Project management is a challenging activity that involves dealing with 4 constant components: cost, schedule, duration and quality. Professional PMs also try to make the organization of work better. Look at any project and you will observe that it needs labour, finance and machinery to produce needed outcomes. You should know that there are a lot of factors that are very important for effective project management. You can look through a number of these factors below:

- Task setting and reviewing progress.

- Handling risk. Take any project and you will see that it involves a number of uncertainties that should be dealt with.

- Allocating people and equipment for the project.

- Defining the outcomes of the project.

- Controlling what is going on: giving out tasks, supervising the work-in-progress.

- Managing quality.

- Dealing with change. Change happens. When you begin the project, you should forsee how it will develop with time.

- Communicating with project stakeholders.

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

- Idividual jobs are easier to assign to time blocks. A program can process timing calculations. It is possible to define work calendars for different employees. It just as well simplifies tracking the work-in-progress on relevant tasks.

- Coordinating several projects with different prerequisites. Progress management software helps project managers to seea bigger picture and collect data on several 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 a task on this path take less or more time, the whole project is going to be touched by this change. It should be noted that for tasks that are not on the critical path small modifications in how long it takes can have no impact whatsoever on other activities.

- Letting all involved be aware of what is going on. Big projects require communication. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of information simpler than it has ever been before.

Is it always necessary to employ task tracking software?

Similar to any other tool, project management software has its limitation. The best time to reap the benefits from such programs is when you work on a few big projects. Little projects can be supervised using MS Excel which allows you to save on overhead costs of handling such complex software.