Robust and reliable project management is essential to maximizing profits while sustaining growth and strong customer relationships – and it’s rarely the result of people working harder and faster. You need both the right project management mindset and the right technologies to consistently deliver successful projects.
The most common tool people use to perform project scheduling is Microsoft Outlook, even though Outlook isn’t good at managing task-oriented buckets of work and scheduling them to the most skilled individual. Outlook is convenient because it’s often part of the software a company already owns, but managing project schedules with a tool designed for contact records rather than company records quickly becomes unmanageable. Even if you provide work to individuals, how do you connect the tasks and task schedules? Yes, there are Outlook-based systems for working with companies, but they’re not designed to share the collected information with coworkers or manage cost and revenue schedules among different customers.
Collaboration tools like Asana and BaseCamp help companies understand which project tasks remain outstanding and the status of each. That’s helpful, but there’s so much missing and no way to add capabilities without connecting it to yet another tool (which gets confusing, unwieldy, and expensive). Without correlating tasks to other critical project data, you’re flying blind with no functionality for correlating costs to work performed or applying analysis across multiple facets of the project to gain a true picture of how the project is fairing.
You may know of one project team member who delivered an advertisement video to the client, for example, and of another team member who delivered the video’s landing page on the client’s website, and that the client offered feedback on both. But how has the project been managed to control the cost of potential rework? Will some costs need to be modified so the deliverables meet the requirements or changes per the client’s feedback? Can you look at all the change orders in one place? On a moment’s notice, can you total the hours spent? And the costs? Does one task raise an additional task item, or do you need to renegotiate the contract based on your analysis? A sequential list of “conversations” that detail all the discussions/tasks that are in process in a project is not an efficient way to analyze (not just view) what is happening.
Maybe that’s good enough for your business today, but do you plan to grow? Do you want to choose and invest in a new system in the future, all over again? This is where modern project management software comes in – collaboration tools simply cannot provide the deep or broad context modern project management can, which leads to numerous project management problems that adversely affect company success.
Contactthe TimeLinx team for better solutions for project management.
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About TimeLinx
TimeLinx delivers innovative project & service management software as a complete solution that perfects the sell-track-manage-support-bill cycle that services organizations must have to delight their customers; TimeLinx brings the cycle together in a single application that offers less frustration, better project management, complete reporting, and improved profitability – all specially designed for Infor and Sage.
