Project management free tools

Project management is a discipline including methodologies and tools necessary to accomplish work of certain scope with a help of given budget and resources. There are dozens of different computer-based tools and solutions created to support these efforts in terms of planning and controlling their elements in a systematic manner. Usually these business instruments are quite expensive, as far as a lot of business beginners have very limited IT budgets, but they yet want to manage their projects in a better manner. There are lots of project management free resources on the Web, not only software, but also PM educational, methodical and assistant materials. Let’s consider different types of project management free download content:

• articles – usually they are products of many different freelancing authors. There are lots of free web-portals providing large collections of articles which are categorized and systematized according to alphabet, authors, topics, etc. Usually, pieces of information contained in such articles are generally incomplete and uncoordinated, so in order to get a complete picture of some conceptions you need to study a bunch of similar articles (they, however, may give you a discrepant opinions and information from different authors).

• e-books – such opuses are much more complete and rich sources of information. They may be dedicated to some particular topics, or to a complete overview of the PM discipline. These e-books could be created in a form of academic statements explaining generally recognized matters through prism of author’s experience and supplemented with his personal researches, or they could be worded in a more practice-oriented form of tutorials that teach you how to perform essential project documents and activities.
• templates – these data-framing tools are patterns and samples that serve for different essential purposes. They could be used to facilitate composing of different project documents (for example project financial plan, staffing plan, quality plan, etc), or they could be used for collecting, systematizing and delivering certain kinds of data, for example free job tracking templates to get reports from the project doers.

• training – different business consulting organizations and companies offer trainings teaching you how to manage your projects. They may offer a first training as a free service to interest you in a further collaboration; however, these business services are quite expensive as for beginning business managers who are limited in their financial resources.
• software – there are different free software products on the Web, all of them have different levels of quality and usability, however free software has a number of issues you may face – poor usability, functionality, support. Good alternative to free project management software are programs sold at moderate prices, such as one reviewed below.

Example of proven commercial project management software:

VIP Task Manager is a commercial task and time management instrument that is supported with free download of its trial version (30 days). Besides this project management free test version, this product is powerfully supported with different free services, for example you may immediately request for assistance from qualified support service, or you can request for live webinars to get product’s capabilities demonstrated by a qualified operator. Besides these webinars, free videos can be watched on the Web-site – they also demonstrate the main software’s capabilities and tutor on how to use them.