Any project manager operates four variables: expenditure, timing, time and quality. A more ambitious goal is to improve business processes and resource distribution. Look at any project and you will notice that it employes people, funds and tools to give satisfactory results. You should know that there are a number of things that are vital for successful project management. Some of them are listed below:

- Setting goals and carrying out analysis.

- Managing risks. Take any project and you will see that it has a number of uncertainties that should be dealt with.

- Allocating and supervising resources.

- Having a clear idea about the result you wish to see when the project is finished.

- Managing what is going on: giving out jobs, supervising execution.

- Ensuring that the products of the project are of satisfactory quality.

- Dealing with change. Change is constant. When you start out on the project, you should forsee in what way it will evolve with time.

- Communicating with project stakeholders.

To manage these issues you can use pencil and a notepad or probably a spreadsheet program. However, you get quite a few advantages if you go for project tracking software:

- It simplifies scheduling. Duration can be adjusted automatically using the workload information. Each resource can possess their own calendar. It just as well simplifies tracking the work-in-progress on various tasks.

- Managing several projects with different requirements. Productivity management software helps project executives to observea bigger picture and aggregate information on several projects.

- It helps you find the critical path. The critical path of a project consists of tasks that determine the real duration of the project. If an activity on the critical path takes more time than the manager planned, dates of work on other tasks will be altered. It should be noted that for activities that are not on the critical path minor modifications in duration can have no influence whatsoever on the project.

- Distributing data among the team members. Complex projects demand a lof of communication. Groupware productivity tracking software enables everybody to know what is up at any given point in time.

Should you always go for task tracking software?

Like any instrument, project management software has its limitation. It produces the greatest result when used for a number of big projects. It might be more appropriate to operate smaller projects by hand, so that you do not have to pay big overhead connected with operating complicated software solutions.