Project-Management.com’s Top 3 Software Recommendations
What makes a project successful?
A project can take many unexpected turns on its journey to completion. Helping your project succeed involves detailed planning and organization. Project management software provides a way for project managers to optimize team resources and schedule, using collaboration and communication platforms, task management and delegation, and integrations with other software. Ten of the best project management software are listed below.
6 Ways of Measuring Project Success
Measuring the success of a project once it’s brought to completion is a valuable practice. It provides a learning opportunity for future undertakings, and, the opportunity to assess the true effectiveness of the project. In order to have a holistic view, objective and subjective criteria need to be considered.
1. Scope
This is the intended result of a project and what is required to bring it to completion. To get a real measure of your project’s success you want to determine if it achieved its objectives within the given framework.
2. Schedule
This is easy enough to measure and understand. Were you able to hit your milestones on time? Did your project get delivered on time? And if not, how far behind schedule was it?
3. Budget
Did you manage to deliver your project within budget? Was it over or under? And if so, by how much? I’m sure it comes as no surprise that your ability to deliver your project within budget is usually considered one of the greatest indicators of success.
4. Team satisfaction
This is more subjective in nature and is often overlooked when evaluating project success. But I beg to say that team satisfaction should be at the top of your success criteria. They’re the ones who were deep in the trenches, and they’ll be the ones by your side on the next project adventure too. They also have deeper insights that even the top stakeholders may not have.
5. Customer satisfaction
Along with your team, you also want to get the feedback of your clients. Are they content with the results? Were their needs met? Find a way to track client satisfaction through the project life cycle all the way to delivery.
6. Quality
The point isn’t only to deliver the intended work but also, to exceed expectations. It’s important to track quality and make adjustments where necessary. Even after the project is delivered, quality assurance is often an ongoing piece of the project puzzle.
Ultimately, you want to evaluate if the project hit its target and how smooth the delivery was. Were the results implemented quickly and easily? Are the stakeholders, including your team members, satisfied with the results? Project success isn’t all black and white; there are grey areas that are a little more difficult to measure but are definitely worth taking the time to evaluate. The more you can work out the kinks of each project, the more successful each subsequent project will be.
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Tools for Implementing Successful Projects
1 Wrike
Wrike is the most powerful work management platform on the market, enabling teams to plan projects and collaborate in real time. Our award-winning software is trusted by 20,000+ companies across the globe, including Sony, Estée Lauder, and Siemens.
Wrike’s customizable features include Gantt charts, request forms, dashboards, cross-tagging, time tracking, and proofing. Integrate with 400+ apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce. Automate repetitive tasks and achieve 50% faster planning. Work from anywhere with 100% access to your files via our mobile and desktop apps.
Whether you’re a small startup or an established brand, Wrike has the solution for you. Paid plans start at $9.80/user/month. Join our community of 2.3 million — start your free two-week trial today.
2 Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a leading work execution platform that has real-time work management features, collaboration and automation tools. Users are presented with a familiar and easy-to-use spreadsheet-like interface. However, it has enterprise-grade capabilities that even Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Bayer, HP, and PayPal are confident to adopt in their business. Strong project management features enable teams to utilize different views of real-time data, and switch easily from Gantt, card, grid and calendar views. Smartsheet has automatic update requests, and can be used for waterfall and agile projects, product launch, sprint planning, and more. The resource management feature provides users the visibility who is busy, and who is not, in real-time. They can also attach files, share sheets, get notified, view the activity log, export, email, and print.
3 ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the highest-rated project management tools today. Use Docs, Reminders, Goals, Calendars, Chat, scheduling, assigned comments, custom views, & more with this all-in-one project management tool.
Used by 800,000+ teams in companies like Airbnb, Google, and Uber, it brings all of your projects into a single app! Built for teams of all sizes and industries, Our fully customizable & proprietary features make it a must-have for anyone wanting to keep project management in one place.
4 monday.com
monday.com Work OS is an award-winning no-code work management platform that helps teams manage projects and workflows more efficiently.
Used by 152,000+ customers worldwide, this fully customizable software lets you plan, manage, and track every project in one place. monday.com offers time-saving and easy-to-use features such as automations, time tracking, document sharing, and real-time collaboration. Multiple board views such as Gantt and Kanban help you structure and navigate tasks and projects the way you prefer, and dashboards give a high-level overview of your progress.
In addition, integrations with apps such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Excel, allow you to easily continue working with your favorite tools from within the platform. monday.com also offers dedicated solutions, such as monday dev and monday sales CRM, designed to answer the needs of specific industries.
5 Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is an online project management application that helps its users to plan projects, collaborate with employees and clients, keep track of time, manage documents, and generate charts and reports. Users work on a central platform where they can keep track of progress, discuss ideas, communicate easily and stay updated. It is cloud-based and highly accessible, where user data is kept safe with stringent security systems. The software is also scalable depending on the number of projects, with the option to add more features. Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management tool that helps you plan your work, track it efficiently, and collaborate with your team wherever they are.
6 LiquidPlanner
LiquidPlanner is the only project and resource management tool that calculates when work will be done with 90% confidence. Our groundbreaking predictive scheduling engine is based on ranged estimates to generate best-case/worst-case scenarios to model when tasks and projects can realistically start and finish. As a result, one of the biggest differentiators with LiquidPlanner is how effectively our project management tool helps project teams manage uncertainty and deal with change. LiquidPlanner factors your organization’s priorities into your project plans from the beginning, so teams are always focused on the most critical work.
The availability of your resources is also accounted for, so you can see if your team really can take on a new project. As priorities, scope, or resource assignments shift, the scheduling engine dynamically adapts to change and recalculates impacted projects in the portfolio for real-time visibility into bottlenecks and risks before missed deadlines.
7 Resource Guru
Resource Guru is the fast, flexible way to schedule teams and keep projects on track. Get full visibility of who’s available and who’s overworked, so people and projects succeed in harmony. Assign work, balance workloads, and edit schedules in seconds. Keep your team up-to-date with personal dashboards and daily schedule emails. Analyze utilization rates, clients, and projects for more accurate forecasts and budgets. Trusted by companies including NASA and L’Oreal. Try it free for 30 days!
8 Xebrio
Xebrio is a SaaS-based project management software covering every phase of project development, from requirements to releases, all under one roof. Xebrio helps teams achieve maximum productivity by enabling precise and comprehensive requirement analysis and tracking, milestone tracking, hassle-free collaboration and task assignment, issue tracking, and much more, ensuring that your team never misses a deadline and works efficiently.
It is a project management software that allows you to get a clear picture of product requirements and user stories, will enable you to include all stakeholders in high-level planning, lets you manage and assign tasks quickly, communicate and collaborate effortlessly, track issues, plan sprints, and releases and keep a close eye on the time and budget constraints too.
