Project Management depends fully on the Project Manager and his/her skills to set-up, coordinate, manage and control the team and it's deliverables. Besides, he/she needs the right methodology (e.g. PMI) and the right tools to manage projects.
Let us focus today on Project Management tools and the needs you have during a full project cycle:
Planning
Scheduling
Budgeting
Progress updates
Management & Team Reports
Team Communication
Risk & Issue Management
Change Management & Escalation
Based on the size of the project team and the working culture of the company you would choose a tool to start with. However, in practice most companies start with google spreadsheets, emails and nowadays chat programs.
Traditional companies with mainly waterfall projects use MSProject (or OpenProject as similar freeware) plus communication and posting tools like MSTeams. This works well as long as the scope is pretty clear from the beginning and everything can be tracked in Action & Gantt Charts.
More agile companies are using solutions like Trello App, Wrike, Basecamp or Asana which foster more fast team communication and posting channels to keep everybody informed within the project management tool. E.g. Wrike project management tool, combines the traditional tasks views and gantt charts to easily connect levels and dependencies with similar board views like Trello and Basecamp.
At Asia PMO, we recommend keeping most communication about the project in one space and make it as easy as possible for the project members to connect. There we favor tools like Wrike Project Management, Trello App, etc. to ease the coordination within projects. As Wrike also resembles a lot of functions of MS Projects, it can be also used for more planned and complex long-term projects. Furthermore, given the needs of the millennial and GenZ workforce to work in a more adaptive and inclusive manner, these modern tools resemble their normal communication behavior with posting, chats, comment functions, etc. Please contact us if you want to find the right tool and approach for your projects and team members.
Tell us about your preferred project management tool in the chat button.