Project Management Headaches? Here's How to Get Relief

Have you ever tried to manage a number of projects, keeping track of resources, budgets, and milestones, and communicating essential information to everyone involved? It can make you feel like the juggler spinning plates, dashing from one to the next, trying to keep them all going at the same time. Inevitably, a plate comes crashing down.

As a small business, the project management tools available to you have been either hard to use or non-existent. Microsoft Project can be used for general planning, but unless you have a full-time expert on staff, MS Project is just too difficult to use. Large companies may make the investment to establish and maintain a project management office; it is simply not practical for most small to medium sized businesses.

That leaves spreadsheets for planning and tracking, and the challenge of rolling multiple spreadsheets into one summary to give management a useful overview of progress. For a one-time view it can work, but updating and maintaining data integrity of all the individual project spreadsheets creates more headaches than it solves.

So what is a growing, successful small business to do? You need a dashboard view for high level oversight, but you also need to be able to drill down and see up-to-date information on what is happening with each individual project. You need to communicate quickly, accurately, and completely with everyone involved, and be sure that they have information they need. Staying within time and budget limits requires the ability to manage change orders to avoid "scope creep". You need to view and distribute reports. And when a project is complete, you need to collect and analyze the all-important best practices that result.

All that functionality does not have to translate into higher system cost. In my experience, many tools over complicate the process. Adding complex features to software does not always translate into benefits, so don't assume that high-end will mean high quality results for your business. The ease of use is at least as important a factor in choosing your project management software as is the price. An expensive, complex program will only work as well as the people who have to use it every day. I've found that products such as BrightWork and CopperProject are wonderful at adhering to the KISS principle.

When you are ready to choose a project management solution, be sure you consider the less complex and lower cost options as part of your selection process. You and your budget may be pleasantly surprised!