

What is the best project management software? Discover our comparison and choose the solution adapted to your project management methodology and your business.
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Do you plan at best your projects from the start? Do you follow the right project management steps to keep track of everything? Are you able to estimate the right amount of resources required for each task?
Activities coordination and progress monitoring are two key steps to succeed.
If you would like a 360° sight on your project, the equation is simple: method + communication and interpersonal skills + pragmatism!
First, let’s remember that to effectively manage a project and ensure its follow-up, it is crucial to:
Project Management covers both the organisation and the planning of the project, from the idea to the follow-up.
Both strategic and operational sides are taken into account, estimated and planned. The main steps to follow are:
ƒTo run a project, you need to have a clear view of where you are going. Set a project scope using a pyramidal structure from the main goal to the smallest sub-tasks as follow :
Once you have achieved this, you will have a clearer idea of your principal milestones and the entity of the project itself.
Once you have defined all the steps through the project completion, you need to estimate the time required to complete them: the deadline to meet, and the logical flow. All this is possible thanks to the definition of:
This step is crucial, the most accurate your analysis is, the less you will have unpleasant surprises. For each task, you need to define the needs related to:
To avoid the tunnel effect you need to follow each phase of your project. Simply put, adopt the lean method. You will be able to face problems as they come and react quickly:
By managing your tasks and their follow-up properly, you are able to:
To achieve this, the project manager can rely on:
As briefly seen above, here are the key tools:
Their purpose is to have written down all requests from the client or from management (internal projects). It is a reference point for the objectives to be achieved.
It, therefore, provides a framework for monitoring:
We are living at the age of dematerialisation; project management cannot ignore it. Especially when it comes to projects with teams on the field, paper reports are no longer a suitable solution.
With software like Kizeo Forms, your mobile teams enter their reports and progress in real-time. The interface also allows you to export and analyse this data, for optimal and geolocalised monitoring, regardless of your sector of activity.
The agile method favours short-term planning and, consequently, quick but regular, face-to-face meetings to define tasks and primary corrective actions.
This short-cycle project management strategy reduces the tunnel effect and provides better visibility and responsiveness to unexpected events. All project stakeholders know who is doing what and where is everyone at.
The dashboard is a proactive and methodological tool to monitor your projects closely. It allows you to see instantly all key data, objectives, risks, resources and anticipate potential problems.
In the long run, it also serves as a reporting tool to understand management's areas of progress.
To use it and choose realistic, measurable and timely Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ask yourself the right questions, for example:
KPIs such as duration gap, budget gap, are essential to the execution of a project. They help you to evaluate a situation at a given time and to make an appropriate decision.
A tool such as RationalPlan is essential to optimally manage dashboards and KPIs. Moreover, thanks to its collaborative functions the whole team will have access to the same database avoiding any information silos.
The Gantt chart is another popular visualisation tool. In particular, it allows you to:
the activities and workload of each member of your team.
How? By presenting tasks progress on a graph, with the list of activities (on the y-axis) and the time units (on the x-axis).
Each of its tasks can be linked to:
An example of a Gantt Chart in Monday.com
Widely used in agile methods, it allows the representation of the workflow (task processing progress), on the principle of sticky notes on a table. Each task status shifts from "scheduled" to "in progress" and finally "completed".
A Kanban board in Wrike
Project management software is a tool that assists you in decision-making and anticipation.
A follow-up with Excel is certainly an option for small projects. Otherwise cloud solutions have the advantage of allowing real-time monitoring, regardless of the deadline, budget, complexity or number of stakeholders.
Communication is also facilitated. Using a collaborative approach, teamwork is relieved, with everyone's tasks well defined and accessible.
Among other examples, Monday.com is an intuitive project management tool. It provides highly visual dashboards, with Gantt chart and Kanban board, to monitor project progress, estimate the workload and continuously evaluate the budget.
Monday.com’s dashboard
Furthermore, Project management solutions such as Wrike allow you to monitor deadlines and dependencies of your team to get a real picture of the situation.
Wrike’s Timetable
Benefits of customised management software are numerous, among them:
The success of a project depends on controlling time, budget and available resources.
Strategic management (or monitoring), also involves the capitalisation of the knowledge of your project team and rigorous monitoring, to recover easier in the event of a problem.
The benefits are obvious: time savings, financial savings, competitiveness, productivity, customer satisfaction but also the satisfaction of your employees. It all leads to motivation and reinforced commitment... to be able to keep on planning projects efficiently!