Online Project Management Software
When running a project, it’s almost a must to make sure you have the right project management software to keep track of your tasks, costs, and resources. The information must be readily available to ensure that appropriate calls to action and specific situations can be reported to all interested parties. Using appropriate technology is nowhere more obvious than in your approach to building and analyzing the project flowchart or network diagram.
When contemplating using automated software tools to integrate into your organization’s system, make sure the application provides the flexibility and detail you need. Working with the number of software tools available can get downright frustrating, so be sure to test a few different apps to get the best fit. Automated tools will get the job done for small projects or one-person teams, but large projects can get in the way. I find that it requires as much human interaction to provide the necessary details of the automated software tool, than the tool alone can provide.
Although the software is becoming more sophisticated and interactive, regarding project management it still requires a lot of our input. The best way to explain this is the approach taken to generate the project network diagram or project flowchart. Once you have selected your project management software tool, enter the activities and their durations in the selected tool. The next steps require human interaction and therefore the participation of your team in “brainstorming” sessions. Solicit input from each of your team members, write their input, and post ideas on a whiteboard. Ask your team to identify all activities that have no predecessors, for each main work breakdown structure there will be a corresponding set of activities that need to be incorporated into nodes that are already connected from the previous step. Once the team accepts the information, ie the identified tasks, activities and duration, it is time to enter the network diagram or flowchart into the software tool. If an activity does not have a logical successor activity, it must be connected to the final activity. Remember, fully connected means that every activity has at least one predecessor and one successor activity.
This planning session usually requires some time and input, as the first draft rarely gives you the accepted project completion date. The first output of the network diagram will need to be reworked, if it doesn’t, you’re very lucky. The software tool you use should quickly and easily find the activities on the critical path and provide enough detail for you and your team to begin making informed decisions about task duration. To compress the project schedule, look for opportunities to change overall relationships with perhaps some introduced lag. Be very careful not to get carried away with schedule compression because it will exacerbate the resource scheduling problem. At each iteration, use the automated tool to check if the critical path has been moved to a new sequence of activities. You have now established a project schedule that meets your requested project completion date. The final step is to schedule resources to complete the work according to the revised schedule.
While this approach can ensure that the system development process has been followed, it does little to ensure that the development team has a clear understanding of what specifically the required quality of the product is and that quality requirements have not been compromised as they develop. The project progresses through analysis, design and layout. , Development and implementation. In addition, traditional quality planning does not guarantee the quality assurance process; rather it ensures that the process has occurred.
The quality agreement provides a simple vehicle to specify the quality requirements for a project. I’ve noticed in the past that a task in System X, which in this case represents attributes of data quality, function, usability, and work impact, is mandatory for most stakeholders. Based on this assumption, the project manager and the team have a clear understanding of what aspects of the system need to be reviewed during the development process.
The quality plan should include quality assurance processes that first review each system deliverable from the perspective of the required quality attributes. The results of the system analysis, such as flowcharts, data models, job specifications, and human-computer interfaces, are evaluated for conformance, usability, and impact on the job. The quality agreement provides the framework to ensure that the required quality is controlled through all system development processes.
No matter which project management software tool your organization uses or is considering, it will require the most input from you and your team to ensure the accuracy and legitimacy of project timelines. Tools of this nature are invaluable for quick project snapshots, expect to spend quality time with your software tool to ensure successful project delivery.