Special Guide: Project Management Tools & Trends

There's no shortage of tools designed to aid with estimation, planning, tracking and delivery. From portfolio management to resource assignment, here's a truckload of products that aim to enhance morale by reducing chaos.

Click here to view our Special Guide to PM Tools & Trends (PDF 41K).

Project management tools are as ubiquitous as the problems they purport to solve—and it's little wonder. Statistics demonstrate the high rate of project failure or cancellation, and those that are spared sudden death often linger in corporate nursing homes with a steady intravenous drip of cash. Project managers want a cure, not extended care—and they're willing to pay for it.

The software industry has responded with a plethora of tonics promising to restore youthful vigor to tired team leaders. But how to choose? Here, I've provided a PDR (Project Desk Reference) featuring many of the available offerings, along with their indications for use.

Most Common Features

[click for larger image] @RISK Palisade's PM offering provides a variety of project risk graphs.

Since the term project management is dispensed as freely as aspirin, clearly some discussion of what constitutes a project management tool is warranted. Not every project manager agrees on a single definition, as needs vary greatly across organizations. One may require sophisticated task dependencies and resource leveling, while another may need to keep the process as simple as possible. But that's the beauty of choice. The features most often sought are:

1. Task scheduling. From basic to-do lists to linking tasks and dependencies.
2. Resource management. From assigning resources to role- or skill-based tracking and resource leveling.
3. Collaboration. Includes project status reports accessible via a Web page, integrated e-mail or threaded discussion boards. In the tool grid (PM Tools), a product received credit only for robust collaboration features, which would include all three.
4. Time tracking. Charging staff time to projects is essential for tracking costs. Some applications export this data into financial packages.
5. Estimating. Includes "What if" analysis and cost projection (time and money) based on past projects, units of work or other algorithms.
6. Risk assessment/management. Risk is all the rage—acknowledging, projecting and ideally circumventing it. Such features are most common in enterprise-level products.
7. Issue/Change management. Some applications track the issue and some the change required.
8. Reporting/Charts. While the Gantt chart is still the most popular output, some products offer hundreds of reports and charts.
9. File attachments. From associating related documents with projects to full-fledged document versioning and checkout.
10. E-mail notification. Only the most basic system fails to provide integrated e-mail, while sophisticated collaboration models centralize and organize communication.
11. Process/methodology. From implementing and monitoring compliance to process workflow.
12. Portfolio management. This involves the big picture, spanning across all IT projects. Sophisticated solutions offer a 360-degree view of organization-wide resource allocation, assets and expenditures.

Trends

[click for larger image] @task AtTask's product seeks to simplify project entry through available templates.

While legacy tools brought us impressive-looking charts and timelines, contemporary PM gear is all about collaboration and flexibility. The new tools are predominantly Web-based and often hosted, incurring monthly service charges.

External hosting may raise questions of data confidentiality, but it offers global flexibility. Service providers incur the expense of maintaining infrastructure, letting managers focus on their projects. Large organizations can add PM tools to their intranets to maintain control over their data repository. Either way, everyone's happy.

The contemporary project manager uses a digital dashboard serving as his point-and-click portal to all-things-project, from documents to threaded discussions. Executives enjoy at-a-glance project health indicators, often in the form of red-yellow-green stoplights.

Developers see filtered to-do lists, receive timely reminders, and exchange techno-banter on a discussion board. While the Gantt chart is still a staple, it's just one of many flexible reporting options including cross-project views, resource allocation, health status and ROI charts. The project team is connected, despite increasing distances and project complexities, as never before.

Beyond the me-too task-scheduling software, requirement-centric products help tie projects to organizational objectives. Often, process workflow is integrated. Some enterprise-level products offer IT governance and portfolio management so that CIOs can measure overall organizational performance.

Finally, visiting hundreds of websites and reading countless product pitches makes one pattern abundantly clear: Microsoft Project is the baseline against which most vendors measure their tools. In typical Microsoft fashion, it's a love-hate relationship: A product proudly extends Microsoft Project—or it offers an easier, less expensive alternative. Just as interesting, the sentiment appears to be reciprocal. In its latest release of Project 2003 Server integrated with its SharePoint Services for collaborative support, Microsoft is clearly responding to the market's clamor for more integration with other tools.

The result? A win-win competitive market for companies seeking effective treatment for their PM pains.