What Is a Work Management Software
Effectively track the allocation status and the work performed by resources
There are certain features that a project management software must have in order to be sure you pick the best solution available and to maximize your return of investment.
What to look for
One of the key features that a project management software should have is the possibility to track the progress for project managers, supervisors and workers that participate in the project execution. This is related to creating tasks that can be easily and clearly quantified: deliverables or tasks that have measurable parameters.
Workload analysis is a very important feature that a project planning software must have. Managers must be sure that an optimal work force is assigned to various parts of a project and that no overallocation occurs. Assigning more work force than it is necessary to tasks would be a waste of resources.
Estimating costs and managing budgets makes a great difference between a good profit and waste of investment. A project scheduling software without a detailed cash flow, at task level, can do more harm than help. Tracking project evolution, in each stage, with a good correlation between costs and progress is very important to be sure that the level of funding is adequate at any time. Overtime work should be kept close to 0 to avoid extra costs.
Also do not forget to check if the selected work management software is capable of handling multiple projects, being able to track resource usage (workforce usage) over multiple projects. You don’t want to assign a worker to two projects at the same time. In the case that it still happens a resource leveling mechanism is always welcomed.
Simplicity and ease of use is another key feature. You do not want to be forced to instruct the entire staff in using an over complicated piece of software. Training costs can be greater than any benefit or profit that a work management solution can bring. Sometimes the costs with training can exceed the price of the product.
As a final point, a good project management tool must have a scenario analysis feature, giving the choice to imagine various scenario plans for projects and compare results in terms of speed, usage and costs.
Key features
So what to look for when choosing a work management software:
- possibility to manage multiple interrelated projects that share common resources
- a clean method to break down costs per tasks
- detection of overallocation – resource leveling mechanism
- integration with other work management software
- scenario analysis capability
- an easy to use product to reduce training costs
- trial version availability to test before you decide to buy it
With RationalPlan products you get all these and much more. You get to keep the work and resources under control and within budget.