There are 4 variables to professional project management: spending, timing, time and quality. Professional PMs also try to make the organization of business processes more efficient. Take any project and you will notice that it employes labour, funds and equipment to give needed outcomes. You should know that there are a number of things that are vital for efficient project management. You can look through a number of such factors below:

- Task setting and reviewing achievement.

- Handling uncertainty. Any project contains a number of uncertainties that have to be accounted for.

- Allocating and managing resources.

- Having a clear idea about the outcome you wish to obtain on completion of the project.

- Controlling what is happening: assigning tasks, controlling execution.

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

- Managing changes. Circumstances change. When you start out on the project, you have to forsee how it will evolve with time.

- Exchanging information with sponsors and participants of the project.

To manage these components you can use pencil and paper or probably a spreadsheet program. Nevertheless, specialized project tracking software offers a number of relevant benefits:

- It makes scheduling easy. Duration can be adjusted by the program using the workload data. It is possible to create work calendars for various resources. It also simplifies tracking the work-in-progress on various jobs.

- Working with several projects and meeting a number of specifications. Project management software helps project executives to seea bigger picture and aggregate data on several projects.

- Critical path is clearly visible. The critical path of a project consists of tasks that directly influence the actual duration of the project. If an activity on the critical path lasts longer than expected, the whole timing of the project will be altered. At the same time for tasks that are not on the critical path minor modifications in how long it takes can have no impact whatsoever on other activities.

- Disseminating data to project participants. Complex projects demand a lof of communication. Groupware productivity tracking software enables everybody to be on the same page at any given point in time.

Should you every time go for task tracking software?

Project tracking software could not be suitable in every case. The best time to use such software is when you work on a few large projects. It could be a good idea to manage smaller projects manually, so that there is no need to incur large overhead connected with using complex software solutions.