Any project manager operates four variables: expenditure, schedule, time and quality. A more challenging goal is to optimize work organization and resource attribution. The majority of undertakings employ such recourses as people, money, and equipment to deliver something of value and meet objectives. To work with projects effectively one have to deal with a number of things. A couple of them are listed below:

- Task setting and reviewing achievement.

- Managing risks. Any project contains a lot of risks that have to be dealt with.

- Finding people and machinery for the project.

- Defining the products of the project.

- Managing what is going on: giving out jobs, supervising the work-in-progress.

- Ensuring that the products of the tasks are of satisfactory quality.

- Dealing with change. Change happens. Most projects develop in time, so the factor of change should be properly considered.

- Communicating with project stakeholders.

Traditional ways of supervising projects, such a pencil and a notepad, can be used to deal with most of these things. But you get some interesting advantages if you choose to employ project tracking software:

- It simplifies scheduling. The length of work can be calculated automatically using the workload data. Each worker can possess their own time-table. Managing work-in-progress also becomes not that much of an issue.

- Dealing with a number of projects and handling a number of requirements. Management can employ progress management software to simplify portfolio of projects analysis.

- It assists you in finding the critical path. The critical path of a project consists of jobs that determine the real duration of the project. Should an activity on the critical path take less or more time, the rest of the project will be affected. It should be noted that for tasks that are not on the critical path small changes in how long it takes can have no impact whatsoever on the project.

- Disseminating data among the team members. The more complex are the project needs, the more of them have to be discussed. Productivity tracking software makes dissemination of data simpler than it has ever been before.

Is it always necessary to use task tracking software?

Like any software solution, project management software has its limitation. The most suitable time to reap the benefits from such software is when you work on a few large projects. It could be a good idea to operate smaller projects by hand, so that there is little need to pay big overhead connected with employing complicated programs.