Supervising projects is a complex job that involves dealing with four constant components: expenditure, schedule, duration and quality. Qualified project managers also attempt to make the organization of business processes more efficient. Look at your project and you will see that it requires people, money and tools to produce needed results. You may come across a number of factors that are very important for efficient project management. A couple of them are listed in the next paragraph:

- Setting objectives and conducting analysis.

- Managing risk. The majority of projects feature a this or that level of risk.

- Finding people and equipment for the project.

- Determining the products of the project.

- Managing what is happening: assigning tasks, controlling execution.

- Managing adequate quality.

- Handling instability. Circumstances change. When you start out on the project, you should forsee how it will develop with time.

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

To handle these issues you can employ pencil and a notepad or probably MS EXCEL. Nevertheless, dedicated project tracking software has a lot of important benefits:

- Task are easier to assign to time blocks. The length of work can be calculated by the program depending on the workload information. You can create work calendars for different people. Tracking progress also becomes less of a problem.

- Coordinating several projects with various prerequisites. Productivity tracking software allows project managers and executives to observea bigger picture and aggregate data on a number of projects.

- It assists you in finding the critical path. The critical path is made of tasks that directly influence the real duration of the project. Should an activity on the critical path change duration, the rest of the project is going to 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 impact whatsoever on the project.

- Distributing information to project participants. Big projects demand a lof of data exchanges. Groupware productivity tracking software allows everybody to be on the same page at any given point in time.

Is it always a must to employ task tracking software?

Similar to any other tool, project management software has its issues. The best time to use such programs is when you managea few large projects. Little projects can be managed using a spreadsheet program which allows you to save on overhead costs of managing such complex software.