February 18, 2008

Intelligent Project Management: Assists With Better Forecasting

Project management software helps professionals manage projects, keep track of responsibilities, manage deadlines and more. However, project management software is only a tool and is only as good as the data input into it.

In project management, like the financial plan of a brand new business, there is a lot of forecasting that goes into the project with the hope to get an accurate picture of the next deadline - leading to the final project deadline.

If you're managing building construction, for example, and you think it will take 10 trucks, 5 hours to go from the concrete making site to the building being constructed and it really takes 10 hours due to traffic, this puts the next item in the project off. To many of these bad estimates means you could lose money or not be hired for the next project.

A new project management tool, LiquidPlanner, is built with intelligence to provide the means to factor the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies every project. Every time a project is completed, Liquid Planner is able to take this information and help the team more accurately predict the next phase of the project more accurately.

Uncertainty exists in every project and has the potential to undermine project success. However, just because uncertainty exists doesn't mean it can't be effectively managed, and that's precisely what LiquidPlanner is designed to do, said Charles Seybold, CEO and co-founder of LiquidPlanner.

Today's project management landscape is crowded and largely homogenous as each product works largely on the same underlying principles.

For example, most traditional project management tools employ single point estimates to calculate how long a specific task might take. These estimates are then simply added up to generate a project completion date. The Liquid Approach to project management is fundamentally different as it unites ranged estimates with statistical analysis to determine the probability of completing a task or project by a certain date. The result is a dynamic project schedule that empowers project managers and their teams to literally see where a project is most likely to break down -- and then remediate those issues before a project gets derailed.

Microsoft Project is probably one of the most well known project management tools. A quick search of Google reveals dozens and dozens of other project management tools, some of which I've brought to your attention already.

37 Signal's Basecamp is pretty neat and is used by a number of notables, including John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing.

You might also find Atttask and Clarizen to be useful tools.

Finally many of the database software (hosted and traditional) such as Quickbase, Microsoft Access, FileMaker and Alpha Software have project management templates you can download or purchase.

tags: 37signals , basecamp , filemaker , liquidplanner , project management , quickbase | 0 comments