Project managers often create, schedule, and optimize workflows. But did you know that these daily management tasks are essential project management software features? Though aligned towards a common goal, each feature plays a significant role in making or breaking your project performance. Therefore, when selecting a project management tool, you must focus on the roles and benefits of these essential features.
This article highlights five key project management software features based on the ratings given by verified software users. We also include the highest-rated project management software solutions for each feature. Read more.
1. Task Management
The task management feature in a project management system assists with managing the workload among team members. The feature allows for creating, assigning, and monitoring tasks within a project. These tasks can be further broken down into smaller sub-tasks with different stakeholders involved to complete them on the set deadline.
As a note, the broader task management functionality also includes task progress tracking, which is rated as “highly important” by 86% of reviewers. Task progress tracking keeps a check on the deadlines and resource sharing to understand the estimated completion duration.
What business problem does task management solve?
Grouping and assigning multiple tasks can be challenging when handling a complex project. Task management functionality simplifies managing projects by breaking them down into smaller tasks and tracking their due dates individually. The feature also allows assigning tasks to multiple team members so that their delivery is not affected by someone's absence.
The task management feature also automates the scheduling of interrelated tasks to ensure real-time collaboration and on-time completion of projects in the correct order.
Ideal users of the task management feature
As a team project manager, you oversee various projects and are responsible for their on-time completion. Task management features can assist you in keeping track of all the projects and their tasks in the correct order. You can set priority levels and re-assign tasks based on the aligned team member's bandwidth.
Top 3 products with the highest ratings for task management
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2. Project planning/scheduling
Project planning/scheduling involves outlining the key project objectives and goals and setting due dates accordingly. This feature in a project management solution provides a dashboard to view different ongoing, upcoming, and pending projects along with the respective tasks. It also provides the name(s) of project owners and team members associated with the tasks within projects.
Project planning/scheduling also helps monitor project costs and resources and creates a budget for each project.
What business problem does project planning/scheduling solve?
Delays in delivery, inaccurate resources, unidentified risks, and cost overruns are some of the challenges faced in project management due to inefficient planning. The project planning/scheduling feature helps bring all the crucial project management elements (data, budget, deadlines, resources, and risks) together, offering a bird eye view to set project objectives, estimate costs, and create schedules accordingly. It also clearly shows the team’s availability to set realistic timelines and ensure maximum bandwidth utilization.
Ideal users of the project planning/scheduling feature
Project managers involved in planning and operations can benefit from project planning/scheduling features. It allows you to improve processes, increase productivity, optimize costs, and maximize resource utilization.
Top 3 products with the highest ratings for project planning/scheduling
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3. Reporting/project tracking
Reporting/project tracking is a project management feature that offers a dashboard for tracking completion, measuring metrics, and analyzing trends. The feature assists with getting a 360-degree view of how a project is doing to determine the next course of action. The overall project's progress can be broken down into individual contributions from team members to track progress individually.
Reporting/project tracking functionality also enables pulling out custom reports to gather insights into project completion rates and assess team productivity. These reports can be viewed using charts, graphs, tables, and other visualization elements to highlight the action points.
What business problem does reporting/project tracking solve?
Tracking and summarizing progress on multiple projects manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. By providing a 360-degree view of all project progress in one place, this feature simplifies identifying trends such as delays, issues, on-time completion rate, etc. The progress is summarized after taking into account the availability of team members and the total projects/tasks assigned to them. This helps assess if the team members meet all objectives to keep up with the key performance indicators (KPIs).
Ideal users of the reporting/project tracking feature
Project managers responsible for creating performance reports with metrics specific to the business objectives can benefit from reporting/project tracking software. You can use the project dashboard to create and share reports with relevant stakeholders via links or as PDF attachments. The feature also lets you automate report generation for specific performance metrics in set intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
Top 3 products with the highest ratings for reporting/project tracking feature
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4. Prioritization
Prioritization in project management is to set the order of tasks based on their urgency and the availability of the team members. It involves evaluating each task within the project for its objective, goal, cost, benefit, and risk. Once prioritized, the task due dates are set for the aligned team members to focus on timely completion.
What business problem does prioritization solve?
Without prioritization, there are chances for team members to miss out on important tasks and deadlines, especially when working on multiple projects. Missing out on tasks can affect the overall project progress. That being said, it is essential to set tasks in the correct order of their delivery date to ensure none are missed.
Prioritization also assists team members in standardizing tasks, identifying dependencies, and taking immediate action on issues to ensure smooth project completion.
Ideal users of prioritization feature
Prioritization feature is beneficial for project managers responsible for planning and scheduling projects and their respective tasks. Additionally, team members working on tight deadlines can use this feature to get a summary of upcoming and ongoing tasks and ensure on-time completion.
Top 3 products with the highest ratings for prioritization
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5. Workflow management
Workflow management optimizes, improves, and automates project workflows to increase productivity and reduce manual scheduling errors. The feature offers the flexibility to select from pre-built workflows (sequential
What business problem does workflow management solve?
Manually setting up project workflows can be complex and time-consuming, causing assignment errors and completion delays. A project management system with workflow management features can speed up project creation with automated workflows, dependencies, and scheduling for repetitive or error-prone tasks. Automation also does not limit the creation of projects to one person, bringing operational resilience.
Ideal users of workflow management feature
Project managers working with a combination of unique and repetitive daily tasks can use workflow management features. You can automate repetitive tasks to maximize productivity with reduced errors. The saved time can be utilized to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and redundancies in team and individual performance.
Top 3 products with the highest ratings for workflow management
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