INFT3100 Project Management : Tools for Managing Projects

Asana: This tool is a mobile and web based application that is designed to assist teams in organising, tracking and managing their respective work. Asana improves work management and team collaboration. Asana tool assists in effective use of templates for adding new workflows, creating task lists, generating projects for posting to share boards, creating subtasks by breaking down bigger tasks. Team members gain the ability to comment on several tasks (Lin et al., 2016).

Trello: Trello tool is a web-based application for project management. This tool is commonly used for real estate supervision, software project administration, planning of lessons, accounting, web design, and gaming. Trello is based on card design. Each card contains a task list. Movement of cards can be easily achieved according to the priorities. These cards can be updated using email (Zamyatina & Mozgaleva, 2013).

Basecamp: This tool is pervasive tool for project management that is used by several web agencies, assisting them for managing projects and work together with clients (Stoshikj, Kryvinska & Strauss, 2014).

Use of spreadsheet for project management processes

Spreadsheet software is ideally used for:

1. To-do lists: To-do lists are created for tracking the pending tasks and manage the tasks that are assigned to the team members.
2. Tracking of tasks: Task-tracking sheets can be designed in Microsoft Excel for effective tracking the tasks that are allocated to the team members.
3. Budget management: effective management of the budget allocated is tracked using excel spreadsheet. Excel spreadsheet of budget can be created using Microsoft Excel.
4. Changes, issues, and risk tracking: spreadsheets are created for tracking the changes in the schedule or any other changes during the projects. The potential risks can be monitored for establishing suitable mitigation methods.
5. Pivot table reports: Pivot table is a tool that is used to summarize and reorganise selected rows and columns of data in a database or spreadsheet table for obtaining desired report. Microsoft excel is used to create pivot table reports.

Use of scheduling tools in project management

Project scheduling is the mechanism of communicating the tasks that need to be done and the organisational resources that needs to be allocated for completing the tasks in proper timeframe. The document that collects all the work of the project that are needed to be delivered in time is the project schedule. Scheduling and planning are the backbone of the entire project. Microsoft project utilises these following steps for ensuring precise project management:

Prioritisation: assists in prioritising the tasks involved in the project and allows the team members to focus on the important details

Task management: - the project managers get the ability to define the activities that are involved in a project and the project managers execute assigning of the tasks to the appropriate task members.

Tips for using these project management products

Spreadsheet can be used to keep track of all the activities that are involved in the project and the planning of the project can be achieved by the use of Microsoft Project.

Two types of project management tools

Pivotal tracker: This application is a service tracker that is used for swift collaboration and project management. It helps the development teams to break down the requirements of the projects into minor, material stories, and organise them in a mutual backlog in a proper priority order. Teams then work through the stories and complete them, while the customers of the team accept the complete stories and then feedback is provided by the customer (Turner, 2016).

Jira: This software is an exclusive product for tracking issues, established by Atlassian, which enables tracking of bugs and swift project management (Mishra & Mishra, 2013).

Difference between Pivotal tracker, jira and the previous tools

Pivotal tracker and Jira software helps in effective managing of tasks.

Casual helps in simplifying the projects, Asana helps in managing, tracking and organising the tasks, the basic function of Trello is to organise the projects, and the Basecamp helps in managing the projects.

Task managing is more effective in Pivotal tracker and Jira software than Casual, Trello, Asana and Basecamp.

Reference:

Lin, B., Zagalsky, A., Storey, M. A., & Serebrenik, A. (2016, February). Why developers are slacking off: Understanding how software teams use slack. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion (pp. 333-336). ACM.

Mishra, A., & Mishra, D. (2013). Software project management tools: a brief comparative view. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 38(3), 1-4.

Pinto, G., Steinmacher, I., & Gerosa, M. A. (2016, March). More common than you think: An in-depth study of casual contributors. In Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on (Vol. 1, pp. 112-123). IEEE.

Stoshikj, M., Kryvinska, N., & Strauss, C. (2014). Efficient managing of complex programs with project management services. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 15(1), 25-38.

Turner, R. (2016). Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.

Zamyatina, O. M., & Mozgaleva, P. I. (2013, March). IT implementation in the educational process of future engineers by means of project activities and competences assessment. In Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 2013 IEEE (pp. 1170-1176). IEEE.