What Are The Essential Tools For Project Management?

Project Management involves effective planning and having an organizational set-up that is systematic. These two factors are determined by how well your projects are defined, how often you make schedules that you stick to, and how well you assign tasks to the overall accomplishment of a particular goal within your company.

There are so many tools that help make project management more effective and efficient most of which are pretty common however we are going to have a wide and expansive look at them. Let us have a look at some of the most essential tools for project management.  

Gantt Chart

This chart helps in breaking down the project and arranging it into a series of tasks that are smaller than the original in an organized way. There is a horizontal bar for each task whose main work is to indicate each task’s expected duration of time. The horizontal bar has left end indicated the completion date of the task. There are several ways that tasks can run in this chart; parallelly, sequentially, or they could also be overlapping.

A Gantt Chart offers you a chance to recognize your current sub-tasks and the time when they either begin or end. This helps present a somewhat visual overview of the project through which you can be able to easily track the progress of the project.

A Calendar

This is, by far, the easiest project management tool to understand. It is however more suited to help manage your time and project. With a calendar, you can know either the date, week, month or year that you are supposed to start your project.

However, the most impeccable thing about this tool is the space that it offers to add your to-do lists. You will be able to see reminders that will help finish your projects before the deadline.

PERT Chart

An abbreviation of the Project Evaluation and Review Technique, it’s a primary tool for a project management tool used for scheduling and planning entire projects and tracking your implementation phase. The PERT chart can also display time allocation, task division, and starting and ending dates.

The Pert chart represents tasks using boxes that are linked to a network module, unlike the Gantt Chart which uses bars to represent data. This layout makes it easy to trace the relationships between activities. However, the only merit is that it can be very difficult to follow especially if there are many tasks and dependencies that are complex.

Timeline

Also, another project management tool that can help keep track project progress. A timeline can help you visualize by the time a task needs to be done. It relies mainly on sequences though it’s not as popular as the Gantt Chart due to its inability of showing task dependencies and the completion. 

WBS Chart

Commonly known as the Work Break Down structure, this chart helps visualize the scope of work by breaking down your projects into components that are easily and effectively schedulable.

This chart’s attributes are similar to those of a tree diagram with the main task on the top, followed by similar sub-tasks and so on.

The texts can be displayed mainly in two ways thus in text boxes or just pure text. 

Mind Map

The thing that makes his particular tool so unique is its flexibility. It is a powerful tool that is both less formal and flexible. It can take so many entries without having to break down and it is very clear.

The structure starts from the main task that is centered in the middle of the whole diagram and then more sub-tasks are added on top of it and spread through in a root-kind of manner, more like a network of nerves that originate from the brain and proceed to the rest of the body.

Status Table

This powerful tool is unique for not having too many details that can be considered too tedious to try and figure out and confusing. The focus on this tool is more centered towards the status and complete progress. The additional function of this tool is that it can include the people who can take charge of the task mentioned. This helps better evaluate employee performance and also know who to hold responsible for a certain dysfunction. Besides, this tool is pretty clear and direct in addition to its easy ways of tracking.

H.O.Q

This abbreviates House of Quality which is a quality management tool used to facilitate decision-making in groups. Though it is a bit complicated to read, it is easy to make through Edraw. 

So the above were some of the essential tools for project developments. These days, all the modern project development softwares incorporates some or more of these tools in their packages.