Project Management Tools And Productivity

Project management has a long history. It has been around since the first humans banded together to hunt a tough, and big, game. The Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramids of Giza are two spectacular achievements of project management that have been handed down to us from antiquity. In modern times, the successful flight of first humans in space and the rise of modern industries – from Ford to Samsung – have been possible because of project managers, who can conduce a large number of individuals to work towards a common goal – the fulfillment of a project.

Project management is at the root of successful projects, that are defined in textbooks as temporary tasks with well defined aims. A project can involve anything – from the construction of the Suez Canal, to the launch of a new product, and even the cooking of a dinner. A project is considered successful if it achieves what it was set out to get without any time delay, or cost overruns, or both. Project management is art that provides decision makers with a set of tools to create successful projects. Poor management, as may be expected, leads to failures; as the American IT industry shows.

The IT industry in the United States spends more than $250 billion dollars on 175,000 development projects each year. Yet, the art of project management is so out of shape that only one in three (32 percent) of them are successful, according to a 2009 report from Boston-based Standish Group. More than two-fifths (44 percent) projects are partly successful; they do not meet at least one of the criteria that make a project successful – cost overruns, time delays, and poor quality. The remaining 24 percent are complete failures because they are either abandoned midway, or never utilized.

Companies and individuals can earn billions of dollars in savings if they do product management in a right manner. Successful project managers understand their product and employ the right tools. The tools that the Egyptian managers used were different from the tools of the Han Chinese who were tasked with the construction of the Great Wall. Both set of tools are different from modern web based project management tools, so much in vogue now, and for a good reason.

The needs of modern project managers are different from the requirements of the decision makers of a generation ago. It is not considered out-of-the-norm if a manager has to manage a team of individuals working across several cities. Egyptian papyrus is certainly not a useful tool here, but a project management software, especially a simple online project management tool, can do wonders.

The days when project management was the exclusive domain of megalomaniac kings are, thankfully, past us. Today, it is the businesses who are the primary consumers of project management tools. In fact, a number of successful businesses are using the most advanced of these tools to gain an edge. In the field of management, currently the most advanced of them are web based project management tools.