Once the company account is created, register the employee with their details like name, email, the password for them to log in. Send an invite to the registered email of the employee with the credentials. You can also provide the required access for the employee. Add the employee either as the Normal user access or as Admin with specific access.
Now the employee will be able to log in with the provided credentials. This helps the project managers to find them online via project management software.
Create the task of the project and assign the task
You need to identify and plan all the resources and the task to be completed by the resources. You can create the task by adding the information like task id, project id, task priority(Whether its critical or normal task), task type( whether it is a normal task or bug), to whom the task to be assigned, allocated time, you can also share the support documents necessary for the task to be completed.
Analyze the ongoing task or view task
Once the task is created, the employee can proceed with the task by changing the status of the task (whether it’s ongoing or it is in pause status). Once the task is started, the timer starts running so that it should be completed within the allocated time. This helps the project managers or team leads to analyze the status of the task. It gives a clear idea when the task will be completed.
Employee Tracking
When the employee logs in to the software with their credentials, project managers will be able to find them online. Project managers can also view the productive time, total time spent at work. This helps to track the employees.
Analyze the performance via automated screenshots, app usage, and productivity report/graph
Project managers will be able to analyze the performance of the employee with real-time data like the automated screenshot of the working window of the employee, productivity report, productivity graph.
You can set the automatic screen capture by setting the time interval at which it should capture and the quality of the capture can be configured.
The productivity report should display the productive time and idle time. This can be analyzed by the URL tracking feature of the project management software. By tracking the URL of the application, It enables us to find which type of app the employee is working. For example, you can set the category of apps like social media app, office app, entertainment app, email app,etc.
Depending upon the team and the project, you can assign these categories as productive or non-productive. For example, if the employee is from the support team, he needs to work on email apps. By using the URL tracking feature the software tracks the URL of the application on which the employee is working. The project managers can set email apps as productive for the support team. If the employee is working on the email app. It shows the productive time for that employee.
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The productivity graph is the graph which shows the productivity level against each time depending upon the productive app usage.
Automated Billing
Once the performance of all the resources is analyzed, the time tracking and time billing feature will enable the software to generate automated invoices. This also helps to identify the project KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and provide the required appraisal for the employees.
From the real-time data report, it helps to identify the overall project expense and helps in effective project budgeting. The automated billing feature will assist the project managers in the overall billing process.
Conclusion
Finally, here you will be able to find how the project management software works. This article also provides information on the different stages of the project, features & benefits of project management software. You need to understand the features and benefits before looking into the working procedure of the project management software
Choose the unique project management software with all the above-enriched features to effectively manage your project.
Author Bio
Jeseena. K is a senior content writer at Infinite Open Source Solutions LLP, a leading Direct Selling Software and Taxi Dispatch software provider. She is a voracious reader and she spends her free time reading a broad spectrum of subjects ranging from fiction to the latest software technology.
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