Project management is a challenging activity that involves dealing with four traditional components: cost, schedule, time and quality. A bit more ambitious objective is to improve business organization and resource distribution. Look at your project and you will observe that it needs labour, funds and equipment to give end results. You should know that there are a lot of factors that are very important for successful project management. You can look through a few of these factors below:

- Goal setting and assessing achievement.

- Handling risk. Take any project and you will see that it involves a number of risks that should be accounted for.

- Finding labor and machinery for the project.

- Understanding the result you want to get when the project is finished.

- Supervising the project from the point of view of who is performing what and at what time.

- Making sure that the products of the project are up to standard.

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

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

To deal with these elements you can employ pencil and a notepad or perhaps MS EXCEL. Nevertheless, specialized project tracking software has a number of relevant benefits:

- It makes scheduling easy. The length of work can be calculated automatically using the workload information. You can set work time-tables for various resources. It just as well simplifies tracking progress on various tasks.

- Dealing with several projects and handling a number of requirements. Management can use project management software to facilitate portfolio of projects analysis.

- Critical path becomes easy to detect. The critical path is made of jobs that directly influence the actual length of the project. If a task on the critical path lasts longer than the manager planned, the whole timing of the project will be changed. At the same time other activities that are not on the critical path might take less or more time without changing the duration of other activities in this project.

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

Is it always a must to use task tracking software?

Like any instrument, project tracking software has its limitation. The best time to use such software is when you managea few large projects. It might be more appropriate to operate simple projects by hand, so that you do not have to pay large overhead connected with employing complex programs.