Project Management Tools

Many companies have learned that sending their management staff to dynamic seminars and having project management training professionals offer consultation gets impressive results using powerful free Project Management Tools that get results. Their employees have learned the project management tools that affect your company. Free Project Management Tools help them to plan, communicate, handle conflict, and meet goals.

The Free Project Management Tools typically taught include learning how to utilize structural tools that delegate authority and tasks. Another tool which falls under this category is skill in scheduling - the tricks and routines that get projects completed within deadline. There are several other important Free Project Management Tools that your company management should learn how to use. Getting your staff fluent in the use of the best business software is invaluable. When it comes to choosing a project management course, make sure that these basic tools are taught, above all else.

What Are Project Management Tools? Project Management Tools are key measures, forms, document templates, and database solutions specifically customized for your project. You can design them yourself, have a consultant to advise you on constructing them, or hire a specialist to do this for you. This can be enjoyable to a few investigators, tedious to some, and downright aggravating to a many. Customized research products demand creativity yet standardization, detailed work yet bigger picture relevance, immediate need gratification yet future development possibility.

One example is constructing a Procedure Manual; this essential but detailed and time consuming task greatly facilitates your staff's abilities to carry out their duties with minimal direct supervision, and standardizes tasks to reduce possible errors and misunderstanding. A project manual is a Project Management Tools which should be operationally defined, yet dynamic in adapting to emerging needs and challenges during your study. You don't want a document that needs to be updated every month, or tries to anticipate every conceivable contingency and outcome.

Another essential document is your data Code Book. This is where you turn to make sense of what those variable names are (e.g., Adhmed1 = "First medication adherence item"), how the levels of any variable are coded (e.g., 1=women; 2=men), the variable scaling (e.g., 1 to 5 rating scale), transformation notes to keep track of changes (e.g., Adhmed1 added to Adhtx1 to make Adhere1 on 5/1/01), and other comments (e.g., missing data coding, non-standardized data entry, etc.).

A final example of Project Management Tools is not essential to a research project, but makes your research enterprise and data management process flow a lot more smoothly. This is creating templates for your forms, documents, and measures. An example of a template is a Microsoft Word document which you use many times, such as a calendar of events or grant sections. Instead of re-creating the document each time, or cutting and pasting sections from old documents (and risking errors), use a boiler plate of the general format. For grants, this is ideal. If you apply for funding to the NIH, they will provide you with templates of their forms; but you still need to format several additional sections, so streamline these into templates of your own.

Project Management Tools will help you make the best of the money, time and resources you have for your project. Project management tools are many. The most common categories of Project Management Tools are project planning and estimation tools, project tracking and communication tools, risk management tools and quality management tools. Some Project Management Tools suites, such as ABT’s Results Management Suite, Platinum’s ADvantage and Eagle Ray’s ER Project 1000, offer a complete package of tools to help project leaders manage one or more projects. Individual modules can be purchased and integrated with other Project Management Tools, such as Microsoft Project.