Managing Phases of Projects using Project Management Software
If you are managing a project that will require the
contributions of multiple individuals or teams using a multi
tiered development plan over a fixed area of time, you should
consider using project management software to help organize the
elements of a project into milestone goals and organize the
efforts of the development team in an efficient manner. Examples
of such projects include software application development, game
development, execution of an advertising campaign, web site
design and development and nearly any kind of project at varying
levels of complexity can be documented and conditions forecasted
to allow for more organized leadership and properly focused team
members assigned to specific tasks to fulfill the overall goals
of the project.
Project management software should help in all phases of the
project, including brainstorming and flowcharting tools to
assist in workflow and design management. Brainstorming
management utilities can help organize and coalesce abstract
design ideas into a fully developed product and workflow
management tools can help make the production, marketing and
evolution of this product as efficient and organized as possible.
No matter how big the project you are undertaking (and
especially on the larger scale projects) you should map out the
milestones, team member core competencies and assign tasks using
project management software such as Visio from Microsoft. There
are tools you may already have (such as Microsoft Outlook, which
provides very basic project management tools) as well as
commercially available brainstorming and project mapping
software solutions that can help streamline your development
cycles and organize the information structure of your company's
management teams.
Once you have worked on properly organized and streamlined
projects that have been carefully planned for and organized
ahead of time by the management teams responsible for directing
the workflow within the project, you will never want to go back
to the old fashioned ways of plan development and workflow
design.