Insights

Which Project Management Software is best for your company?

I’m sure you clicked on this post expecting an answer to the effect of, “Software XYZ is by far and away the best project management software and you shouldn’t look any further.” You aren’t going to find that here and that is for a simple reason – there isn’t one that is the best for every situation. How do you determine what tool is the best fit for your company’s needs when there are hundreds of options?

First, new small businesses aren’t likely to need a tool that has a ton of the more robust features found in some tools such as enterprise level portfolio management and portfolio reporting capabilities. That will shrink the number of tools to consider. Still, that’s not a lot to go on when approaching something like this that will have a significant impact on how your organization manages projects. So, what is the best way to approach this?

We recommend that you approach this in the same way you would if you were gathering requirements for any other project. If you have not done this before, it may be a bit challenging to determine what you need to consider. To that end, what you will find below are some requirements (Please note that this is just a sample of a few criteria) that I consider to be very important:

Budget

You will find that project management software tools can range in price from free to $55 per user per month. Without jumping into other criteria, those prices are based on the features offered. What you need to do is to determine your budget. If you are only looking for free tools, then that limits your universe of tools to pick from, but you will also end up with a tool that I consider to be fairly light on features (More details on this are listed in the features section below). For a large number of the paid project management software tools, the license fees are on a per-user basis so you will also want to identify the number of users who will be using the system. I would also recommend that you identify the types of users as some of the paid tools allow for free “reading” accounts for users who are just accessing the project management software, but not doing any kind of major work in it. It is also important to understand that many of these paid tools have different licensing models such as paying a subscription fee per user per month (usually billed annually), a one time license, and an annual license that covers all of your users. Another thing to keep in mind is that budget isn’t just licensing fees. For companies that go with a tool that requires a lot of administrative work (Ex. generating reports, managing users/permissions, managing workflow etc.), their costs are more than just the license fees.

Features

What features are absolutely critical to your company? Identifying these features in detail is probably the most critical part to ending up with a tool that fits your needs best. The reason that this is so important is that once you identify these features that the universe of possible tools shrinks rapidly as you fine tune your list of important features. For example, Financial Management/Budgeting is something that a number of tools don’t offer so either you have to manage this separately in Excel or something of that nature. Collaboration is another one that is important to consider. If you want team members to have the ability to collaborate within the project site, something like Microsoft Project (outside of the online version) may have to be reconsidered as collaboration is going to be a major challenge with just the desktop version. However, where Microsoft Project has the advantage over almost all other tools is the depth of features that it offers. As a small business, you might find that you don’t need a lot of collaboration, but need pretty robust features in which case something like the desktop version (one time license cost) of Microsoft Project can be a good fit. As I mentioned in the “Budget” paragraph above, there is a big tie-in when it comes to budget and features. My personal experience is that many of the free tools such as Basecamp (Not really free anymore), Asana, and Zoho to name a few are very light when comes to the features that I use regularly such as budgeting, baselining a project, setting dependencies, tracking resource assignments/allocations, and reporting/dashboards. Some of those “free” tools can be upgraded to a paid plan to get some of those features. What I tell people is that if you are looking for something more than basic task management and collaboration, that you should expect to incur some type of cost when setting up project management software.

Methodology

Do you utilize an Agile methodology for your projects? If so, you are going to find that some tools are much better suited to Agile projects than others. Many of the most popular tools that more naturally fit for Waterfall projects can be utilized with Agile, but there are software tools that are essentially purely for Agile. This becomes more evident if you are looking for something along the lines of a Scrum board, which is something that a few tools have by default and do well while others can be adapted to do this, but I would say it is not their strong suit. If you are a web and mobile development shop, something like Jira is going to be a tool to consider as it is tailored to Agile very nicely and very commonly accepted across the development space.

Integrations

What software tools do you run that your new project management software will need to interact with? Many project management software tools have built in integrations with common applications such as Dropbox. If you are looking to integrate with something that doesn’t have a built in integration or doesn’t have an easy to use API, this can get complex and very expensive in a hurry. You will have to hire a developer who will have to custom code something for you. For that reason, it is extremely important to identify what other tools you need your project management software to interact with.

Gantt Charts

I have to say that I am amazed at the number of tools that don’t have quality Gantt chart functionality. Even of those that do, I have encountered significant difficulty printing Gantt charts for clients. I realize that there is a lot less printing done now than was done 10 years ago, but the number of clients that ask me for a printable Gantt chart that they can hang up in the office or show to a senior leadership member is significant. Despite that demand, I have found that very few of the popular tools do a solid job with Gantt charts. There are tools that are totally Gantt focused which utilize Gantt charts really well, but tend to come up short when it comes to other key features.

Those are just some of the criteria on our worksheet (which we can use for small businesses, large businesses, and the government) that we go through with our customers when they are looking for guidance on which project management software tool they should implement. I also have a blog post on custom project management software, which highlights the pros and cons of going that route.
In conclusion, selecting project management software is a process unto itself and should be approached that way. Requirements should be defined and clearly prioritized. Once you go through requirements analysis and have developed your criteria, you are then ready to evaluate which project software will be the best fit for your company. Again, this process is also about finding software which is the best fit for your company as there is really is no single “best” or “greatest.”