Project Management Tools and Techniques
Over the years the tools and techniques that have been used to manage projects just got more sophisticated. The reason for this is because the business environment is always changing and it has gotten more complex. The same tools and techniques we used back then can’t adapt to the new environment.
For project managers using tools and techniques will help to make your job easier. They can help you to make proper project analysis to manage risk and make better decisions. You have a lot of cool and interesting tools you can implement into your project to make managing it better. You can see a list of them below.
Project Management Techniques and Tools
PERT (project evaluation and review techniques)
This is a tool you can use to get a better time estimation of a project or the different activities within a project. It will help you to evaluate the average time it’s going to take for each task to be finished. So you can make important business decisions. Such as planning out the amount of resources a project will need over a period of time.
Resource histograms
The resource histogram is a bar chart or column. That’s going to show you the number of resources that’s going to be assigned to a project over a period of time. This will help you to plan out your resources better along with your project staff. You can see an example of one below. It’s going to show the types of staff you are going to need over a 5 day period.
Project management software
Project management software is a tool and using one can really make your job easier and improve efficiency within your project. You can find a lot of them being sold online for a very cheap price. A popular one you can use is Microsoft project.
Additionally you can even find free ones although investing in a good one would be recommended. They can help you manage risk, controlling your budget and cost, scheduling your different projects etc. Lastly they can improve the efficiency of how you collect data and interpret the information.
Earned value management
This technique will help you to manage your cost and your project’s progress. It will also help you know the true value of how your money is being spent. So for example you set a budget of $15,000 on a project that’s going to finish in 2 months. If one month is up and the manager has reported that they have spent 40% of the project’s budget.
That may seem like everything is working perfectly like how you’ve planned it out. When you analyze it properly and look at where your money was being spent and look at the project’s process. You come to realize that your project’s progress is at a mere 20%.
The earned value management will help you to see the early warning signs early in your project. Before it gets any later on and it incurs more cost in a failed or inefficient project.
These are just some of the techniques and tools you can use while managing a project to make the overall project management process more efficient. They are also pretty simple to implement.