No matter the size, skill, or experience of your project management team, there are key project challenges that can only be tackled with a robust project management software solution.
No matter the size, skill, or experience of your project management team, there are key project challenges that can only be tackled with a robust project management software solution. When deciding if a new project management software will enhance your operations – or evaluating your current approach – it’s important to look at several different criteria. Ask yourself these four questions:
A project management solution must solve two obstacles that are the death knell for any project: lack of accountability and poor communication. Most business gaps originate here. Without accountability, it’s not clear who on your team is responsible for what, making it easy for critical tasks to get lost or delayed. These gaps can affect follow-through on projects, and your client is ultimately left holding the bag. When your team suffers from poor communication, it is often a symptom of inconsistent visibility over a project, which can lead to team members working in silos with inaccurate data, making it impossible to accurately track tasks to completion.
If your project management software offers complete visibility into project tasks, owners, and timelines, there will never be a doubt over expectations or commitments. It should also centralize all project information in one source of truth so fragmentation is less likely during the course of a project — fragmentation that could otherwise deviate into silos of inconsistent, inaccurate data.
Is your project management solution helping you forecast the next steps in your project, adjust to new business requirements, or adapt your project schedules? These capabilities are integral to project success. Without the tools to predict the impact of changing ETAs or requirements, it becomes difficult to allocate and manage resources effectively. Similarly, if your project managers don’t have flexible project scheduling tools, your project will rarely be able to meet commitments or client expectations on time.
The best project management solutions should empower your organization with a complete understanding of your project realities no matter how many business requirements change or timelines fluctuate. They should evolve and adapt over time to handle all exceptions and reflect how your business actually tracks projects. Not only is it important for your software to predict the trajectory of your project as it evolves, but it should also help your project managers facilitate the operational side of those changes with flexible scheduling. This allows you to communicate changes to both clients and the rest of your team, so projects always stay on course and on budget.
How efficient are your processes during a project – especially basic, repetitive processes? Do your project managers waste time overseeing the pass off of information, reconciling unformatted data, or chasing down misfiled documents? To overcome friction or potential roadblocks in your processes, you should assess how potential software solutions can streamline, track, or automate different aspects of your projects. This could be the key to greatly improve time to completion and project profitability.
Consider project management solutions that ensure data is standardized across all teams and linked together through smart task dependencies. Some project management tools offer the ability to configure and control data formats so that all data is collected and processed in a cohesive manner, effectively automating stages of your workflow that would otherwise have to be managed manually. Other project management tools can help you visualize your workflow so it can be easily communicated, adjusted and understood across your organization. By augmenting your communication methods and reducing the amount of oversight, these tools can save you time and boost project profitability.
When determining the best project management software for your enterprise, it’s important to consider how it can improve team collaboration. Are you able to collaborate on and share assets between multiple projects/departments? Does it have multi-user access? Can you generate insights and reports that inform organization-wide decision-making? Each of these components is crucial for organization-wide collaboration and intelligent decision-making.
The right project management software for your enterprise should make critical information and real-time data accessible to all the parties involved, in one centralized place, thereby creating more pathways for seamless collaboration. Additionally, your project management software should be able to generate insight reports, no matter how granular or big-picture in scope, so your team can make smarter decisions and move projects forward.
As you evaluate your options among a variety of project management software tools, including aPaaS solutions like OneVizion, it’s important to keep these criteria in mind. The powerful OneVizion Platform helps enterprises expand their program and project management in several key areas:
Standardizes and collects data, assets, tasks, and deliverables in a single source of truth
Offers real-time project and scheduling and forecasting
Lets you build custom work plans with intuitive task dependencies
Does not force you into predefined templates but adapts and evolves to handle data exceptions and capture changing requirements.
Provides total organizational visibility through robust reporting
Learn more by visiting our platform overview, or contact us today to schedule a demo.