Smart Project Management

Today’s technological advance has first impacted on the production of goods, but automated production and advanced global telecommunications have determined a massive change in business management. Efficiency keeps measuring all economic success against allocated resources, costs and time, but project management has become the key concept to all efficient businesses in our technology-based age.

When the first Concerto project management software experiments hit the market, the concept was still new but alluring. Geographically dispersed teams could be employed within a supportive environment. Clerks could be replaced with affordable software. Also, project management software allowed managers to spend more time with actual decision making. These possibilities were embraced by some and doubted by others. Even skeptics were ready to admit that computer-based project management suites would have serious advantages. Only they doubted that such a thing would really work efficiently with more complex projects.

Many managers, who tried out Concerto project management software, offered precious feedback and decided to go on with its implementation. Software developers keep doing their best to echo their customers’ needs. Proficient suites have become versatile, and are able now to take over various kinds of projects, and to manage all of them successfully. This means that managers need not switch from one software suite to another whenever a new kind of project is started. Also, suits have become highly customizable, and increasingly capable to operate with customized workflows. In other words, the name of smart project management today is project management software.

The Concerto smart project management software has brought about certain specific problems that are not for software developers, but for the project managers themselves to sort out. The key issue of proficient project management software suites is the treatment of change. The managed processes within a project are predetermined to a certain extent, and from there on changes can occur on many levels. Proficient management suites have been designed to react to change, but it is up to the project manager, to implement the unexpected into the existing structure of the project, in a way that allows the software to interpret it in the desired way.

Numerous complaints related to inefficient project management software, in particular situations when changes were introduced in the management process of a project, are not followed by discoveries of software errors or limitations. Instead, they reveal themselves as human management errors. In other word, smart software suites call for smart project managers, who know what should and what shouldn’t be assigned to the particular software they employ in their work.

No management software is accountable for errors related to human communication. It is always for the manager to make sure that the sponsor, the business managers and the project managers have indeed reached an agreement concerning their roles. Another important human management-related issue refers to scope change and new requirements. It is the manager’s duty to make sure that each of his projects has a proper change management plan in place before work is started. Finally, it is also for him to make sure that end users are properly involved in the project.