It is no secret that it takes a lot of hard work and guts to match when it comes to running a business. You have to have excellent product knowledge, communication skills, and you need to have employees who have all of the respect in the world for you, so they stay motivated to work as diligently as possible. Then, when it comes to actually working on completing a project for a customer, who you obviously want to satisfy, you need to have a way to organize the project, so it gets done in the time frame you promised. Fortunately, there are several project management programs, and we have compiled a list of five technical functionalists you should look for before deciding which one is right for you.
Time Tracking
Since you likely promised to have the project completed by a certain date for you customer, you should look for a project management software that includes some type of time tracking device. This would allow you to not only keep your employees working towards completing certain aspects of the project by certain dates, but it will also allow you to quickly, and accurately, inform your customer about how their project is coming along. This is far easier than you have having to call each of the multiple teams working on different aspects of the project to ask them how their portion is coming along.
File Storing
Since you will likely divide your employees into teams for the projects, you will find that they will need to combine their files into the finished project. For this reason, the project management software should allow each team to easily upload their individual files to some type of software, so they can be easily accessed by members of other teams.
Task Agenda
The project in itself needs to be planned out before you can begin the actual organization of the project, which is what makes a task agenda an invaluable tool in any project management software. This will allow your employees to see and remember exactly what their tasks are, so you do not have to waste time by constantly reminding them about what they are supposed to be doing at each stage of the project.
Communication Component
Since your employees will likely be split off into teams, they may not be in cubicles within the same area they normally sit. For this reason, you need to have a solid way for them to communicate back and forth besides the sometimes unreliable cell phones and email.
Budgeting
Finally, you likely quoted your customer a price range for the finished project, and you need to stay as close to this range as possible. A budgeting component will make this easy because you can plan out where cuts need to be made.
A project management program can do wonders for managing your projects. However, before you purchase just any, you should ensure it includes at least these five components.
