According to Jetbuilt, utilizing technical data fields provides a clear view of information that will help ensure a project has a proper design. It also ensures accounting of components, such as rack space, power, heat ventilation and weight capacity. Thus, the data fields enable a smooth installation process.

“The introduction of technical data fields will save time, money and aggravation as the project moves to the installation stage,” remarks Tom Peters, director of business development at Jetbuilt. He gives one example where understanding a rack space for a particular installation, especially for a small space like a credenza, can ensure ordering of the proper size credenza.

Peters continues, “Additionally, you can warn the HVAC contractor that there will be 1000 BTU in a closet to ventilate, and easily view the total weight of a speaker system or videowall included in the project, to check against the building structure. Basically, the technical data in the Jetbuilt builder will provide a clear view of what is needed to accommodate the system being installed.”

Expanding Valuable Functionality

Technical data fields is the latest feature to support the platform’s engineering efforts. It will also pair well with Jetbuilt’s engineering scrub feature. Launched early in 2022, the feature allows companies to enforce a technical review as part of the workflow.

Related: Jetbuilt Partners with AV-iQ

Scrub also ensures approval of every item from an engineering perspective before the project moves to the next stage. By having key technical data at the ready and auto-calculated, users can streamline this process as well.

Jetbuilt will showcase the technical data fields at CEDIA 2022. It will also highlight engineering scrub and JEL, the Jetbuilt Engineering Lab.

Also launched in 2022, JEL provides the ability to commission CAD drawings, REVIT drawings, 3D renderings and presale engineering as needed. All of this is possible within the integrated workflow of Jetbuilt.

Paul Dexter, Jetbuilt founder and chief executive officer, remarks, “While Jetbuilt is known as a sales and project management tool, in 2022, we committed to better serve consultants and the engineering side of our design teams using Jetbuilt. To that end we are proud to have launched engineering scrub, JEL, and now technical data fields, with more valuable functionality to come.”

Jetbuilt will exhibit at CEDIA in booth #9017, September 29 – October 1 in Dallas, Texas.

This article originally appeared on MyTechDecisions’ sister-site CommercialIntegrator.com.

The post Jetbuilt Adds Technical Data Fields to Project Management Software appeared first on My TechDecisions.

As a technology manager you’ll often need to strategize over the long term in order to successfully implement a new technology. In education environments, for example, the IT and AV departments often forecast years ahead based on budget and goals. For corporate clients that forecast may depend on many factors – you may go department by department, office by office, or one employee at a time when rolling out new technology.

When building a technology implementation business strategy it’s important to communicate a realistic timeframe to stakeholders in the organization. In order to communicate that timeframe, you need to understand that timeframe. That involves communication with the technology provider, the technology installers, your own IT team, and so on.

It is also important to know potential pivot points, or potential check-in points. If you have a three-year timeframe, you can’t simply set it and forget it and expect that three years later everything will be fine. Mistakes can get made. Projections can be incorrect. Outside variables such as COVID-19 can come into play delaying the implementation. It’s a good idea to break the timeline into phases, focus on one phase at a time, and as things progress tweak the following phases to reflect that.

At the onset of the technology implementation, your business strategy should look like a timeline. One long plan, with specific phases of the plan built in. That all starts with gathering the right information.

Gathering Information

Gathering information is by far the most important part of setting up a long-term technology implementation strategy. The aim here is to understand the implementation internally and externally, on multiple levels.

Your first discussion should be with the manufacturer of the technology. If you are utilizing an integrator to help with the installation, the integrator should be brought into this conversation as well. You should be asking about specific installation times for the technology. Inquire about the strategy on the integrator’s part. At this point you’ll likely have a bid from the integrator – study it and make sure to note any questions you might have. You want to know what the delay will be if something goes wrong.

Next you’ll want to talk to your IT department. You’ll want to clearly lay out each employee’s role in the installation. Make sure they ask questions if they are confused about anything. Make sure they voice concerns if they have any. Your IT department will be the front line internally to installing technology, so you want that group as tight as possible on roles and responsibilities.

Finally, you’ll want to talk to department heads whose departments will be affected by the rollout. If there is going to be any down time as a result of the implementation department heads have to know so they can plan for that. The marketing department may have their busiest week the same week you plan to switch them over to a new system – that’s not going to go over well if you inform them last minute.

Make a note of any problems that may arise, who will be in charge of solving those problems, and how that will affect the installation. You want everything as clear as possible up front so that you don’t waste time assigning blame or responsibility if and when something goes awry.

Creating a Timeline

Once you’ve learned everything you need to know internally and externally it’s time to create a timeline. It’s often helpful here to utilize project management software to help keep track of the timeline as well as everyone’s responsibility for that timeline.

The timeline will really be several timelines. As mentioned, you’ll likely want to take a phased approach, where there are multiple phases of the project over the full timeline. Within each phase there will be specific actions and responsibilities doled out.

Make sure that every internal stakeholder has a copy of the timeline so they know when the implementation will affect them. Just because the sales manager said they’ll be good to switch over two years from now doesn’t mean they’ll remember. Create reminders a year, six months, three months, one month, and a week ahead of time so they have ample time to prepare.

Before you finalize, run the timeline by everyone one last time to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Once the project kicks off there will inevitably be problems that may well lead to delays. You need to be prepared to pivot. This is where the phased approach comes in handy – you can pivot one phase and still get back on track down the line, without having to worry about the entire timeline.

Keep all of this in mind and your long-term business strategies will go off without too many hitches (though Murphy’s Law does always apply).

The post How to Build a Long-Term Technology Implementation Strategy appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Tech Decision

The company’s management did not have a robust platform with which to integrate and aggregate project information, and lacked visibility at both the portfolio level, as well as project health and status.

Sharing project-related updates and images with customers was not happening in real-time and the project managers had to manually communicate project updates and information to customers, implementation teams, and company management.

To resolve these challenges, Stillo Construction engaged Optimum to implement a centralized collaboration, content management, and project management solution to help streamline client communication and increase visibility and internal productivity.

This new centralized and integrated solution helped Stillo Construction achieve its goals in better managing projects, improving internal collaborations and client interactions, and gaining a competitive advantage in the market.

Stillo Construction desired to maintain a higher level of visibility across their portfolio of projects, while enhancing the communication and collaboration between their customers and the internal teams.

The Smartsheet Solution

Optimum provided a centralized collaboration, content management, and project management solution that helped increase productivity, visibility, and business efficiency for Stillo Construction in a significant manner.

Aside from the integration of Project Management best practices, Optimum implemented a Smartsheet-based software solution that allowed for increased process and portfolio visibility, and real-time external collaboration with the client’s customers utilizing web and mobile devices.

Smartsheet is an award-winning, cloud-based project management, work automation, and collaboration solution for managing any project. Smartsheet provides a real-time view into the status of top KPIs, critical trends, and summary reports using easy-to-build visual Dashboards and Scorecards.

Smartsheet’s Control Center is also utilized to streamline and automate approval workflows and the project provisioning. This functionality is possible through seamless, secure integrations with the legacy systems or cloud tools.

Related: Collaboration Tech Fails (And What They Should Have Been)

Optimum implemented a Smartsheet-based project management solution, helping the client achieve their goals in better managing their projects, improving internal collaborations and client interactions, increasing efficiency, and ultimately gaining a competitive advantage in the market.

This solution was accomplished through the design and development of robust and scalable Smartsheet templates, reports, and KPI dashboards.

These solution components were based on the client’s project management needs and goals in order to increase the user adoption, support the company’s project-based growth, and facilitate better customer-project manager collaboration.

Also, industry best practices as well as project management standards and techniques were incorporated into the solution to both ensure the successful closure of each project and earn customer satisfaction with the results.

The Impact on Stillo

In addition to the benefits indicated above, the solution’s impacts consisted of:

• The ability for the client to manage their large number of projects more effectively
• Increased team productivity and maximized potential for project success
• Improved real-time communications with the client’s customers and internal teams
• Enhanced management and executive visibility at the project and portfolio level
• Reduced operational cost
• Higher competitive advantage in the market

“Throughout our interactions with Optimum, we have received satisfactory services with the highest level of quality, professionalism and commitment to the success of our project,” says Leo Stillo, CIO at Stillo Construction.

The post From Spreadsheet to Smartsheet: Stillo Construction Work Automation and Project Management appeared first on My TechDecisions.

There were specific findings from the research that point the the prevalence of this gap:

• More than 80% of respondents indicated senior management does not believe there is a high correlation between the quality/availability of data and organizational success
• Only 11.4% of respondents indicated the highest level of IT resilience maturity
• 91.2% of respondents reported experiencing some type of business disruption in the last two years (from a variety of causes)
• 56% of respondents had an event resulting in unrecoverable data loss, and the top causes of this loss were often avoidable (i.e. the event occurred during gap between backups, backup/recovery system failures, etc.)

“These survey results indicate that most respondents have not optimized their IT resilience strategy, evidenced by the high levels of IT and business-related disruptions,” says Phil Goodwin, Research Director at IDC. “However, the majority of organizations surveyed will undertake a transformation, cloud, or modernization project within the next two years. This illustrates the need for all organizations to begin architecting a plan for IT resilience to ensure the success of these initiatives.”

According to the report, resilience planning plays an important role in minimizing the financial burden and negative impact of IT business disription. During business disruption initiatives:

• 36.6% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue
• 61.4% of respondents suffered either major or minor damage to company reputation
• 26.1% respondents indicated a permanent loss of customers

Unfortunately, only 12.4% of IT budgets on average are spent on IT resilience solutions. This poses a specific problem for IT Pros – put in charge of implementing new technology but without the financial support to ensure there is no damage done by upending a former business practice. It’s a harrowing conundrum – business decision makers ask IT pros to completely restructure the way business is done, don’t give the proper support, and then blame the IT department when the bottom line is affected by these changes.

I believe a great way to avoid these problems is by properly communicating the need for resilience solutions. Studies such as this one from IDC provide important statistics on the dangers of the process of digital transformation. It goes without saying that more data can lead to better business intelligence, and certainly we shouldn’t stop transforming because of the dangers that could occur during that transformation. That would simply leave us unequipped to challenge competitors down the line.

Instead, a good tech manager and IT pro will go to the business decision makers with an outline of the worst case scenario. Imagine a permanent loss of customers simply because the budget isn’t there to put in failsafe resilience solutions. The up-front cost of these solutions pales in comparison to the loss of what might be a lifetime cutomer. If you can properly explain that to the business decision makers, that’s how you can bridge the perception gap indicated by this study.

The full study can be downloaded here.

The post Study Finds Perception Gap Between IT and Business Decision Makers on Data appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Features

A Case Against The Cloud

There are tons of articles making compelling cases to take your business to “The Cloud” – this is not one of them – we take a pragmatic approach to reviewing the cloud.

My TechDecisions Podcast – Episode 43, Bryan Payne PMP

In this episode of My TechDecisions Podcast, host and TD Managing Editor Jonathan Blackwood speaks with Bryan Payne, Project Management Professional, about how to determine return on investment (ROI) for technology projects.

You Don’t Have to Worry When You’ve Got Support Services

Support services are a way for you to take the worry and risk out of maintaining your technology, and offers experts at a fraction of the cost of hiring an employee.

Video Interview: AVI-SPL TechXchange Offers Great Insight to End Users

In the latest TechDiscussion, Dale Bottcher explains what end users can gain from attending an AVI-SPL TechXchange event.

Project of the Week: InvestEdge Agile Product Management and Development Methodology Software

Learn how InvestEdge introduced software to promote Agile product amangement.

*If you’d like to submit a project for Project of the Week, click here.

Blogs

Informal Survey Finds That Tech Industry Employees Feel Like Imposters

Despite the fact that tech is growing at unprecedented rates, employees seem more insecure in their abilities and ideas than you may expect.

As Urban Infrastructure Gets Smarter, Good Connectivity is Key

Knowledge of which solutions will help cities obtain the best connectivity will help decision makers build smart cities more effectively.

Civil Rights Groups Concerned About Secrecy Behind IBM Surveillance Programs used by NYPD

The IBM and NYPD program surveilled New Yorkers without their knowledge and had potential for racial profiling.

A Story of Human Error, Access Control, Technology and the Gym

This is a story of how I found myself in the locker room of my gym with the master key to all lockers.

The post MyTechDecisions Week in Review: The Cloud, Project Management, Gym Lockers, etc. appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The company offers an integrated suite of tools that simplify and streamline portfolio management, trading and rebalancing, performance reporting, compliance monitoring, data aggregation and more.

The Tech Decision

InvestEdge partners with progressive leaders of investment firms who advise and serve high-net-worth individuals and families. The company’s primary focus is helping clients grow through innovative thinking and proven wealth management technology. Top advisors nationwide use InvestEdge as a key part of their investment technology platforms, enabling them to provide the high degree of sophistication and quality clients demand.

Though the InvestEdge business was growing, the internal software development methodology wasn’t evolving to meet the needs of the business. Increasingly tech-savvy customers were becoming increasingly impatient with the slow pace of innovation. The need for a more product-driven development methodology was apparent.

InvestEdge first attempted to solve the problem by implementing small process changes and improvements, but quickly realized a bigger change was necessary. As with any industry, considerable challenges accompany ambitious changes. InvestEdge’s fundamental challenges included supporting the company’s innovation arm while also being able to turn around professional services work in a reasonable timeframe. An additional challenge included reacting to new information in the middle of the development process without derailing the schedule. To prepare itself, the business would need to break from it (unscalable) homegrown Waterfall system and establish more efficient documentation and training for internal operations.

“Scaling for growth is a classic challenge within our industry,” says Roland Collins, CTO and Founder, InvestEdge. “InvestEdge lacked the in-house expertise to properly establish the needed agile processes and procedures to position us for success. We needed expert advice and guidance to build our internal processes in a more disciplined manner.”

The Solution

InvestEdge turned to its long-term consultancy partner, Anexinet, for assistance. Anexinet took a holistic approach by conducting interviews with all InvestEdge stakeholders—including executives and VP-level personnel—to gain a deeper understanding of the client’s current state and processes. The process revealed InvestEdge’s lack of a cohesive product management process, its “old school” product development and testing process, and its weak approach to resource forecasting.

“Anexinet’s in-depth, multi-faceted approach determined the root cause of our issues and identified the sources of the challenges we are facing. It was clear we suffered from an outdated process that was impacting everything InvestEdge was doing,” Collins added.

Anexinet helped InvestEdge scale for growth by implementing an Agile product management and software development methodology that drastically increased its ability to roll out innovative new products at a much faster pace – for example, InvestEdge built a new Compliance Middle Office product, a Manager Model Exchange, and UMA functionality within a year of the transformation.

Anexinet outlined their entire process and provided documented analysis and recommendations for remediating challenges to InvestEdge stakeholders. The consultancy engagement included:

• Employee interviews and working sessions.
• Improving the consistency of deliverables—especially employee training.
• Synthesizing findings to specific people, process, technology categories and themes.
• Determining root causes and formulating programs to address these issues.

Anexinet determined InvestEdge to be a strong candidate for an Agile product management and development methodology adoption—not only for the IT organization but for the business as a whole.

Agile is a term used to describe a product and software development approach that emphasizes incremental delivery, team collaboration, ongoing planning, and continual learning. Agile is not so much a single solution as it is a mindset: one that drives an approach to software development. There’s no one approach that works for all situations. Rather, the term “Agile” has come to represent a variety of practices that align with an organization’s value statements. For this reason, professional assistance is a prerequisite for true Agile adoption.

The Impact

With its phased software development lifecycle of planning, execution, and delivery, implementing Agile (and conducting the scaling strategy workshop) were departures from InvestEdge’s typical technology engagements. Over a six-month engagement, Anexinet demonstrated its expertise at prescribing a successful work method, with documented guidance and clear employee principles.

“Anexinet displayed excellent discipline and a full understanding of the Agile methodology. They were confident in their assessment of our operations, met every deadline, and knew all the pitfalls to avoid. With their expert guidance, we achieved a successful transformation to meet all our scaling requirements,” according to Collins.

By encouraging InvestEdge team members to share their understanding of processes and outcomes, Anexinet’s Agile development methodology produced a more collaborative practice that fostered a closer team environment.

With a more collaborative process in place, InvestEdge drastically increased its ability to roll out innovative new products, at a much faster pace. All teams’ deliverables became more transparent, and operational bottlenecks became immediately visible so that they could be quickly addressed. In addition, a more disciplined product management approach enabled a faster delivery cycle. Leveraging the new methodology, InvestEdge built a new Compliance Middle Office product, a Manager Model Exchange, and UMA functionality, all within a year of the transformation. Not only were employees enthusiastic about the results, the fundamental changes inspired by the Agile methodology also had a positive effect on InvestEdge’s client base.

The post InvestEdge Agile Product Management and Development Methodology Software appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Instead, you’re in charge of informing the budget. The first obstacle to budgeting is understanding a key difference in how to estimate the cost of a project during the planning process.

People use budgeting and project cost estimating interchangeably all the time – people have the same thought in mind when thinking of one or the other. However, the two are really each a different side of the same coin. They are very related, but there are subtle differences between a project budget and a project cost estimate.

Cost estimating is the process of quantifying every resource that is going to be required to complete a project. Resources means everything – labor, materials, land (in the case of construction), and everything else that needs to be paid for in terms of the project. The cost estimate is a list and quantification of all of those with a dollar amount attached to it. At the end of the process you have a single dollar amount that represents the roll up of everything that you’ve qualified.

Budgeting relies on that estimate. You have to have an idea of what the cost will be before you set out to do your budgeting. Budgeting is the process of identifying not the amounts, but the sources of the funds to be used to cover the cost estimate.

Think of buying a car. The cost estimate is like the sticker price on the window of the car. Budget is the exercise the buyer will go through to determine where the money will come from – who is pitching in, how much they’re pitching in, what accounts the money will come from, and so forth. Finally, how much they’re willing to pay.

It’s important to make sure that your budget and your estimate are in alignment. It takes a lot of work to make sure that happens. You need to know you’ve identified the source of the funds that will cover the estimate, or (if there aren’t enough funds) figure out what you need to revise to bring the estimate underneath the budget.

In the best-case scenario, the estimate comes before the budget. The sequence would be:

1. Scope is prepared
2. Schedule is prepared
3. Cost Estimate built
4. Budget determined

If you think about it, how could anyone complete an estimate if they didn’t know what they were trying to buy? If you don’t have a scope you can’t build an estimate. Everything is built on scope, and in an ideal world follows that logic.

The schedule will give you a time frame. If the stakeholder wants something done on an accelerated timeframe, that will have a huge impact on the estimate and therefore the budget. You might have to pay extra for faster shipping, or pay overtime labor to get things done more quickly. On the flipside, if the client has a long timeframe – a year or more, or perhaps they don’t want the project started for another year or more – then that will affect the estimate as well. Labor, materials, land, or anything else could cost different prices years down the road, and that means new variables in the cost estimate.

Unfortunately, it’s hardly ever a best-case scenario. There are occasions when an executive will come to you, give you an assignment, explain what the budget is, and you’ll need to work backwards to make it work. There are many other variations as well – you might get a project that is partially budgeted, scoped, or scheduled and have to fill in the rest yourself. Depending on what you’re given, you might choose a different technique to determine the cost estimate and, ultimately, the final budget.

For more information on how to create a cost estimate and get budget approved for technology projects, click here.

Credit to Robert Marshall, PMP and Adjunct Professor, for providing information for this article. Listen to his My TechDecisions Podcast appearances here.

The post What is the Difference Between Project Cost Estimate and Project Budget? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

There are tons of options out there. Some include everything for the entire project lifecycle. Some specialize in a certain portion of the project. Some can be used to augment other project management software.

We want to learn more about the project management software you use. Please take our brief survey (below) and let us know what you use to schedule, track, and communicate throughout the project lifecycle. Choose as many or as few software that you use.

(While the first three questions ask about software you currently use, the final question will ask you about your favorite project management software. We know the organization you’re working for won’t always use the software you prefer, so please let us know you’re favorite on question 4).

If you’d like to learn more about project management software, check out our Complete List of Project Management Software.

If you’d like to learn more about project management tips and advice, learn about our 6 Secrets to Better IT Project Management.

In the meantime, please complete the survey below. Your answers will help us better provide you with information to do your jobs better. Thank you for your time!

Quiz Maker – powered by Riddle

The post Survey: What Project Management Software Do You Use? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

There are tons of options out there. Some include everything for the entire project lifecycle. Some specialize in a certain portion of the project. Some can be used to augment other project management software.

Your job is to figure out the right project management software for yourself and your organization. Luckily for you, we’ve created a comprehensive list of every project management software that could help you out.

When you’re done you’ll be ready to choose the perfect project management software to ensure that you get the job done right.

The Complete List of Project Management Software

ProjectManager.com – Create, monitor and share your project plans online, with multiple views for your team. As they work on tasks, your project plan updates automatically in real time—these project management tools are always in sync. Project Manager offers services for IT, professional services, construction and more.

Microsoft Project – Microsoft Project can be set up on-prem or in the cloud, and comes with Essential, Professional, and Premium plans depending on your level of need. Microsoft Project allows team members to communicate, share documents, and submit timesheets. It allows project managers to plan, schedule, and track projects throughout the lifecycle.

RationalPlan – RationalPlan lets you manage projects by PMBOK guidelines. It includes solutions for portfolio management, resource management, and team collaboration. Offerings include cloud services – with free, beginner, master, and production tiers – as well as on-prem applications – including single project, multi project, project server, and a free project viewer tier.

Twoproject – Twoproject is a lifecycle project management software that allows for team management, issue tracking, time tracking, cost management, and document management. It boasts a friendly and intuitive approach, as well as reminders, analytics, visualization, and more.

Sciforma – Sciforma focuses on accessibility, usability, flexibility, and security. It allows for planning, tracking, analyzing, optimization, and execution through a project management lifecycle. An all-in-one-solution, it is scalable and offers read-only access for unlimited users.

ProjectPlace – ProjectPlace Enterprise brings teams together to improve collaboration. Smart project collaboration and communication, task execution, progress tracking. Workload management, including who is working on what and when. Dashboard for reporting include Kanban task management and Gantt chart.

Primavera – Primavera P6 Professional Project Management from Oracle handles large-scale, highly sophisticated and multifaceted projects. Organize projects of up to 100,000 activities with unlimited resources and an unlimited number of target plans.

ConceptDraw Project 8 – ConceptDraw PROJECT is a full-featured project management tool that delivers a full complement of features needed to successfully plan and execute projects. Features supported include task and resource management, reporting, and change control. The integration with ConceptDraw Office helps improve project management by leveraging the power of mind mapping and data visualization.

Genius Project – Designed to adapt to your organization’s business processes, Genius Project delivers a highly flexible and configurable portfolio and project management software allowing tailored feature sets for a wide array of project teams and project types. Offers include cloud and on-premise.

Asana – Asana gives you everything you need to manage team projects and tasks, so you can spend less time on busy work and more time focused on making your ideas happen. Map out each step and organize all the details of your work in one place. Visualize your work, and bring emails, files, tickets and more into Asana.

Atlassian – Atlassian provides tools for teams. It includes tools to plan, track, code, collaborate, chat, and more.

Basecamp – Basecamp combines discussions, tasks, files, schedules & chat in one place, making it easy to see what needs doing, where to find things, and what’s going on. Assign a task, assignees are notified, and you can view every task from one screen. Conversations are organized within each project and rolled into a single place.

ProofHub – ProofHub’s work management system brings your projects, remote teams and clients under one roof, empowering you to keep things always under your ultimate control. Tasks, discussion topics, files and documents, group chat, proof and review, and track time included, as well as Gantt charts and project reports.

SmartSheet – SmartSheet allows you to improve collaboration, manage work in real-time, automate workflows, and deploy new processes enterprise wide at scale. Works with enterprise tools and apps. Real time visibility to make better decisions. Automate work processes. Stay secure.

Trello – Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way. Dive into the details by adding comments, attachments, and more directly to Trello cards. Collaborate on projects from beginning to end. Plus, it’s free.

Slack – Slack creates alignment and shared understanding across your team. Slack brings all your team’s communication together, giving everyone a shared workspace where conversations are organized and accessible. Builds a searchable archive of your teams conversations, decisions, and work.

Zoho Projects – Zoho Projects includes project planning with milestones, task lists, Gantt charts, timesheets, reporting tools, document management, and more.

LiquidPlanner – LiquidPlanner is a dynamic project management software designed to help teams. Features include smart schedules, resource management, cross-project visibility, contextual collaboration, integrated time tracking, and advanced analytics.

Wrike – Wrike is a cloud-based collaboration and project management software that scales across teams in any business. A real-time work management software, Wrike lets you organize everything you need to complete your project in one spot. Create, plan, collaborate, report, customize, integrate.

Teamwork Projects – Teamwork Projects has everything you need to track a project from start to finish. Flexible and intuitive, it offers project creation and management, tasks, milestones, messages, files, time tracking, billing, and more in one place.

Workfront – Workfront allows you to centralize your projects in one solution. Manage your digital work processes, review and approve digital work, deliver client-facing services, and govern compliance workflows. All done online.

Clarizen – Clarizen brings together project management, configurable workflow automation and in-context collaboration so everyone is engaged and inspired to do more. Plan, control, and integrate your project in one place.

Celoxis – Celoxis is an all-in-one project management software. Gain real-time visibility across all projects. Resource management, financial management, team collaboration, custom apps, and reports and analytics.

ProjeQtOr – ProjeQtOr is a free, open-source project management software grouping in a single tool all the features needed to organize your projects. It is simple, easy to use while covering a maximum of project management features. You can record all the events on your projects, and thereby simplify compliance with leading standards of quality management, whether ISO, CMMI, ITIL or other.

OmniPlan – OmniPlan is only available for Mac and iOS. It offers smart scheduling, critical path, task management, automatic leveling, split tasks, Gantt timelines, network diagrams, dashboards, reports, and more. Relatively cheap, the Pro version for Mac is its most expensive offering at $299.99.

Project KickStart – Project KickStart was purchased by Keystroke in October of 2017, but still offers project management capabilities that focus on ease of use. Project KickStart Pro 5 makes it easy to specify requirements, tasks, resources, and obstacles, and to generate a full Gantt schedule, including task dependencies. All for less than half the cost of the leading project management software. And, you’ll be building projects in less than an hour.

Eylean Board – Eyelean is a Scrum and Kanban desktop software that integrates into Office tools and TFS from Microsoft product family. Mainly used for scheduling, it offers dashboards, flow diagrams, burndown charts, and workflow reports.

Planisware – Planisware allows you to manage your portfolios of projects, resources, programs, and costs within a single integrated solution. Bring visibility to your teams involved in concurrent work, across multiple functions, sites, and countries. Provide decision support with analytics and what-if; collect lessons learned to improve your process. Implement best practices across teams from fifty to tens of thousands of users.

In-STEP BLUE – With in-STEP BLUE, you receive a software that you can customize according to your needs and organization, your workflows, processes and methods. You can plan and execute projects with processes in in-STEP BLUE. Public standards like Scrum, PRINCE2, HERMES, SPICE for Automotive, V-Modell XT & Co. can be used along with your best practices.

Quickscrum – Quickscrum is a software for Scrum and Kanban tools. Dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view of your project. Features include a velocity chart, burndown chart, task summary, resource workload, activity log, and more.  Backlogs, planning, timesheets, reports, file management, and more included.

NetPoint – NetPoint is a planning and scheduling software for project management. Engage the whole team! NetPoint transforms scheduling into an interactive, planning-centric experience that ensures communication and collaboration. With NetPoint’s intuitive representation of activities and relationships, all stakeholders can come together in a seamless process that produces a CPM/GPM logic-driven schedule from the same tool used for planning.

WorkPLAN – WorkPLAN is a fully-scalable family of manufacturing software solutions, from project management to ERP, which enables custom manufacturers, project-based and make-to-order companies to automate and manage processes such as job costing, quotations, sales order processing, planning, quality, time, purchasing and stock management.

FastTrack Schedule – FastTrack Schedule is your Windows project management software for organizing, tracking, and reporting all your project goals. Great for both new and experienced project managers, FastTrack Schedule 10.2 helps you manage projects easily and effectively.

GanttProject – GanttProject is a free project scheduling and management app for Windows, OSX and Linux. It allows you to create Gantt charts with tasks, milestones, organization, and dependency constraints, and generate PDF reports or upload information to Microsoft Project.

Milestones Professional – Milestones Professional is a project scheduling and management tool, which can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Project, Excel, Oracle Primavera, and more. Make presentation reports, check reports at a glance, and get instant access to cost, earned value, and more. Share with a single click.

Open Workbench – Open Workbench is a robust, mature tool for project scheduling and management. It conforms to and supports the underlying ideals of project management while presenting information in a way that is intuitive and easy to learn. Tens of thousands of project managers around the world use Open Workbench to plan and execute complex projects.

Quire – Quire helps you optimize the writing, tracking and management of all your report-writing projects, no matter how many people are contributing at any given time

Active Collab – Active Collab allows you to stay on top of your work while juggling between multiple projects. Each project has task lists and everything else that goes with it – from files and discussions to time records and expenses. Bring your work into one place, filter tasks, and collaborate with your team.

Casual – Casual is an online project management tool that helps teams plan and execute projects as simple workflows online. This new visual approach shows you everything at a glance.

Tempus Resource – Nominated Gartner Cool Vendor 2016, Tempus Resource uses powerful, real-time simulations to model project data. Whether you have one hundred or one thousand resources, Tempus Resource is simple to implement and easy to use.

Teamdeck – Teamdeck is a resource management software giving you a full control over all of your resources. From resource scheduling, time tracking and timesheets, to leave management and reporting, Teamdeck helps you to stay on top of your resources’ availability, allocate your team members effectively and track their performance.

The post The Complete List of Project Management Software appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Just because you’re outfitting a single conference room with AV equipment doesn’t mean you’re not managing a project. You’re in charge of justifying costs to stakeholders. You’re in charge of setting a schedule and updating it as the project progresses. You’re in charge of ensuring all relevant parties are aware of their duties to the project and timeline. You might even be in charge of communicating with and overseeing third parties, like an AV integrator installing the system.

I recently did a podcast interview with Dr. Robert Marshall, a PMP with decades of experience. He’s managed projects with multi-million dollar budgets that span entire sky rises. What struck me most about our discussion, however, was that his tactics can be applied on a much smaller scale. If done that way, the methodologies of project management apply directly to tech managers implementing a new technology into their business.

It’s worth doing the research to learn how project managers plan, schedule, and track their projects to apply to your own. Often SMBs won’t have the resources or scale to require hiring a project management firm to oversee the project. Those duties will fall to the IT staff most likely – the tech managers already under employment.

What I’m advocating for is that tech managers take their roles seriously and apply true project management strategies to every project. It will bring more success and impress the higher-ups. That way you can take on bigger projects and expand your capabilities in your company and possibly the larger job market.

We’ll be providing more coverage on project management practices to help you, so keep checking in on TechDecisions.

The post Tech Managers Should Consider Themselves Project Managers appeared first on My TechDecisions.