Project management software can significantly simplify time management in an enterprise.

To get this benefit, make sure to look for a project management tool that centralizes timesheet data by project along with percent complete status of individual projects.  This can provide a seemless picture of effort and labor costs on a project compared against where the project actually is. 

This same feature set facilitates financial forecasting by giving managers up-to-date information to best estimate how many more resource hours will be needed to be complete a deliverable -and therefore, often time, send an invoice to a client.

Message Makers, a multimedia communications firm in Lansing, Michigan recently experienced these benefits with Vertabase Pro. 

“Prior to implementing Vertabase Pro, it was difficult for us to effectively manage resource allocation,” said Chiung Cheng, PhD, Controller and Research Director. “We selected Vertabase Pro because it addressed our most essential need - the merging of project status reporting and timesheet management into a single function. Now, with Vertabase Pro, we are able to evaluate overall status instantly.”

To read more about their experiences, heres a case study on improving resource allocation with project management software.

There’s a differences between project management software and task management software. Understanding the difference can help you search and select the right software for you or your team.

Project management software is centered around a work breakdown structure. That means that each project has a specific set of tasks that need to be completed for the project to be completed. There are also a variety of other components to a project which the software helps manage. These include issues, budgets, documents, notes and resource availability.

The overall goal of the project manager is to plan, manage, track and complete projects as a whole (along with the other components of the project). Project management software helps the project manager do this job. This can be on a single project or, if the software has portfolio views or project portfolio dashboards, for numerous projects across the enterprise.

Task management software is built around to-do lists. The main goal of task management software is help the user keep track of everything they have to do. Or, in the case of a manager, to help them keep track of everything everyone else has to do.

When searching for project management software, understanding this difference, can help you define the terms you’re searching for and make a better selection of what it is you need.

There are three key features most users look for in enterprise project management software:

1) Porftolio Views;
2) Executive Dashboards and;
3) Automatic notification.

Portfolio views allow managers, clients or executives to view projects grouped together into different portfolios, or categories, that are meangingful to that person. For example, a marketing department may have numerous initiatives active for a particular brand. The project status details of each iniatitive may be important for the resources working on them or to their manager. But an executive often wants to see the status of all projects for that brand, grouped specifically by brand, compared against other brands for which that executive may be responsible.

Executive dashboards are templated reports which convey the exact information an executive wants to see. Rather than hunt around for the metrics which are important for enterprise wide decision making, an executive dashboard gives the decision maker instant visibility into the specific status items they’ve designated as important or relevant to their decision making process. Enterprise project management software should make these reports easy to access (often with a single mouse click) and easy to create.

Automatic notification keeps people in the loop on project milestones without requiring them to constantly login to the software. It leverages the data gathering capabilities of enterprise project software while utilizing an email notification engine to distribute overall project information. This is particularly helpful for busy managers or executives who don’t want the added to-do of checking another business intelligence system but to whom the data in that system is exetremely useful.

Vertabase Pro offers these three key features in an easy to use enterprise project management system. A free test drive is available as well as a live, web-demo with an experienced project management software consultant.