The Best Project Management Tools Have These 3 Features

by Renee Coulombe
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Collaborative work management tools are transforming the way project management leaders plan and organize work. According to a new in-depth report by Project Management Institute (PMI)®, 84 percent of innovators say the cloud is giving their organization a competitive advantage when it comes to project management — and cloud-based tools are proliferating.

But if the platform you’re using lacks critical project management features, you risk process inefficiency and team confusion.

When evaluating cloud collaboration platforms for project management, it’s important to make sure they have these key features:
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Interactive Gantt Chart Views

A Gantt chart is one of the most popular ways for project managers to visualize the relationship between tasks and milestones in a project plan. It allows you to see dependencies, track the relationship between tasks, and display the percent complete of individual assignments.

Many collaboration products don’t include this critical capability. Smartsheet provides a simple, seamless way to visualize your projects with interactive Gantt charts, helping to bring focus to important tasks and maintain transparency.
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Work Days and Duration

As a project manager, you need a tool that allows you to monitor and adjust your project schedule down to the minute. Whether your timeline includes having holidays off, working weekends, or staying a few hours late, having a tool that can take these schedule variations into account when creating your project plan is imperative.

The Smartsheet work execution platform allows you to adjust work days and duration, giving you the freedom and flexibility to maintain schedules that may not fit neatly into a nine-to-five work week. As one of the most flexible collaborative work management tools on the market, Smartsheet allows you to easily adapt project timelines and ensure your teams are on track for success.
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Critical Path

In any given project, you may have hundreds of tasks and dozens of dependencies. The critical path method is used to identify the most important tasks and ensure your project doesn't fall behind schedule.
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In Smartsheet, project managers can use Gantt charts to easily identify and track key tasks on a project’s critical path and use the platform to program automated alerts providing you with updates on task statuses and completion percentages.
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See More, Manage More

From big-picture progress to detailed execution, the Smartsheet work execution platform helps project management professionals focus on what matters most.

Discover why PMO leaders rely on Smartsheet every day to align the right people, resources, and schedules: www.smartsheet.com/solutions/project-management

Source: Smartsheet Blog

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