Project management is a complex activity that involves dealing with 4 traditional components: cost, schedule, time and producing a satisfactory result. A bit more ambitious goal is to enchance work processes and resource allocation. Most projects utilize such components as people, funds, and equipment to deliver something of value and hit selected targets. There are a lot of things that are vital for effective project management. A few of them are listed below:

- Establishing goals and conducting analysis.

- Managing risk. Most feature a this or that degree of uncertainty.

- Choosing labor and machinery for the project.

- Having a clear idea about the outcome you want to get when the project is finished.

- Managing what is going on: giving out jobs, controlling execution.

- Assuaring quality.

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

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

Traditional ways of running projects, such a pencil and a notepad, can be employed to do most of these things. However, specialized project tracking software offers a lot of important benefits:

- It makes scheduling easy. The software can automate scheduling calculations. Each worker can have their own calendar. It also makes it simpler to track progress on different jobs.

- Coordinating a few projects with different requirements. Executives can employ project tracking software to simplify analysis of several big projects.

- Critical path becomes easy to detect. The critical path is a critically relevant concept in project management. Should an activity on the critical path take less or more time, the whole project is going to be affected. At the same time other tasks that lie outside the critical path might last longer or shorter and not change the timing of the whole project.

- Allowing everybody involved know what is happening. Complex projects demand a lof of information exchanges. Groupware productivity tracking software allows everybody to know what is up at any given point in time.

Is it always a must to use task tracking software?

Project tracking software could not be appropriate in 100 percent of all cases. The best time to reap the benefits from such software is when you managea few big projects. It could be more appropriate to manage simple projects manually, so that there is little need to incur big overhead connected with using complex software solutions.