Project management is a challenging job that involves dealing with 4 traditional components: cost, timing, duration and producing a satisfactory result. Qualified project managers also aim at making the organization of work better. Take your project and you will notice that it needs labour, finance and machinery to produce satisfactory results. To manage projects successfully one need to handle a number of factors. Some of them are listed below:

- Setting goals and carrying out analysis.

- Managing risk. Take any project and you will see that it involves a lot of risks that have to be accounted for.

- Choosing people and tools for the project.

- Determining the outcomes of the project.

- Controlling what is going on: giving out jobs, controlling the work-in-progress.

- Ensuring that the products of the tasks are up to standard.

- Handling instability. Change is constant. When you start out on the project, you have to forsee how it will develop with time.

- Talking to everybody involved with the project.

To deal with these components you can employ pencil and a notepad or probably a spreadsheet program. However, you get some interesting benefits if you go for project tracking software:

- Idividual jobs are smoothly assigned to time blocks. The software will automate timing calculations. Each worker can have their own calendar. Managing work-in-progress also becomes less of a problem.

- Coordinating a few projects with different requirements. Management can employ project tracking software to facilitate portfolio of projects analysis.

- Critical path is easy to detect. The critical path is made of tasks that directly influence the real length of the project. Should a task on this path change duration, the rest of the project will be touched by this change. It should be noted that for activities that are outside the critical path small changes in how long it takes can have no impact whatsoever on other activities.

- Disseminating information among the team members. The more intricate are the project needs, the more of them have to be discussed. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of data easier than it has ever been before.

Should you always choose task tracking software?

Like any software solution, project management software has its limitation. It produces the greatest result when used for several large projects. It could be more appropriate to manage simple projects by hand, so that there is no need to deal with large overhead connected with employing complex software solutions.