Project Management Tools - What You're Missing is Less Than What You Have

For anyone in the business of managing projects, the question of what kind of project management tools to use looms large. You want to make sure you use the tools that reflect how your business works, but you also don't want to end up building your project around the tools you selected. At the same time, you don't want to end up with tools that don't embrace the full scope of your work.

Picking the right project management tool is tough, but there's no reason to think it's not doable. In fact, project management tools are fairly easy to understand, in a way: you don't have to pay much attention to features when you can look at philosophy. Basically, there are three schools of thought:

• Do the right thing for one particular group: so you've got a giant construction project? Oracle Primavera may be the only choice you can go with. Sure, it's ugly, it's clunky, it's slow, and it's pricey, but you need project management tools that get the job done, and it's going to at least do that. Tools like this are a last resort.

• Do everything, for everyone: building a house? Drafting a law? Building an e-commerce website? Some folks think you ought to use the same project management tools for every one of those tasks. And somebody has given those people what they want. Broad, maximalist project management tools can certainly give you everything you want, but they're also going to bog you down. You don't want to spend all your time mired in someone else's software bureaucracy, just because they spent all their time adding features and none of their time making sure those features added up.

• Do a simple thing well: here we go! Don't use the project management tools that are built for one particular industry (unless you have to): they'll just make you turn out cookie-cutter projects. Don't use project management software designed for nobody in particular; you'll just spend all your time wrangling them into doing what you wanted in the first place. Instead, use project management tools that do one thing, and do it really, really well.

How can you tell that simple project management tools are best? The answer is, well, simple: every time you work on a project, you have to spend a certain amount of time thinking about the project's long-term goals, your personnel issues, etc. And you also have to spend some time running the project -- doing the day-to-day allocation of tasks and people.

It's the day-to-day work stuff that tools for project management are supposed to make easier, but they often fall flat. Every new feature means more time users spend scratching their heads, or integrating disparate tools, rather than actually doing their work. And that time quickly adds up to project delays, cost overruns, and worse. The first step in any project is to avoid getting swamped -- and the best way to do that is to start with the right tools.