PM Software—A Tool or a Supervisor? Computers have replaced people as workers in

Question

PM Software—A Tool or a Supervisor?

Computers have replaced people as workers in many areas primarily because of the speed and precision with which they perform tasks. However, there are drawbacks to overreliance on automation—when a job is no longer performed manually, the skill set required for the job may slowly diminish and may eventually be lost. This idea holds true for project management as well.

This week's Discussion considers a PM relying on project management software tools. With sound understanding of the main areas of project management activities, you should be able to analyze which of these activities are best automated and which other activities should be performed manually.

Discuss the pros and cons of project management software.

When should project management tools be used?

For which tasks should a PM not use any software tools?

Is project management software truly beneficial to PMs, or does it tend to misdirect them? Substantiate your answers with examples.

Explanation / Answer

Discuss the pros and cons of project management software.

Pros:

1) Shareable and easier to collab: Project management software allows us to easily share our project informations and important things among colleagues. For eg, Trello is an excellent project management tool that are used by teams to share ideas, events, dates, deadline etc.

2) Organization: When dealing with project management, organization is a big problem. As humans, it might become quite hard to be in track, especially when multitasking. So such tools helps us get organized and track our works. For eg, Asana focuses on quick task tracking.

Cons:

1) Needs updation on a regular basis: The tasks and documents need to be updated. The app needs to be updated on a manual basis. That is how it can be used efficiently. For eg, in Trello, one needs to update the shared documents and all in order to keep track.

2) Time investment: This is somewhat a con that needs to be surpassed whenever we switch to using tools for software project management. Investment is required in learning to use the app efficiently and applying one's management in the app. And that requires everyone involved in the project to do so.

When should project management tools be used?

It should be used only when one needs the tools desperately. Or else, people would overly rely on them.

Here are some cases when the tools can be used:

1) Less number of people in a team and more work to do.

2) Lack of an efficient Project Manager.

3) Deadline is of less time.

4) Lack of proper organization. Might happen when a project is ongoing.

5) When there is a need of keep tracks and records for a longer time.

For which tasks should a PM not use any software tools?

1) Initial planning and defining scope of the project.

2) Sequencing tasks.

3) Resource planning

4) Team leadership

5) Risk Analysis

6) Developing schedules

7) Managing issues

8) Strategizing

Is project management software truly beneficial to PMs, or does it tend to misdirect them?

According to me, project management software are beneficial for PMs, but only upto certain extent.

Let us take a project, say A. Now, to make A, we have a team of 5 people, including the project manager. So we decide that we would use tools like Asana and Slack to keep track of our progress and sharing data amongst each other. But, of course, we cannot rely on those softwares for the planning, scheduling, budgeting, risk analysis etc. That is something that a PM should do.

But this time, our PM decides that he would use some tools for all the works, so that we have output for less work. The problem that happened was, the tool did give him analytics but it was upto him on how to handle them. So, finally, he was doing all he ought to, because apps weren't helping that much.

For anything nowadays, we need both the human brain and technology. We cannot rely completely on technology to do our tasks. If we have some graph of certain things, our brain is needed to analyse the graph. And in project management, there are many times when we have to make a decision. A PM cannot take help of apps at that time.

Apps are good for providing certain information, calculations to save time and also collaboration. But when it comes to planning and decision making, we are our own best allies.

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