The general features of a project management software include scheduling, costing, budgeting, controlling, management and communication. However an important function of any project management solution is resource management. This covers all types of resources including human, equipment, materials and costs.
Nowadays businesses can work efficiently only by managing resources. With materials and costs things are pretty easy: you buy a stock and it is yours. Human resource management is not the same. You can not just own a human resource, but need to retain one. With the help of a resource management software, project managers can make sure that the right human resources are working on the right tasks and following a real-time project timeline. This is achieved based on several factors like employee’s skills, experience, and availability.
Resource planning software – must have features
In today’s global economy, when projects are spread across multiple regions or even countries it only makes sense that the right resources should make up a project team, regardless of their physical location. Even more project managers need to have powerful project planning tools capable of managing multiple projects with shared resources. At any moment in time they need to view resource availability and utilization even across multiple projects.
Tracking the time and costs using Time Sheets or Resource Sheets is one of the best solution. These tools contain data (total, actual, remaining, standard, overtime) related to the work and cost of the resources and their assignments. The data can be seen as totals or time distributed. As the project evolves the actual data represents the work/cost already consumed for the completed part of the project. The remaining data refers to the values needed for the remaining part of the project:
An important feature that a resource planning software must have is the ability to handle multiple working calendars for different shifts and holidays. The capability to manage leaves, holidays, planned, unplanned work is necessary in relation to overtime work. It is a well known fact that overtime rates are always higher than standard ones and these should be avoided as much as possible in any project in order to not increase the costs and to fit in the estimated budget.
The possibility to have a time distributed sheet with different timescales is a big bonus. Sometimes it is needed to manage resource bookings in hours, days or even minutes. A flexible and dynamic timescale would do the trick. The system should also be very user friendly and easy to learn, allowing users to handle functionality with a minimum number of clicks.
Dynamic Project Planning For Increased Productivity and Flexibility
Every project starts with a well-defined plan and schedule. But the reality offers a lot of uncertainty so the project may very well not evolve according to the initial plan.
Working With Project Management Software – Who Is Managing Who?
Managing projects is not an easy job and in most cases the manager would greatly benefit from the use of a dedicated software.
Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage and Project Management Software
The demand for distributed data and services is increasing as big companies are more and more spread across the world. Smaller companies are also starting to use distributed systems once the prices have lowered due to the increase of such offerings. As many other domains project management is also embracing this new wave.
