Tips to Get the Most out of Project Management Software

Many businesses invest a lot of time in trying to select the best project management software. While that’s a good idea, it’s unfortunate that many business managements ignore the most important part – coming up with strategies to get the most out of their best software. For this reason, we thought it wise to provide some of the most useful tips for getting the most out of any project management software.

Useful tips for getting a project management software

Analyze your needs first

Before you start looking for project management software, start with a needs analysis. Find out what kind of PM software your business needs. For instance, are all your projects internal, or do you go beyond this to work with external vendors and clients? What do you want to do – assign tasks and deliverables to team members or create a space where team members collaborate? And will your projects require you to create invoices? Answering these questions will lead you into choosing the project management software with features that will be fully beneficial to your business.

Train the users adequately

Provide multiple training sessions and make sure everyone receives adequate training. By the end of each training session, make sure every team member has an account, a login and a simple password that’s easy to remember. You should set up a project immediately after each training session so that everyone can practice the general use of the system such as attaching files and so on.
It’s important to reinforce what employees have learnt and you can do that by offering follow-up training few weeks or days after the initial training session. You can also organize with a third party or a vendor to offer them online video tutorials.

Define your goals early

Determine what you want to achieve by using project management software. Ask yourself what you want the software to do. For example, do you want it to create status reports? Or do you want it to forecast or just serve as a collaborative tool? When you establish your goals early on, it’ll provide clarity to how you’re going to set up and use it. This will also provide clarity on how you’re going to train the team on it. Otherwise, implementation is going to be terrible.

Track projects in real-time

Instead of waiting for a weekly meeting to notice that your project is doing terrible, you should have one person in charge tracking projects in real-time. Assign one party to act as a project manager to track your projects’ progress in real time. In that way, he or she will be able to correct all issues before they get out of hand. Still, project manager is supposed to communicate regularly with the team members and ensure that the entire team is using the software.

Integration with core apps

It’s very helpful to make sure that the project management software integrates with core apps such as email. This is important because everyone uses email and therefore, a solution that posts messages to email is really going to increase user engagement.