There are 4 components to professional project management: spending, timing, time and producing a satisfactory result. Qualified PMs also attempt to make the organization of work better. Look at your project and you will see that it requires labour, money and tools to give satisfactory results. You may come across a number of factors that are vital for effective project management. You can look through a number of these factors below:

- Establishing goals and conducting analysis.

- Handling risk. Take any project and you will see that it has a number of uncertainties that should be accounted for.

- Assigning and supervising resources.

- Having a clear idea about the product you wish to see when the project is finished.

- Controlling the project from the point of view of who is performing what and at what time.

- Ensuring that the products of the project are up to standard.

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

- Talking to people involved with the project.

To manage these issues you can use pen and paper or perhaps MS EXCEL. But you get quite a few advantages if you decide to use project tracking software:

- It makes scheduling easy. Duration can be calculated automatically depending on the workload information. Each resource can have their own time-table. It just as well simplifies tracking progress on relevant tasks.

- Dealing with a number of projects and handling a set of requirements. Progress tracking software helps project managers and executives to seea bigger picture and aggregate data on several projects.

- It helps you find the critical path. The critical path is made of tasks that directly influence the real duration of the project. Should a task on this path take less or more time, the rest of the project will be affected. Whereas other tasks that lie outside the critical path can take less or more time without changing the duration of other activities in this project.

- Allowing all involved be aware of what is going on. The more intricate are the project requirements, the more of them have to be talked about. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of data easier than it has ever been before.

Is it always a must to use task tracking software?

Like any software solution, project tracking software has its issues. The most suitable time to reap the benefits from such software is when you work on a few large projects. It could be more appropriate to operate smaller projects by hand, so that you do not have to pay big overhead associated with using complicated programs.