Western reviews of project management software have traditionally divided the board portal available on the market into two broad groups: high-end systems and low-end systems (midrange).
Choosing the Board Portal to protect Management
The decision to purchase board portal software in different organizations comes in different ways. The shortest path, as a rule, is associated with a solution based only on advertising information from the seller of the system, which promises to solve the problems that every manager has – the tools offered in the package should help the manager to plan and carry out work on time and within budget, optimize the management of available resources and etc.
The marketing brochures of the various board portal software vendors are remarkably similar to each other. In recent years, a certain stereotype has even developed for the presentation of a new package, according to which each new version of the system is advertised as the long-awaited and the only one that is as close as possible to the real management processes in a modern company and which can be easily implemented and actually used. This is followed by a long list of the system’s advantages, the purpose of which is to make it clear to the user that the only gap in the functionality of the system is that it does not know how to brew coffee for the manager.
Comparative reviews of board portals published in computer publications can provide some help in choosing a system. However, it should be borne in mind that in reviews published in computer journals, the power and elegance of the implementation of package functions from the programmer’s point of view are mainly evaluated. The issues of managerial efficiency of using packages in a given situation fade into the background.
5 Aspects to Look at Before Purchasing a Board Portal
The development of information technologies in recent years has practically brought to naught the differences between systems in terms of volumetric indicators of the capacity of systems (the size of the planned project in terms of work and resources, the speed of project recalculation). Even cheap packages today are capable of supporting the scheduling of projects with tens of thousands of tasks and thousands of types of resources. Studying the comparison matrices of the main functions of systems, it is also quite difficult to find significant gaps in a particular system. It is often possible to identify differences in the implementation of individual functions only with a detailed study and testing of the system.
What does the user need to know about the proposed board portal software and their own needs in order to make the right choice? Take a look below:
- First, you need to understand what tasks will require a project management system.
- The head needs to analyze the nature of the activities of his own organization from the point of view of the possibility and feasibility of using the project form of planning and management.
- What activities can be planned as projects?
- How much detail is needed to plan and control projects?
- For an enlarged description and analysis of a project at the pre-investment stage, specialized software for project analysis is more suitable, which allows you to assess the main indicators of the profitability of the project as a whole and justify the effectiveness of capital investments.