What types of project management tools are good for what situations

2020-03-25

Project management tool by definition is to assist human beings. But the human being will need to understand her shortcomings for a particular situation so that she can get the “right” assistance from the “right” tool. If you don’t know your shortcomings (as a project manager) for a particular project and you have no or little ideas from what assistance you will need from project management tool, your project success is sheer luck.

Most project management tools on the market are information recording tools such KANBAN tools and MS Project.  KANBAN tools are simulating using yellow sticky papers on a whiteboard to manually record and change information. MS PROJECT simulating a human written project plan on spreadsheet.  

A pure information recording tool doesn’t have the logics to detect lies during project execution but trust the user input 100%. And keeping people honest must be done by human beings, usually the project leader and some team members who care about the project success.  But the project manager and the team members who care can ONLY do that if the project information isn’t beyond their memory capacity. If the project information is beyond human memory can memorize and judge, shortly after the project’s first lie was successfully inputted, additional lies will be gradually inputted and finally getting to the point that lies will be generated on top of lies.  That is the reason why a project can be 90% complete and suddenly become 70% complete, 60% complete or even 50% complete without requirements changes.  

As Stephen Law said, unlike many other project management tools, 8Manage PPM is like an Automatic Tell Machine (ATM).  What do I mean?  In an ATM, it doesn’t matter how many card holders are depositing and withdrawing money at how many different locations at the same or different time, it always knows the balance and how much each card holder can withdraw.  

After the project started in 8Manage PPM, its project plan still looks like a project plan, but all its information is actually generated from the project’s underlying transactions in real-time.  That means the project plan that everyone is looking at is always the most up-to-date single-copy-of –the-truth.  This together with its accountability-tracking and incorruptible-audit-trail features can keep people honest.

8Manage PPM has KANBAN information recording feature, but its unique features are project integrity management and accountability tracking.  Its’ Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) can tracks every single project element associated with the audit trails of its responsible persons in real-time. It also displays a single view of accurate plan & execution information to everyone in real-time and totally eliminates the misperception caused by multiple versions of the truth. 8Manage PPM has built-in sales, procurement and management accounting functions and can perform project-based sales and procurement and can compute and aggregate financial information to generate income statement, account receivable, account payable and cash flow reports in real-time.

8Manage PPM can be used in any small projects, but is especially useful in distributed project management (people from multiple sites such as Hong Kong and Washington DC), large project management and multi project management.Try for free Now!