Any project manager operates four components: expenditure, timing, duration and producing a satisfactory result. A more ambitious objective is to optimize work procedures and resource allocation. Look at your project and you will observe that it requires people, money and machinery to produce end results. You may come across a lot of factors that are crucial for effective project management. You can look through a number of such factors below:

- Goal setting and assessing progress.

- Dealing with risk. Take any project and you will see that it contains a number of risks that have to be dealt with.

- Allocating and managing resources.

- Determining the outcomes of the project.

- Controlling the project from the point of view of who is performing what and when.

- Managing quality.

- Handling instability. Circumstances change. All tasks occur in time, so the factor of dynamics has to be accounted for.

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

To manage these components you can employ pencil and a notepad or perhaps MS EXCEL. However, dedicated project tracking software has a number of significant advantages:

- It makes scheduling easy. Read the rest of this entry »