What to Consider Before Choosing a Project Management Software
Posted on 26th Nov 2020
How do you manage the workflow of your creative team efficiently? At times, it may get a bit messed when the number of projects crosses a small number and you may have to do some projects all over again. A wide-ranging PWC study of 10,640 projects across 30 countries found that only 2.5% of companies successfully complete 100% of their projects. That means, 97.5% of projects fail to hit their originally stated targets.
In the last few years, project management tools have come a much longer way in getting things done. It gives way to a collaborative workflow and brings several benefits to the teams:
Prevents frustration and miscommunication
Streamline activities that are done regularly
Eliminates bottlenecks by making the best use of time
A workflow doesn’t have to be complicated. So, keep it simple. The creative team at ProofHub has the flexibility to pursue a variety of ideas. And using the right project management software they find it easy to meet deadlines. According to several creative project managers, there are certain features they find it to be integral in a project management software. Let’s find what are the must-have features of a project management software for creatives.
Creative Project Management: Why is it different?
Creativity is the ability to look at the same thing as everybody else and see something different. Charles “Chic” Thompson
What creativity is for a project manager is quite important for the success of your next project. When it comes to creative projects, Creative Project Management is the need to handle your daily projects in a creative team. Managing a project with creative ideas can be difficult if you do not have the right tool in hand.
The project management software designed with the creative process in mind will have some features to release complexities in your project. Let’s have a look at them.
Must haves for creative project management software
Real-time and efficient project planning
In every project, regardless of its size, there is a need of staying up to date to know what’s happening on a project. A trustworthy project management software will have the ability to share everything about the process in real-time. Professionals look for perfect planning to transform their ideas of the project and therefore a good project planning feature.
While managing a team, you will be able to plan, assign, schedule and delegate the new tasks. Each and every update in the project plan will be visible through the lifecycle of the project. Creative teams will have something in place to make their life easy.
Milestones and deliverables
You as the project manager, might have already noticed how creating milestones will decide how your project is advancing. It is essential to set clear time boundaries on all deliverables for the success of your project. Creative project management software should allow setting milestones to get things done on time, where you can break up large tasks into small and set individual milestones. Incorporating milestones will help creative teams to keep a sight on deadlines while always stay on top of the schedule.
Agile project management methodology
Throughout the years, business chaos is hampering the performance of many professionals. There is a need to switch to an agile project management methodology to do everything you need to do to control the chaos.
Agile project management methodology is becoming the industry standard for project management. Creative teams have seen their productivity explode by 400% and with less fuss. More and more leading companies need to adopt Agile software development methodology for successfully eradicating business chaos.
Visual and efficient reporting
A project manager’s world has a lot of visualizations of their ongoing project and so they need to track things in spreadsheets. Without tracking and reporting, the exact success of the project cannot be judged. In reports, there should be a clear look at how to represent all the project data.
Creative project reporting should be more visual so any kind of report required can be extracted easily to leave an impact on the customer. Also, it will make it easy for creative teams to understand the necessary information.
Integration with other tools
When the project managers want to manage all the work under one roof, then you need integrate all your scattered files, documents, images at a central place and access them from within the tool. With a project management software, the teams should be able to access all the files stored on multiple platforms in one place.
The tool should support third-party integrations with DropBox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive. Integrated tools will increase productivity by reducing the switchover time while running into various tools.
Native Mobile Apps
Mobile-optimized project management software is a must for creative teams. With remote workers growing rapidly and with growing technology how people work is changing, a native mobile application should always be in hand. It will help in having an ultimate control of your projects with different functionality. Native mobile apps are optimized for on-the-go usage for handling projects.
A custom role for everyone
Smart creative teams have the right mix of professionals with different skills so you need to know who should be on your next task. It can be quite tiring for managers to assign roles to the team members working on a project. There has to be a way out for what information should be assigned and shared with each team member. Managers will be able to manage so many roles successfully with the right features in the right technology. On a project management software, you should be able to assign a role to each team member for better performance.