Sep 11, 2006
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Choosing Project Management Software for Marketers
DM News online recently published an article by the General Manager of Intuit’s Quickbase. The article is Five Steps to Simple Marketing Project Management.
There are two crucial requirements for project management software which she left out. (While aimed at marketing departments, these apply to IT departments and others, as well.)
1) Scalability. Marketers can deal with a large number of on-going projects involving multiple teams, clients or project portfolios. Make sure your project management software can scale, easily and out-of-the-box, to handle that level of complexity. Report should give you clarity into your projects, helping you get a handle on everything that’s going on. Functionality should be skillfully crafted so that the software remains easy to use no matter what level of complexity you are dealing with. If not, managing the software can become a job in itself -creating more work than its worth.
2) Training and Support. Implementing project management software takes a degree of formalizing workflow. For creatives and other professionals (like software developers) this may be a bit of a change. Your project management software vendor should have a committment to hands-on training and ongoing support to make this process as easy as possible. They should help you map out the process (afterall, they should have experience doing this with other customers before). They should be easily accessible, to hold your hand, as it were, throughout the process. And remain friendly, accessible and supportive throughout the relationship.
She is right on when it comes to simplicity and trying out project management software. If you are looking for reasons to try online project management sfotware, see our earlier post.
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