Project management is an essential part of any business for a range of reasons.
One of the most important reasons is that successful project management can help guide the direction of growth for a business.
Another important reason is that well executed projects can ensure that your reputation with clients remains and continues to be a good one.
Successfully managing a project will make sure that everything stays on track throughout each project undertaken. This will keep you within the budget, ensure that clients are not being over or under serviced, and limit the amount of time wasted through inefficiency.
A brilliant way to ensure your project management is as comprehensive as it can be is to incorporate project management software into your processes.
However, as each industry has different needs when it comes to project management, with some requiring special features, and capabilities, it can be difficult to decide which one will be best for you.
If you are struggling to pin down what exactly you need from your project management software, read on for some advice on the best direction to take.
Industry Specific Project Management Requirements
Creative Agencies
The perfect project management software for digital and creative agencies will include a number of features that have been created with the client-facing nature of the industry taken into account.
Features such as report generators, live client dashboards, and email integration will make it much easier to seamlessly interact with clients. This will in turn allow teams to invest more of their time into producing high quality work for clients.
There are several tailored agency project management softwareoptions available. One option is Synergistwhich includes a scheduled reporting feature to ensure that nothing falls between the cracks, time and profitability monitoring to keep you on track with projects, and capacity planning so that you can easily and effectively manage resource.
Architects
The architecture, building, and construction industry has always needed comprehensive project management solutions. But in the digital age project management can be more detailed than ever.
Project management software with Sage integration, and easy to navigate contacts databases helps keep architects focused on designing, without having to worry about important details being lost.
IT
IT support teams often carry out complex projects with tens of stages. This means that staying on top of progress is a task in itself.
Project management for IT support professionals relies on on well structured, highly customisable task lists that can be viewed in real time by the rest of the team. One solution is cloud project management which allows everyone to work on their respective tasks whilst being able to view the progress of other team members. Ultimately this means that there is less need to be interrupted with too many pointless catch-up meetings that can destroy productivity.
Engineering Consultants
Consultancy based engineering companies can benefit from specialist project management software too.
With most consultancies having a mix of clients, they need to keep track of both ongoing monthly retainers and one-off fees. With consultant project management software, it’s easy to keep on track of which jobs are profitable and which aren’t, to avoid wasting any precious labour hours and continue driving company growth.
Finance
The financial industry involves a lot of ongoing projects that project management software is perfect for keeping track of.
Integration with programmes such as Xero can give you the ability to produce invoices and bills straight from the project management software itself. This reduces the risk of errors being made when swapping between programmes.
As you can see, project management software is a versatile way for any company to make their processes more efficient and save time and energy. If you are looking for a small boost but don’t know where to start, this could be the answer to your question.
