There are four components to effective project management: cost, timing, time and producing a satisfactory result. Qualified project managers also aim at making the organization of work better. The majority of undertakings employ such recourses as people, money, and tools to deliver something of value and meet objectives. To work with projects successfully one have to handle a number of things. Some of them can be found in the next paragraph:

- Setting objectives and conducting analysis.

- Handling negative possibilities. The majority of projects have a certain level of risk.

- Finding labor and tools for the project.

- Understanding the result you wish to obtain when the project is finished.

- Controlling the project from the point of view of who is doing what and when.

- Ensuring that the outcomes of the project are up to standard.

- Managing changes. Everything changes. Most projects occur in time, so the element of change has to be accounted for.

- Exchanging information with sponsors and participants of the project.

Conventional ways of managing projects, such a pencil and a notepad, can be used to do most of these things. However, you get some interesting pluses if you decide to use project tracking software:

- It makes scheduling easy. The length of work can be calculated automatically using the workload data. Each resource can have their own calendar. Tracking work-in-progress also becomes less of a problem.

- Working with several projects and meeting a number of specifications. Progress management software helps project managers to seea bigger picture and collect information on several projects.

- Critical path is easy to detect. The critical path is an important notion in project planning. Should an activity on the critical path change duration, the whole project will be touched by this change. It should be noted that for tasks that are outside the critical path small modifications in duration can have no influence whatsoever on the project.

- Allowing all involved be aware of what is going on. The more complex are the project requirements, the more of them have to be talked about. Groupware productivity tracking software enables everybody to know what is up every time.

Should you always choose task tracking software?

Like any software solution, project tracking software has its issues. The most suitable time to use such software is when you work on a few big projects. Small projects can be supervised using MS Excel which helps you save on overhead costs of managing fairy complicated software.