Project scheduling software - planning and controlling project scheduling resource

Project scheduling software is your tool to identify all of the tasks that are required to complete your project on time. This kind of identification stands for dimension of time. Let's define what is project scheduling - it is creating of calendar that shows project tasks and activities on time grid. Using of calendar is very helpful, because this convenient graphical appearance allows you to review your available resource - to see how much of working time still remains unallocated. Usually project scheduling system is an essential part of fully-functional system that handles planning, scheduling and controlling. But not every project management product can be called a tool as far as not every product has required specific capabilities such as project scheduling calendar. Also not every PM program can be considered as a fully-functional PM tool and this refers to project scheduling software products that do not support planning and controlling of projects. For example you can find project scheduling application that supports only planning , but not effective controlling. Usually that is because of single-user orientation of that system, because effective controlling function implies collaboration between users. A single-user program requires from project manager to enter progress of team members into software (but previously manager should gather progress information). In other words project scheduling tool should be multi-user (collaborative), because that allows users to enter their progress themselves at any convenient moment and this tool from superfluous operations. Let's consider what capabilities project management software should have to be called a full-featured application:

• Collaborative Project Planning - Your project scheduling software should support Task Tree mode, Assignments, Priorities and Costs. Project scheduling system should have Task Tree to categorize (group and sequence) tasks, assignments to give tasks to employees, priorities to outline importance of tasks and cost planning to define estimated expenses. The specific example of project scheduling tool that has all these features is VIP Task Manager. This collaborative project scheduling program can immediately make all team members informed about project plan details.

• Collaborative Project Controlling - Your project scheduling application should enable employees to report on actual vs. planned progress. After you have used your system to plan tasks in details and assign tasks to performers you need to track work progress in the same terms that were used for planning. Collaborative shareware such as VIP Task Manager was actually designed for this. Owing to collaborative capabilities of this package you can keep your schedules and progress up-to-date.

Read also a new article about process management - project management client-server software for Windows