The Technology Behind Predictive Project Management

Featured article by Steward Copper, Owner, Project Management Insights

As soon as a Project Manager gets a hint about a new project approaching, they start thinking of applying the right and the most effective ways to execute a project.

In general, they have distinguished several methods to conduct a project:

– Traditional waterfall project management that presupposes a step-by-step approach through each of the project’s phases – initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and completion;

– The Critical Path Method which associates each task with the period of time necessary to complete it, providing resources selection after that;

– Agile method that turns out to be flexible towards to every phase of a project implementation;

– Six Sigma is the approach based on solving the problems occurred within the project and detecting their causes in order to prevent them in the future.

Surely that every single Project Manager will choose the way that will suit their experience, the project itself and the team that are likely to perform the tasks in the course of a project.

Great deals of Project Managers stick to the traditional predictive project management path and do install the corresponding software that seems to be reliable to assist in performing their tasks. Such a way means that rigid planning is put as a priority and a strict project map is created, and the project moves to the next step only after the previous one has been completely finished.

The methodology works perfect and never fails, but some Project Managers call it a bit cold-blooded, as it is only science, but no art at all.

We cannot deny all the advantages of the predictive approach and the importance of performing all the project stages it presupposes – planning, estimating, measuring and controlling the work.

At the same time, more and more Project Managers do accept the science and art project management way. It means they have to balance between the scholastic knowledge they have and the real life art of managing a project that is like a live creature that lives its own life with its wishes, changes and troubles. That is why we cannot deny the presence of art in project management at all.

The only trouble arising in this respect is the ability to come across a project tracking tool that will fully satisfying a Project Manager leading him or her to a successful project completion. The chosen tool should ideally provide the ability to be follow all the classic project management steps and refer to creativity and art while executing a project.

Surely, it may happen to be enormously hard to single out such a project management solution among the abundance of tools that are available on the market.

For example, in this respect, we can mention is Comindware Project – team project management software that implements both traditional approach to project execution and lets a Project Manager to be creative all the time.

Describing the tool’s peculiarities we are able to attract attention to the option of implementing predictive Gantt Charts which will automatically reschedule the remaining part of the work and the whole planning map can stay up-to-date with real-time statuses.

The feature that may look appealing to Project Managers as well as team members is intuitive task progress tracking when the tool itself determines achievable deadlines by tracking the tasks fulfillment based on estimated time minus logged period.

The option to have baselines will surely help you to see how the project going on and, on the other hand, to be proactive in making some changes in the project procedure.

It is only one of the examples how modern project management tools can combine the science and art of project management making the job of a Project Manager more attractive and challenging at the same time.

To sum up, it can be mentioned that sometimes a Project Manager is able spend several days selecting the project management tool for their future work, only wishing to have such a solution that will both unite science and art and will offer all the necessary options to lead the project in the most efficient way.

Steward Copper is the owner of Project Management Insights. While working as a project coordinator and BA, he has tried almost all possible PM tools, BA instruments, collaboration programs, including tracker and task management software solutions. Now he uses Comindware Project for his project management processes. Follow Steward on Linkedin.